The law of growth and other sermons

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I. The Law of Growth i

"For whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have." — Luke viii. i8 8 (March n, 1877.)

II. Half-life

" Truth shall spring out of the earth, and righteousness shall look down from heaven." — Psalm lxxxv. n.

Do not these words suggest the way in which one part of every life stands related to another part of the same life ? There is a heaven and an earth in every man ; first in his nature, then in his experience ; and it is on the cordial working together of these two parts of his life that the healthiness and completeness of any man's existence depend. Think what these two parts are. The earth of every man's life is what we are apt to call, in our loose, superficial way, its practical part. It is that which has to do with the methods and machineries of his existence. It is made up of numberless details. The house in which he lives, the food he eats, the business he pursues, the places where he travels, the dress he wears, the amusements in which he finds recreation, the daily plans by which his living is conducted, — these make the earth, the lower and terrestrial level of his life. All these would be altered to something different if — the same man still, with the same purposes and standards which he has now — he left the earth and went to live on some star of other conditions than this familiar one of ours.

And then, always over and around this world of methods and machines, as the sky is always over and around the earth, there is the world of purposes and standards, — the reasons why the man is doing these things, as distinct from the mere way in which he does them. To this world belong all the affections, all the calm or tumultuous passions out of which actions are fed, as the cornfields are fed out of the brooding or the hurrying clouds. To this world belong religion, all lofty and inspiring ideas, all great ambitions, all desire for culture, — everything which, unseen, is yet the motive and the force by which the visible activities of our lives are set and kept in motion. These make the heaven of our life. These would go on essentially the same in any other star. They are not dependent on the conditions of the earth. They would inspire other conditions if these present ones should be removed.

Are you not aware of these two regions in your life ? As, standing on some great mountain, you feel the solid ground under your feet, and see the sweep of landscape, mountain, and lake and plain and river all around you ; and then, over all, the sky, separate from the earth, yet making one system with it, living in closest relation with it, and meeting it all round at the horizon, — do you not know these two worlds in your life, the world of method and the world of motive, the world of deed and the world of thought, the world of embodiment and the world of inspiration, the world of what and the world of why — the earth and the heaven, may we not call them? — which make up together the total system of your life ?

And now the suggestion of our text is that, in order for a human life to be complete, both of these two worlds must be active and both of them must be true. If either of them is inactive, or if either of them is false, the life is a failure. Truth must spring out of the earth and righteousness must look down from heaven. The different failures to which men's different lives do really come are the result of the different ways in which these two worlds do not work, or work falsely, or do not work in harmony. Let us study this a little while, and I think we shall see that it is no mere theory, but the simple story of what is going on always in the world.

The easiest and most obvious illustration of our truth, that which must let us see immediately what it means, appears in what we call the fine arts. There the two worlds are most distinct, and the need of their harmonious cooperation is most manifest. You go into a sculptor's workshop, and how evident the lower world, the world of method, is! The tools that lie around, the hard, clear block of marble, the model in the clay, the evident need of technical skill which can only have come by practice with the most concrete and tangible of things, — all that is clear. But how the whole place loses its character, and is nothing but a mechanic's factory unless, behind what you see, you are clearly aware of the unseen ; unless the place is full of presences, of visions and ideas, of thoughts of beauty which are to be embodied in forms of beauty through the means of all this visible matter and this technical skill. Here are two worlds; and evidently both of them are necessary, or you have no sculpture and no sculptor. Leave out the world of method, and you have only a dreamer left, who thinks of statues and never carves a stone. Leave out the world of motive, and you have only an artisan, who cuts statues as another artisan cuts doorsteps, with no vision, no meaning, no idea to make them live. Both worlds must be there and both must be true. Falseness in either ruins the result. You must have purity, loftiness, and truth in the conception which you want to embody, and you must have simplicity, straightforwardness, and reality, freedom from artificialness and trick, in the technique by which you work, or you make nothing worthy of the name of statue. Given these two, — truth in the world of imagination and idea, and truth in the world of execution, — and then the Venus of Milo or the Dying Gladiator comes.

We have not, most of us, to carve statues, but we have all of us to live lives ; and so I turn at once to see how this our truth applies, not to a special art, fine or coarse (though it does apply to them all), but to the general conduct of a life. And it seems to me that the result to which our thought about it brings us is this : that there are four kinds of men — four kinds of characters, three of them weak and imperfect, one of them complete and strong — who may be conceivably produced by the imperfect or the perfect relations of these two worlds to one another. All of these four kinds of men are actually produced and live among us. Let us describe them to ourselves, and try to learn some of their lessons.

I said, then, that both of the worlds, the world of motive and the world of method, as I called them, must be active in every man, and that they must work in harmony with one another, to make the perfect man. You will see at once where the imperfect kinds of men will come from. There will evidently be: 1st, the men in whom the world of motive is alive, but not the world of method; 2d, the men in whom the world of method is alive, but not the world of motive; and 3d, the men in whom both worlds are at work, but work on different principles and keep no harmony with one another.

1. How common the first kind of defect is, we all know, I am sure, only too well. We see it in our brethren ; we feel it in ourselves. Wherever a man lets himself be satisfied with ardent aspirations which never go forth in deeds, or with admiration of goodness which does not utter itself in some struggle for the increase of goodness in the world, have we not got exactly this : Righteousness looking down from heaven, but no truth springing out of the earth to meet it ? How long she may lean over the golden walls, and look and look in vain down to the dull, unresponsive earth ! You let your mind dwell upon the misery of poverty, the wretchedness and terrible temptations of the poor, — how dreadful, how mysterious are these inequalities of human life; the advantages of one, the disadvantages of another! How rich the opportunity, how pressing the necessity that they who have should give not merely money, but time and thought and sympathy, in help of these others who have not ; that the rich and happy should freely bestow themselves on the poor and wretched! Your soul is filled with these ideas. It not merely is filled with them ; it glows with them. The theory is perfect. The conviction is complete. And then comes the demand for action. The poor man stands before your door. The special problem clamors for solution. And where are you ? You have stopped short upon the borders of your theory, and are loitering in the mists of your enthusiasm, and all the need of vigorous action cries out for you in vain.

Or take a case that concerns only your own personal life. You have some vice, some bad way of living, and who is there so clear and cogent as you are to reason about it ? Who will so clearly show its evil origin, its mischievous result ? Who will be so earnest in praise of the man who with a manly resolution breaks the chains of this bad habit, and in spite of all the pain which the struggle costs him goes out free ? And yet you go back over and over again to your abused and detested habit, and the new years as they come one after another find you still its slave.

I am telling a most familiar story. It is what we have all seen and felt all our lives. It is the old story of unfulfilled purposes and enthusiasms that disappear like dreams. The world is ready with its explanation. It always makes its easy explanations of complicated situations, and is quite sure that they are right. The world cries out, " Hypocrisy ! " It believes that the enthusiastic purpose which failed before it came to action was unreal. It laughs at the brave young reformer who was going to renew the world, and whose sword is missing when the battle morning breaks, and says, " You see there was nothing in his boasting. He meant nothing. It was all insincere."

The world is wrong. The problem is by no means such an easy one as that. There is such a thing as hypocrisy, of course ; but the chance is that this is not hypocrisy. It is half-life. It is life only in the world of motive and not in the world of method. It is righteousness looking down from heaven without truth springing out of the earth. These high enthusiasms are thoroughly real, perfectly sincere. It is simply that these men live in the region of emotion and idea, and very probably the lower world of action seems almost contemptible to them. They almost despise it. It belongs to lower souls. Their part in life is loftier.

No doubt, in time, this partial life tends to become unreal even in the part of it which does exist. An unused conviction always tends to insincerity. But it is real enough as it glows upon the lips of the young enthusiast — this outcry of high motive which never lays a finger to the tasks it paints so glowingly. The experience of how much there is of it in the world is what makes sad and pathetic the sight and sound of the college, full of high thoughts of life, and the hosts of brave young thinkers there, kindling with the reading of great books and looking as if they could not wait for graduation day to save the world.

2. With this sort of failure in your mind turn suddenly and look at another which is just its opposite. Here is the man who lives only in the other world, the world of method. As he of whom we have been speaking never came forward out of the region of enthusiasm into the region of action, so this man never allows the region of action to have any background of enthusiasm. That the thing should be done is everything. That there should be a fine, high, spiritual reason why it should be done is nothing. Such men, I sometimes think, have grown most common in our time. They are of every occupation. There are professors very learned, very faithful, very skilful in all the technical details of teaching, who will grow silent or grow scornful if you suggest the higher, the religious, purposes of learning, the duty to one's own nature, to society, to God, which constitute the ultimate reason why one should be learned at all. There are business men, honest and charitable and intelligent to a degree which fills the whole business world in which they move with light, who are utterly bewildered if you bid them think of the relation of business to the Brotherhood of Man and to the Redemption by Jesus of the earth into completeness as the Kingdom of God. There are philanthropists the inspiration of whose philanthropy never gets above the economics of alms-giving and the wastefulness of poverty. There are politicians enough to whom the state is a great machine of wonderful complexity and fineness, but with no divine purpose, no possibility of character. Nay, strangest of all, there are religious men and women who, above all things, would guard religion from becoming overspiritual. Ask them why they are religious, why they go to church, why they say prayers, why they send missionaries to the heathen, why they read the Bible, and they will give you dry and dreary answers about religion being a natural craving of the human soul; or, drearier still, about its being so helpful to the order of society. Not one word of eager and impulsive utterance of the child's yearning for the Father's love, or of the sinner's gratitude for the Saviour's glorious salvation ! All is of the earth: nothing is of the heaven. It is faithfulness, intelligence, truth, springing up from below, not looking down from above.

I know and I think that I value fully the better feeling which is mixed up with all of this. I know the dread of vagueness and sentimentality. I know the impatience with tiresome gush and enthusiasm that fail when it comes to work, the contempt for the mere pretence of lofty purpose, which by and by cries out, " Let motive go, and simply do your work. What the world wants is that the students should be taught, the asylum founded, the railroad built, the Church service maintained." All that is very natural, and also very shallow. Because there is sentimentality, no man has a right to disown the power of true sentiment. Because there is hypocrisy, what right has any man to say he never will be enthusiastic ? Because the sky breeds fogs, does that give any man the right to build the low roof ten feet over his head, and live in his poor cabin as if there were no mystery of sky beyond ? Because fanatics have had their heads turned by the Book of the Revelation, must you abolish the vision of the New Jerusalem from the vistas of your life ?

The danger which comes with such a fault and folly is manifest enough. Let it grow to be the habit of the world ; let great, enthusiastic motives cease to be felt as the inspirations of the world's activity, and sooner or later that activity must lose its quality of faithfulness; and even while it maintains that quality, and while men keep on working hard without any supply from the most profound depths and the loftiest heights of their natures, still their work must lose its breadth, and degenerate into tricks and artifices. This is what, I think, we have to fear more than anything to-day: — not a loss of the intensity of industry, but a loss of the nobility of industry; work done upon the lower and not upon the higher plane, and so not rendering the best result to the worker, nor giving the largest inspiration to the progress of the world ; business done sordidly, government conducted mechanically, learning gained and given mercenarily, religion practised formally, life in general relying for its impulses upon the needs which spring out of the earth, not upon the inspirations which come down from heaven. May God save us from these things, and preserve for us and in us not merely the activity, but the nobility of labor and of life!

3. I have depicted two kinds of failure. Let me say a few words about a third, which is less simple, more subtle than these two. I have spoken of the man who lives only in the region of his affections and enthusiasms, in the world of motive, and leaves the world of method and action unattempted ; and then of the other man who lives only in the lower world, and will not meddle with enthusiasms and high impulses at all. There is another man, as I suggested, in whom both worlds are active, but in whom they work contradictorily and will not keep time with one another.

Have you never known the man with two consciences ? Have you never known the man with the higher and the lower conscience ? One of the consciences was active in the region of his speculations and emotions, the other in the region of his practical, active life, and they were hostile each to each. They were both consciences. They both were based on the idea of duty, but they were set in opposition to each other, and confusion was the result. One or two instances will illustrate my meaning.

Here is a man who, in the higher region of life, has accepted the duty of Humility. The more he reasons, the more he sets himself in the presence of the sublimest truths, the more he always is aware that to be humble is the only worthy position for a man all full of weakness and defect. He has stood in the sight of God, and felt how insignificant he is. He has looked the possibilities of his own life in the face and been ashamed of what he is beside what he might be. " I must be humble, " he has said;

M what right have / to boast ? My only chance for any comfort is in owning frankly to myself and everybody else what a poor thing I am."

Now, that is perfectly honest and sincere. The man in his closet says that to God and to himself with all his heart. And then he goes out from his closet to his business. The world lays claim to him. Tangible things to do, concrete questions to answer, meet him on every hand. Do you not know how often a new sense of duty comes up in the street, which is different from that which filled the closet ? What can a humble man do in scenes like these ? Has a man a right to be humble here where self-confidence is the first element of strength ? Does not humility mean self-obliteration ? And so the man who, when he thought abstractly, philosophically, and religiously, accepted the obligation of humility, when he comes to act practically and concretely, finds it his duty to be proud. In the same way, the duty of trust and confidence and cordial faith in man seems to be met in common life by the counter-duty of suspicion. " I have no right," says the confiding man, " in this world of wickedness, to indulge a faith in man which will only make me the victim of his wiles." In the same way, the man who, in the higher region, bids himself hope, forces on himself in common things the necessity of fear. So he who knows in general that man is meant to be tender and sensitive hardens himself with some base alloy when he goes among his brethren, as if so only he could be of any use. So the obligation of perfect truthfulness is met by the practical necessity of a limitation of candor which really is deceit, and which pleads for itself in the sacred names of pity and justice.

You see what all this means. It is not simply that high motives melt and weaken when you try to put them into action. It is that the world of action seems to have different standards of duty from the world of thought. Those which seem imperative in one appear impossible in the other. There are plenty of cases where we do not carry our religion into common life because we are cowardly or indolent or selfish. The real trouble comes when, being perfectly ready to carry our religion into common life, we dare not carry it there because it seems as if our religion there would do not good, but harm ; because it seems as if that common life bred its own duties, and would not tolerate these that come down to it from above. There comes the deepest confusion. That is the real perplexity in which multitudes of business men are struggling on year after year. When they first met the difficulty as young Christian clerks, it filled them with dismay. Since that they have long ago settled down into a dull hopelessness of its solution, and take it as a thing of course. But it is still the oppression of their lives. The heaven and the earth which are in them will not harmonize, and neither of them can they cast away, or bid to yield in absolute subjection to the other.

4. And what then ? Is there any solution ? Is there any harmony of these two discordant parts of this one life? Is this third failure a hopeless failure?

Must a man escape from partialness only to fall into confusion ?

And this brings us to the positive which stands over against all these negatives — to the description of the sort of life which is not a failure, to which the study of these failure-lives must have been helping us. I wish that we could fill our minds at once with a picture which will bear witness to us of its own possibility of being realized. It is the picture of a man alive all through, from the summit to the foundation, in the celestial and the terrestrial portions of his life. It is the picture of a man who never thinks a high thought without instantly seeking to send it forth into its fitting action ; who never undertakes an active duty without struggling to set behind it its profoundest motive. He is one total man. The heavenly part of him is not vague because it is so high ; and the earthly part of him, the lower part, is not counted wicked or contemptible. It knows its place, and, filling it completely, is full of dignity and peace.

I say that such a picture, when we set it before our imagination, in some true sense proves itself. Our human nature, disappointed with many failures, recognizes its true idea, and says, " That is what I was meant to be!" And then, when we look earnestly around to see how we, in our personal life, may indeed come to be that, we find ourselves at once in contact with a truth to which we always are returning. That truth is, that whenever man thinks of himself as a composite being, a being made up of parts and therefore liable to inconsistency, liable to fall apart, he finds that he needs God for his power of coherence, he needs God for the element in which his inconsistency may be reconciled with itself and the whole nature find its harmony. Here, here alone, is where our three failures must disappear, and the only true success of human life come in their place. " The heaven is His throne; the earth also is His footstool," — let those words come to mean for us that there is no highest thought or emotion which is not subject to His will, and no least plan or action which does not rejoice to put itself at His feet; and then, in common obedience to Him, the discord between the higher and the lower life must disappear, and the whole man, as the child of God, be all one, and all alive.

I turn to the character and the career of Jesus, and all of this is plain. That wonderful character and career may be summed up in many ways. It shapes itself ever into a new orb of beauty as one sees it ever from a new side. In our summary of it, may we not say that it represents the higher and the lower life of man, harmonized within the obedience of God ? It was because Jesus was always perfectly consecrated to His Father that the most exalted enthusiasm was never dissipated into a dream, and the simplest task was never degraded into a drudgery. We love to think how Jesus never intimated the least contempt for common things. Contempt for common things is apt to be the feeble and desperate resort of men who cannot keep them from intruding into an importance where they have no right, and so would tread them under foot and out of existence altogether. He who is in no danger of overvaluing them is prepared to give them their true value, and finds it easy. " These ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.'* " Your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things." " Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." What a poise and balance there is in all those words! What an entire absence of contempt for common things! "The common is not wicked, ,, they declare, "only less and lower. Therefore it is not to be abolished, only kept in its true, second place."

How different this voice is from that which has come from many of the seekers after spirituality in all religions and in every time ! All asceticism tries to increase the exaltation of the higher life by defaming and astfar as possible abolishing the lower, which is as if you tried to make the sky loftier by destroying the earth and doing away with the horizon. Or if asceticism recognizes that the total man must be made up of heaven and earth together, it finds the fulfilment of this necessity in the general humanity. Let a few men and women, priests, monks, nuns, what we will call Religious people, live the spiritual life ; and let the rest of men do the plain duties of their ordinary stations; and so the race, as a great whole, will be complete. Each part will see fulfilled in the other part that which it cannot fulfil in itself. To think that each man can live in the heaven and the earth at the same time is a delusion. Against all that, Christ's life and words and work are a perpetual protest. He bids each man be entire. He says to every one: This you must do and yet not leave the other undone. All His New Testament is full of that. Strange, that with the great Christian Book so clear about it, the old false division — the assignment of the heavenly life alone to one set of men, and of the earthly alone to another set of men — should have so fastened itself in Christianity!

You say, indeed, — how men are always saying it! how terribly familiar it has grown! — you say, " I am not spiritual; I cannot be. My possibilities on that side are very small; somebody must do my spirituality for me. Enough for me if I can creep through the common tasks of common life with decency.' ' Of such talk from anybody let us make little account. We make less and less account of it, I think, the longer that we know our fellow-men. At any rate, however much it may mean when a kind man uses it about his brother-man, making for him such excuse as seems possible, any man ought to be ashamed to use it in self-excuse about himself.

The truth is, my dear friends, for any man in this short fragment of a life of ours to dare to think or say that he has understood the limits of his possibilities is worse than folly. It is almost blasphemy. What do you think of the boy that stands up at the age of ten, and looks you in the eye, and says that, as he has found he has no faculty for language, he proposes to deal with his language-books no longer ? Do you not bid him learn a little self-respect and modesty together, and send him back speedily to his grammar and dictionary ? And we are not children of ten yet in our long life of immortality! Before us stretches so far away the long experience, so dim, so calm, so certain, so certainly full of richer conditions and a perpetual development of this mysterious humanity of ours. What will you say to the pert little man who stands up sharp in the midst of the concrete trifles of his busy life, and says, "Oh, I cannot be spiritual. I have no faculty of prayer. It is impossible for me to find God, or even to seek after Him." Will you not say, " Be more modest, and so have more respect for yourself! Go back to your closet and your Bible, and do not dare to say what possibilities God has put into that nature of yours, which He made, till you are older, a great deal older than you are now; yea, till you are old as eternity! "