The just weight, and other chapel addresses

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Vo NOT ABLE TO "DIGS ani vs heen so thee 28

VIII. WHat THE FATHER Saw............. 52

II

THE EXPLORING HAND “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do.’—Eccles. 9. 10.

WE are told to do with our might whatsoever our hand findeth to do. The text serves to suggest to us the part the activities which the hand symbolizes play in religious experience.

Every once in a while some evolutionist amuses himself and the others of us by pulling up into the light the importance of some hitherto slighted organ of the body. Those who have read Wells’ Outline of History will remember the emphasis he puts upon the development of the great toe in the fashioning of the human body. According to Wells, effective movement in an upright position would hardly have been possible if nature had not made the toe with a power of grip and thrust which we see so clearly in the barefoot peoples. Now, just to get a start at the significance of the hand, probably all of us would think of it as more important than the toe. The hand is indeed a marvelous mechanism. In fighting days the doubled fingers made a club. The thumb and fingers make the best grasping machine ever known so far as its design is concerned. In fact, no instrument that man has ever contrived serves sO many purposes and serves them so well as the hand. The range of activity is astonishing, from the rough force of the unspecialized laborer’s hand to the delicacy of touch of the pianist or the surgeon. ‘To sensttive fingers there must be a delight in the developed responsiveness of the nerve-tips to stimulus. I have known of Chinese who carried in their pockets pieces of fine jade just for the sake of feeling their velvety smoothness.

The sense of touch has always been looked upon as a power that brings us very close to what is actually “‘there,’ as we say. If we are in doubt about an object of vision, we naturally reach out to touch it. The ordinary man feels that the Christ of the resurrection made the complete response to challenging doubt when he said to Thomas, “Reach hither thy finger.”

Of high importance for all knowledge, including religious knowledge, is the function of the hand, and the practical activities for which the hand is a symbol, in correcting and adjusting the revelations which come along the channels of the other senses, notably those of sight and hearing. The psychologists tell us that it is the child’s reaching out and grasping that gives him | his sense of perspective, or of order and adjustment among the things he sees. If any kind of

THE EXPLORING HAND 17 strange object is put before us for examination, our handlings of the object follow one another almost spontaneously. We turn the object into all sorts of positions, with the fingers constantly playing over it. Of course, we are turning it into all positions to see it better, but the restless movement of the fingers is a part of what we call our “total reaction” to the object—the manifestation of our impulse to learn all we can about it. The psychologists go so far as to tell us that we would have seen everything as in a plane surface, without perspective at all, if it had not been for the corrections made by the hands. In our actual adult thinking the various elements of the process are so fused together that it is impossible to look at any one by itself.

Likewise the activities which we call practical condition our religious knowing. <A good deal of our difficulty comes of the fact that we seek to see religious truth by the mind alone. This is about as if we should seek to see the world of material things by the eyes alone, without regard to the multitudinous adjustments and corrections that have come into knowledge as we and those before us have felt along and around, amid the actual things that we touch and handle. In our total act of seeing with the eye it would be hard to tell just what the eye unaided contributes. If we could get at that unaided contribution, it might seem very barren and small as compared with what we seem now to see. So the intellect sets for itself unaided the task of finding God. The thinker tries strictly to rule out everything which does not come from the mind alone, especially everything which seems to arise from the so-called practical instincts and adjustments. The fact is that in the ordinary matters of daily life the soul acquires a sort of “knack” which it carries into all its thinking. Sometimes this goes by the name of common sense, the sort of sense a man would show who would correct the sight of the eye by the touch of the hand.

There are those who tell us that all these manifold spheres of activity into which the church is to-day throwing itself have no significance for the pursuit of the deeper religious truth, that being so busy with the hands absorbs energy that might better go into meditative brooding.) The lack of meditative brooding is indeed to be deplored, but the only world in which it is safe to have such brooding carried forward is a world in which speculation and logic are supplemented and checked by sound practical sense. ! The man who broods too much to-day, with the world in the desperate plight in which we find it since the last war, is likely to become mind-sick and soulsick. Theoretically speaking, there seems noth-

THE EXPLORING HAND 19 ing before us but doom. Practically, those who are actually at work are not downhearted. It may be said, of course, that such persons are blinding themselves to the remoter truth by losing themselves in a swarm of details close at hand. This overlooks, however, the sense of fascinated satisfaction in the work itself which is prophetic of victory. It seems unreasonable that a universe in which men find joy and victory in relief and redemption in detail should be hopeless in the large. It is surely significant that the practical workers attain to an optimism which the theorist often knows nothing of. Nathaniel Shaler used to tell of his experience in once coming upon a battle from the rear and finding himself in the midst of the surgeons at work on the wounded men. Shaler was about to fall with nauseated faintness when a surgeon called on him to help dress a shattered arm. In the work of actual relief, as his sound fingers helped to bind bodies that were stricken, Shaler’s sickness passed away and he worked to the end of the day with new sources of energy ever opening up within him. In that great battle with pain which the race is forever waging, those actually striving to relieve the pain are ever the most hopeful. The theorist is forever trying to explain how pain got here and what its place is in the universe. The practical worker is trying to get rid of pain, now that it is here: and there is sounder knowledge in the unceasing stirring of his hands than in the puzzled questions of the philosopher. One trouble with philosophy is that while the mind thinks the hands are folded.

The activity of the hand is not merely a check upon the eye and mind but it is a positive discoverer. It is as if we were living in a world of dim light as a miner under the earth or a diver under the sea, and as if the hand reaching forward seized gold or pearls and brought them out to view. It is the restless unceasing hand which gives to the mind many of its most prized objects of beauty. Do with thy might whatsoever thy hand findeth to do! So runs the injunction. Asif the hand itself found something to do! Yet that is the way we make many of our noblest achievements. We begin where we are—the hand seizing whatever is at hand to do. The doing of one thing leads—seemingly of itself —to the next. The life may seem to a superficial glance to move at haphazard, but in the end part is seen as bound to part with rare consistency. The hand has proved itself the discoverer and explorer.

We feel after him, if haply we may find him, Says the apostle of our quest for God. The poet tells us that we are children crying in the night and with no language but a cry. We are, how-

THE EXPLORING HAND 21 ever, children with something more than the language of a cry. We have also the child’s impulse to reach out and around to get hold of things, and the eye and mind bring order and meaning to the things that we find. Theology may give us a worthy statement about God, but it is the outreaching exploring hand in actual deed that most surely finds him.

IIf

THE FAR COUNTRY

“The younger son gathered all together and took his journey into a far country.”—Luke 15. 18.

HE took his journey into a far country. How far? The question has little meaning if we are thinking of actual distance, but much meaning if we are thinking of a spiritual pilgrimage. The spiritual distance can be accurately measured. It is the distance between the idea the boy had of his father when he said, “Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me,” and the idea of his father when he said, “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight.”

When the boy said, “Father” in the first utterance he took his father as a matter-of-course, rather as one of the good things among the other good things of life. “The portion of goods that falleth to me.” There is a happy aptness here in that word “falleth,” though it is the entirely correct term to use of a division of property like that in the parable. The younger son, however, looked on good things as coming of themselves. They fell upon him as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath, so to speak. It

THE FAR COUNTRY 23 never occurred to him that before there is any falling someone must do some lifting to get the good things to the place from which they can fall. The father had lifted the possessions to the value from which they could come down in blessing upon his son’s head.

It never seemed to occur to the boy that before there could be a division there had to be an addition—an accumulation. If he had been asked how all this property got together in such amounts as to make possible his taking his share, he might have replied—especially if he had moved in certain jovial school circles—that things are here because they’re here. When we think things are here because they’re here we are not likely to value them overmuch. It took the experience of hunger in the far country to teach the boy the value of the things that he had taken as a matter of course. Hunger! That was a new experience.

There is a deal of practical atheism in the world that comes out of taking the good things of life as a matter of course. They’re here because they’re here. I am speaking now of attitudes and not of formal utterance. If one could have stopped the boy on the way to the far country and have asked him who gave him all his wealth, he would have no doubt replied truly enough, “My father.” If one had then said,

“Your father must be a very kind man,” the boy would have replied, “He certainly is.” Likewise we, of course, accept the belief that we receive our good gifts from the Father above. We should be desperately offended to be told that we are in any sense atheistic. The atheism is that of a practical attitude, the attitude that takes things as “falling” to us, without thought of where they fall from. It sometimes requires almost a famine to teach us the value of the goods that seem to come of themselves.

The first measure of the distance, then, is the distance between the idea of the father, as just here as the source of supply of goods, and the idea of the goods as representing a value which the father had created. The next measure is that of the realization of the fairness and generosity of his father. The boy had lived upon the goodness of the father without knowing that it was goodness. He had lived in an atmosphere of generosity without knowing it. The distance between his father’s open-handed lavishness with his servants and that of the man who sent him into the fields to feed swine, without any other food than pig food for himself, was illuminating. As the boy stood hungry among the husks which he could hardly force himself to eat, he could not help thinking that his employer had been cruelly hard to him. He reflected that he had not been

THE FAR COUNTRY 25 used to such treatment. Why not? Because he had had his father to deal with him. Even in time of famine the boy felt sure that his father would have found some way to get food for the servants. The boy who would at first have admitted glibly that his father was “all right” came at last. to see that his father was generous in a degree that made the son’s light-hearted acceptance of that generosity a sin of irreverence and ingratitude.

It was this contrast between his father’s generosity and his own thoughtlessness that marked a still greater step in his soul’s journey. There was the contrast first between his father and the men of the far country. There was next the contrast between the father and the boy himself. This was the contrast which brought the boy to himself.

When he came to himself! That was a long journey too. The boy had some distance to travel before he got to his real self. He had taken himself as a matter-of-course also with much too high a rating. That began to adjust itself a little as the money gave out. No matter how highly the son thought of himself he came after a while to have it rather grimly thrust into his consciousness that nobody else took his estimate. Literally, in time of famine he was not worth saving. Then he asked himself what his father would probably think of him. There is a tinge of deep humiliation in the words, “I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight.” The thought of what his father might think of him was more bitter than the hunger. After all this the son said, “I am not worthy to be called a son,’ and determined to ask a place among the hired servants.

Now, this is a long journey, this journey from the thought of himself as important enough to seek for a division of his father’s property, as wise enough to get along by himself away from home, to the thought of himself as one of the hired servants. He expressed himself as willing to stop on the return journey just short of the old home. He would remain in the servants’ quarters.

Whether we sin the:sins of riotousness or not, the great discovery which we are to make is the discovery of ourselves. It is not necessary to sin to do this, but it is tragic never to make the discovery. I would not for a moment encourage . a worrying introspection, but we must find ourselves. We find ourselves by the revelation of what the Father is. The boy at home had not been able to make the proper contrasts. He took himself as he was and his father as he seemed to be as matters-of-course. After he saw himself he was fit to come back home and work. The

THE FAR COUNTRY 27 best sign of the genuineness of the son’s discovery of himself was his willingness to go to work.

I may have seemed to have turned things around in these comments. The far country appears to be a condition in which many of us live even before we take a step from the father’s house. The father may have looked upon the boy in the days before he left home and have said, “He is far from home. His mind wanders out to fancies that have nought to do with us. He is absentminded.” The physical going into a far country was but the expression in outer fact of an inward state. Inwardly the boy had never been so near home as that morning when the owner of the swine sent him to the fields without anything to eat. In that instant light began to break. The boy saw his father for the first time. With that glimpse of the father he had come out of the far country and started home.

IV

NOT ABLE TO DIG “T cannot dig.’—Luke 16. 3.

Ir is legitimate at times to consider a Scripture passage apart from its main intent, provided we keep our eyes open to what we are doing. In this parable of the dishonest steward who won the favor of the debtors of his master by scaling down their debts, one phase of the dishonesty is incidental and has nothing to do with the main point of the illustration. Still, it is permissible to look at even an incidental biblical passage for its own suggestiveness.

“T cannot dig,” said the steward when he saw that he was likely to be turned out of his stewardship. That inability shut up one path to earning money, and so the steward felt himself compelled to get his financial salvation by sharp practice. The steward added one dishonesty to another by his inability to dig.

It is to be noted that dishonesty and the inability to do good, hard, heavy work like digging often go together. Of course if a man has not honest instincts in the outset, he is likely to be tempted to get money in easier ways than by

NOT ABLE TO DIG | 29 digging, but the inability to dig is one misfortune that may prompt to dishonesty.

I am not, however, particularly concerned just now with the dishonesty of stealing, or of making false accounts, or of any form of outright wrong practice. I am concerned with the lack of honesty which often accompanies the inability to do physical work, or to keep the hands on actual physical things. I do not mean that a man ceases to be honest when he ceases to work by digging, or anything like digging, but I do mean that a training in actual contact with the rough, heavy material things of this world makes for that kind of honesty which is free from the taint of artificiality, or of unwillingness to face facts and deal with them, or of inadequate appreciation of value.

Take the last hint first. All the economic goods which you and I consume have upon them the mark of somebody’s labor. By economic goods I mean the goods that somebody has to pay for, or put into consumable form by labor. It is an old, old illustration, that of the picture of the long line of servants standing behind our chairs at the breakfast table: the farmer who raised the wheat, the far-off tropical laborer who gathered the fruit or the coffee, or cut the sugarcane, the miner who faced death to supply the heat for the kitchen stove. No matter how much the consumer at the breakfast table may work with his mind to earn all the good things which are thus brought to him, no matter how earnestly he may exercise his imagination to picture the labor of these breakfast bringers, he cannot quite get the exact understanding of the values of the © things of daily life if he has never had experience in digging. Without such understanding we may well ask if the thought is honest—honest, — not in the sense of right intention, but honest in the sense of solidity and adequacy and genuineness.

Everything that comes to us, outside of the free gifts of nature, has on it the mark of someone’s labor. For example, almost every article of our daily life has on it the touch of fire—food is fire-cooked, clothes are made of instruments fashioned in fire, houses are built of timbers and stones and steel after the tools made in fire have wrought them out. Who makes the fires? Who keeps them going? Who gets the fuel? Now, fire is not a product of any engineer’s thinking alone. It has to be kept going and it has to be controlled. So with the forces of the world around us. If we leave the contribution made by labor to values out of the account, something is wrong thereafter in our estimate. Labor is upon all that comes to us, I repeat, and if a man does not actually know what labor is, he has not an

NOT ABLE TO DIG 31 accurate scale by which to weigh the values of this life. |

More and more we must deplore the chasm between those: who do the heavy work of the world—the digging—and those who live by more strictly intellectual ways; and we deplore the chasm not merely because those on one side do not know how the other side works and so fail to exert good will to them, but we fear the effect on human society of a system of organization which shuts some men so completely off from sheer physical effort that their minds—no matter how bright—cannot think honestly about the facts of life. When any form of artificiality hinders this grasp on facts dishonesty is at the door, not the dishonesty, I repeat, of false intention but the dishonesty of a false, or distorted, or unbalanced view of things. I have not much sympathy with the idea of regimentation of men for the performance of daily physical tasks, the regimentation advocated by some social reformers. For example, some socialists will have it that social justice requires that the heavy work of the world be more equitably shared, and they insist that all men of a given age shall be drafted for such work. This sounds fair on the face of it, but we must have the work done effectively, and it is doubtful if this scheme would be effective. Let us not forget, though, the essentially sound aim of this plan. It is not, however, well advocated when the emphasis is put on just turning ~ things around in this world, so that those who do not now do heavy work shall have a chance to “see how it feels” to do such work. That is not an adequate motive. William James was nearer the essence of the matter when he proposed substantially such drafting to heavy and dangerous work as a moral equivalent for war. He had in mind the preservation of certain virtues which war 1S Supposed to foster. I do not know whether war calls for any particular virtues to-day worth preserving, but I am confident that the best argument for such a scheme of social regimentation —if it could be worked at all—-would be the new note of reality—and therefore of honesty—in thinking.

Of course an ideal is attained when all the back-breaking, dehumanizing labor is done by machinery; but when all that ideal is achieved, it will never do for us to cease “digging” enough for us to understand the texture of the world in which we are placed. There is a sound instinct back of the badly conceived, badly stated doctrine of some labor leaders that only manual laborers should control society. That never will be, and never can be. It might, however, always be insisted upon that the honesty, which is the basic virtue of even the highest

NOT ABLE TO DIG 30

Christian mysticism, comes in part out of frank facing of things and of dealing with things and of controlling things.

I once saw a monk in the fields belonging to a monastery plowing corn. The monk’s face showed clear marks of high spirituality. My first thought was that a man set apart for spiritual exercises should not be put at plowing corn. IT am not sure that such feeling was right. For spiritual workers above all others need the honesty of facing a world of nature in which things sometimes will not do as the rule calls for, in which we have to check dreams by stones and clods, in which we have to join praying and digging. Even the incarnation itself is a divine facing of a world in which hard, heavy labor is an outstanding fact.

V

AND GOD SAW THAT IT WAS GOOD “And God saw that it was good.’—Gen. 1. 10.

THis word, “God saw that it was good,” sounds like a refrain all through the first chapter of Genesis. The light appeared and was good. So also was the appearance of dry land, the emergence of grass and trees, the coming of animals and man.

. I eall attention to the fact that the divine , approval was thus given to things that were half done. Instead of waiting till the end of the creative week the Creator pronounces the world good as he goes along., The various stages are good as they are, good on their own account. Of course we cannot take the Genesis account of creation as scientific in the modern sense, but there are some mighty features of worth in its description of the creative process. At least this is to be said, that the author of the Book does not represent the Creator as feeling his ' way along by experiment. All moves by a plan that has been brooded over, and the various phases arrive in an order which brings out their worth on their own account.

GOD SAW THAT IT WAS GOOD 35

In this present day of “relativity” we seem | loath ever to say that anything is good just as it stands. It is good as related to the past and the future. It may be better than what went before and is glorious because of its prophecy of the future. We do not think of it as good here and now.

The creation story of the Bible indeed allows us to see that a particular stage is better than what went before and that it leads on to something better still. Things in this world are indeed to be judged by the direction in which they are moving, but in Genesis the goodness appears in the direct contemplation of the thing itself. If we could take the Genesis narrative as strict scientific truth, and if we could have imagined ourselves as onlookers during creation’s week, would not the successive scenes have been worth seeing on their own account? The glory of the light breaking on the waste of waters—that is worth an ocean voyage to us to-day. Would not the arising of the dry land, the clothing of the land in green, the stirring of approaching life all have been glorious? We can look upon a picture moving before us on a screen and enjoy the successive scenes of beauty without thinking that the beauty is there just in contrast with what went before and in prophecy of what shall come after. Sunrises and sunsets are what they are on their own account. We do not value the sunrise just because it ushers in the day, or the sunset because it brings the day to a close.

One objection I have to some teaching of evolution is that the teacher never seems to let the various stages and epochs and organic forms appear good on their own account. Everything is of value as it leads to something higher. This sort of exposition can almost literally take the joy out of everything, for nothing is yet final; and if we have to wait till the last fall of the curtain before we see anything really good, we shall wait a long time. I think if we could have seen the first emergence of solar systems, or the vast continental changes of the planets, or the animals of the different species, we would have found the huge cosmic spectacle good on its own account, not perfect necessarily, not final, but certainly worth seeing. Of course when we begin to ask questions as to what all this is worth, using our human scales of value, we are at a loss, but maybe our scales are wrongly adjusted.

IT have now and again heard some enthusiastic eulogist of what man has done on earth tell of the forms of wild life man has destroyed, and of the transformations he has made even on the earth’s surface, on the assumption that much still on the earth is a survival from an earlier evolutionary stage, and that its only purpose is

GOD SAW THAT IT WAS GOOD — 37 to get out of the way for something else, like the small boy’s poem which had a second verse just to help on to the third. Suppose there are these survivals from an earlier evolutionary period. Are there not many of them worth keeping on their own account? We are not pleading for the preservation of snakes and tigers, but what about the flight of birds? Would there not be something of honor to the Creator in our making the evolutionary process stop, or run back, to keep alive many great winged creatures who give glory to the upper sky? When I look upon the soaring turns of an eagle I do not care to have an evolutionist at hand to tell me just where the eagle belongs in the evolutionary scale. I think, if such a thing had been possible and I could have looked earlier on the evolutionary scheme, I would have been glad to see a mastodon on his own account, or a dinosaurus. both would have been worth seeing.