Tillage of the heart; or, The cultivation of goodness

Preface

The chapters of this book, as the reader will see, are not essays, but sermons. They were uttered in the Calvary Baptist Church, Washington, D. C, as vacation sermons, in the summer of 1909. They retain their original colloquial form, as nearly as it could be reproduced.

I have been much impressed for several years that the Christian life of our country needs a more persistent and hopeful cultivation than it gets. We are in an age of criticism. The man who denounces gets a hearing. We need more encouragement to high living. The Saviour was a man of wondrous hope for mankind. Having been led to see his hopefulness I have been greatly desirous to utter his word of hope to a wider audience than any single congregation. Hence this book. It goes forth

6 Preface

with the prayer that it may be read, not as a literary production, asking anybody's praise, but as a loving word of hope to sinners, who like the author, are seeking to be better than they are, and expecting to succeed. " Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

a. s. H.

Crozer Theological Seminary October, 1909

Contents

Chapter Page

I. Essential Requirements .... 9 II. Examination of the Field. . . 30

III. Nature's Assistance 51

II

"But let a man examine himself." — i Cor. ii : 28.

IF a man were to begin the reclamation of a farm, or its substantial improvement, his first step would be to make a mental survey of its condition. He would note the various kinds of soil, the noxious weeds it produces, the marshes to be drained, the stones to be removed. And then he would plan his work to meet the exigencies. In the tillage of the heart, it will be necessary at the first to give a thoughtful attention to the faults of life.

I should regret exceedingly if what I am about to say should be understood as favoring a morbid self-inspection. It is not such an examination that I counsel. But it is a well-recognized fact that we often see what we think are faults in ourselves, and overlook the greatest ones. It is easy to be deceived about ourselves. We must, there- 30 fore, " gird up the loins of our minds " in this matter that we may not overlook our real weaknesses. We may not safely be content to ask what the creeds say about us. They tell us that " all men are by nature utterly void of that holiness required by the law of God; positively inclined to evil, and therefore under just condemnation without defense or excuse. 1 It is an easy thing to give assent to that statement. But mere assent counts for nothing. It may be a sort of opium plaster to ease the pain of conscience, while the sore on our souls rots away our moral life. This kind of assent is a most dangerous substitute for the real sense of our badness which must precede any radical improvement.

Neither may we be content simply to accept the statements of the Scriptures on this matter. We know they say that, " All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags " ; 2 and " There is none righteous, no not one " ; 3 and " We are all children of wrath, even as others. " 4 We are liable to think that because we believe the Bible, and assent to these condemnatory things which it says

1 " N. H. Conf.," Article III. 2 Isa. 64 : 6.

about us, we are in a fit frame of mind to accept the grace of God. But I take it that mere assent to such sayings, simply because they are in the Bible, is not worth a rush toward helping us to overcome our faults. It is a very different thing from feeling our sin, and crying out as the psalmist did, " My sin is ever before me." No ! not this formal assent to anybody's opinion about us, but some intelligent view of our own case in the light of careful examination is needed. We know how in sickness the old-fashioned doctor used to feel the pulse, look at the tongue, and give a dose of calomel. But now the skilled physician seeks first a thorough diagnosis of the case. He studies the action of the heart and lungs; takes the temperature; inquires about the digestion; obtains cultures from the secretion of the throat to see if diphtheria is present; examines the sputum for tubercular, the blood for malarial, germs. Then he feels prepared to prescribe.

The same is true in business. Men who would improve their business find out where the leaks are. They inquire, " Does the clerical force cost too much ? " " Are any of them dishonest? " " Is there any energy displayed among them ? " " Can the incidental expenses be reduced?" " Is there enough in the business to make it pay under any management ? "

And in political matters the same is true. We all are familiar with Daniel Webster's grandiloquent opening words in reply to Mr. Hayne's speech on slavery : " When the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course. " 5

We remember also Mr. Lincoln's less wordy, but equally wise statement, " If we knew where we are and whither we are tending, we should know better what to do and how to do it."

So is it in this matter of our own life; we must thoroughly know our condition. It is said of our great missionary, Doctor Judson, that at one time he found himself fearing that his contact with sin in India had blunted the sense of his sinfulness. He prayed to God that he might have a clearer view of his own condition. And his prayer

5 " Great Speeches," p. 226. C was answered. Somehow the windows of his soul were thrown open to the light, and he saw the accumulated dust of years, the mildew on the walls, the spider sins up near the ceiling, the bugs that had their nests in the corners. He smelled the must of old theology, and snuffed the miasma of decaying sympathies until he cried out, " O God, it is enough! Create in me a clean heart; renew a right spirit within me." After that he could sing with great fervor :

Oh, to grace how great a debtor Daily I'm constrained to be.

And Paul went through a similar experience. He says, " I was alive once without the law. But the law came, sin revived, and I died." 6 That is, the time was when, though he knew the law by head, he did not know it in heart. He assented to its sayings, but the fact of his own sinfulness was not impressed on him. He saw his own badnesses very dimly, and therefore did not make any strong effort to overcome them. He was orthodox. He was honored in his church. He was zealous — so much so that he could persecute those whom he thought were not orthodox. But one day he saw himself as God saw him. Then he cried out, " O wretched man that I am."

It is this sense of our own sinfulness which we must try to obtain. Not a sense of sins which we do not have; nor a sense of sins which others think we have, but a sense, true and just, of what concrete sins we do have, and what specific deficiencies in our Christian life remain to be remedied.

But while all this is, I doubt not, vaguely understood by us, I think we feel — I know I did for a long time — dependent wholly upon some superhuman agency which should reveal our condition to us. We have said, " The Holy Spirit must convict of sin/' And we have not so generally recognized it as a part of our own proper duty to try to discover for ourselves the true state of our case. We have sometimes had a foolish notion that as pests on trees live out their days and depart of their own motion and will, so our faults will probably go away — " burn themselves out with their own flame " — without our special attention to them ; dis- • appear with our advancing years of experi-' ence. Dr. Henry G. Weston had a great rose garden. On being asked for some information about rose culture, he replied: " I know nothing about it. All I do is to keep the soil rich, and hope thus to grow the roses faster than the lice or pests can eat them up." That answers fairly well part of the time. But one year some sort of malady attacked them which withered the buds by the hundreds, and made them turn black in a night. Special treatment was needed then. And that could only come by knowledge of the disease. Many people tell us that the only requirement for growing into goodness is to keep in good company; keep active in Christian duty, and the rest will follow naturally. There is a great amount of truth in that. But it is far from all the necessary truth. What shall we say of an active, soul-stirring, world-known evangelist who does not pay his debts? Could not he discover that fault by a little self-examination? And would it not be at least better for his creditors if he should try and be rid of that fault before he is an old man ? " He that hath arrived at the stature of Christ, hath already fulfilled the prime and longest intention of his being, and cannot be called young/' 7 He could get the

1 " Letter to a Friend," Sir Thos. Browne, p. 146.

virtue of age in his youth, and thus gain time. Or, how about a Christian business man who, in his desire to make a success, grinds the faces of his helpers in the business? Or a social leader in the church who is hard on her housemaids? Or the carpenter who is faithfully at church, and is not faithful in his carpenter work? Are not these faults discoverable by self-examination, and remediable by self-culture?

A preacher, whose name is well known, found himself deficient in the use of illustration. He was an abstract sort of a thinker; reasoned all the time as if he were talking to a class in mathematics ; fed the reasoning powers, but starved the affections of his people. But when he found in what he was deficient he began to cultivate his imagination and illustrating power. Now he is a most remarkable man in his power of illustration. Doctor Watkinson tells of a man who was excessively timid at the thought of death. He forced himself to sleep in the presence of a skeleton, until he overcame it. Shall we, then, think that the consciousness of our own faults must wait until some other than ourselves makes them known to us? The old Greeks said, " Know thyself." The modern man, while he has help which the Greek did not have, may not neglect the precept of the old philosophy.

When we come to the self-examination, there are three things into which we need to look.

The first is our motives. We said, in a former address, the first place to estimate the moral quality of an act is in the motive, or intention of it. No matter how good an act may be in itself, it fails to bring us comfort if the motive is not right. So far as the world about us is concerned, the motive may not affect the influence of an act. Bread given to the hungry will feed them as well if it is given from love of praise as if in a spirit of love. But the man most concerned in an act is the actor. And with him the motive is important. The real heart of an act is found in the answer to the question, " Why did I do it?" It sometimes occurs that men praise an act of ours as an act of generosity, when we know it was done out of pure diplomacy, to gain some other end than the one they see. How empty their praise seems to us ! We know that the act of which they speak, and as they see it, was in reality not performed at all. They were deceived. At other times we are accused of wrong actions, which were done with great self-sacrifice and the best motives. These accusations grieve us at their injustice, but how light are the self-inflictions of reproach at such mis-judgments! Put such acts in the crucible of the truth and they stand all tests. Perhaps the record of our goodness will shrink very much when brought to this test, for our motives are mixed with dross. But it is worth while — not too frequently — to put some of our record into the assay office of our best judgment and see what proportion of it melts away under the fire, and how much will bear the test. Some woman, writing of the New England people, said that they could not receive a kindly, self-sacrificing service from others without asking, " I wonder why they did it." This is slander on New England, but it reveals a certain tendency to mistrust motives ; and such suspicion is born in one's own consciousness of mixed motive, for to accuse any one of a wrong shows such a wrong to be possible in the accuser. It is uncomfortable to go on under false colors. Quaint old Thomas Browne said, " He who acts a part is, as it were, out of himself; which, if long, proves so irksome that men are glad to pull off their vizards and resume themselves again." 8

Again, it is well to examine our habits. We are creatures of habit. And it is good to be such. Virtue is not full grown in any until it is habitual, and kept for the love of it. But there is a habit of action, and another of feeling. Prof. St. John, of Hartford School of Pedagogy, said in a lecture at Northfield, on the training of the young in missions, that " it is not best to try and form in very young children the habit of giving money, for they do not know the value of money, nor do they experience any self-denial in the giving. Better train them in the habit of feeling interest in others who have less knowledge of God than they, and then, when the knowledge of money and the power to earn it come, the habitual interest in others will be the spring of true benevolence and large gifts of money." It is well to examine life and see whether our contributions of money, our attendance at church, our courtesy to others, our response to causes of need, are

8 " Christian Morals," p. 220.

mere habits of action without a real habit of sympathy. Do we give money because it is the least trouble to help in that way? Are we reading the Bible and saying our prayers from habit, or from the love of it ? I do not say that habit of action is not good, for it is. But I say that the best — and we want the best — is habit of affection. That will bring the best results. John Ruskin wrote : " If people do right, in time they come to like doing it. But they are only in a right moral stage when they have come to like doing it ; and as long as they don't like it, they are still in a vicious state. The entire object of true education is to make people not only do right, but enjoy doing right things ; not merely industrious, but to love industry — not merely learned, but to love knowledge — not merely pure, but to love purity — not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice. "

" I am prepared," says one writer, " to maintain that so long as we are conscious of performing a good action from a sense of duty only, we are immoral. . . So long as we only do our duty we are ' unprofitable servants.' I will even go farther. I will maintain that there have been more crimes done in this world in the name of duty than good deeds." 9

We may ask, " Am I drifting easily in a current of good habit and early training, or making a brave self-directed business of righteousness ? " " Am I living a respectable life because my lot is cast where there is no great battle, or am I, having on the whole armor of God, standing against all the wiles of the wicked one, strong in the strength which God supplies ? " I do not say we should covet the fight, but I say that a truthful estimate of our own situation, in the light of these questions, is necessary for a just estimate of our own worth, and our estimate of the worth of others.

And, again, we may profitably examine our knowledge of right. Many a man has good motives, and good habits, as far as he knows, but he is in error about what is right. For example: Is it the Christian's right to obey or to disobey a law of the land when he thinks the law is not just? A clerk in a store — is it his duty to refuse to sell goods for what he knows they are not? A stenographer is directed to write a

9 H. W. Garrod, in " The Religion of All Good Men," P- 32.

letter, the contents of which she knows are false — is she justified in doing so, or should she refuse? A politician is expected by his party to stand by a certain measure for the party's sake. He does not himself like the measure. What is his proper course? It may be that men have come to erroneous decisions about such matters. It is for them to revise their knowledge of moral duties. There was a time when the best Christians did not think it a duty to send missionaries. They were wrong in their judgment. There was a time when the deacons and ministers did not think it wrong to use alcoholic drinks, even in church gatherings. They have learned better. Once good men in America thought slavery was right, and thought they found its justification in the Scriptures. Now the men are very scarce who would not condemn it as in whole and in every part unchristian.

It has lately been said (or written) that the teachers of ethics in our schools are trying to blast away the Rock of Ages. I think any man who reads the article must see that it is either a new ebullition of Tarbellianism, or an example of gross ignorance of the facts. The teaching of ethics in the colleges is not disturbing the Rock of Ages, but surveying its proportions, and finding the eternal bases on which it rests. But as these bases are laid bare, it is being found that moral principles which have Christian confirmation are susceptible of much wider and more thorough application than we have been giving them. We are living in times when some of the common judgments of life are being reversed, but upon good moral authority. It becomes us all to look into our moral ideas and see if we are reasoning from some false premise, and, like Paul, " verily thinking we ought " to do certain things which we ought not to do. If we, as a people, are to rise to nobler things, we must rise to higher ideas of our duty. Are our common conceptions of duty as high as they can be? If they are not, then we ought to make them higher. Are there any duties contained in the spirit of the Master's teaching which we have not seen to be our duties ? Then we ought to search for them as for hid treasure. It is certainly the business of Christian men to christianize the civil life of the land. And that requires more than submission to somebody's dictum. It means examination of one's own duty.

These three fields of inquiry — our motives, our habits, and our knowledge of moral requirements, will cover pretty well the ground of a good self-inspection.

Now, a word about the search itself. How shall it be made, and with what helps ?

First it must be an honest search. I mean we must be honest with ourselves, for no others are to know what we find. If we find real faults, we may not gloss them over, but admit to ourselves the facts. If a man finds that he is accustomed to misstate facts, let him not say to himself, " Well, I did stretch that a little/' or " That was partly a play of the imagination/' but let him say, " That was a false statement, and I knew it was false when I made it; and a false statement is a lie ; and the man who makes such habitually is a liar ; and when I look in the glass I look at a liar." Brand the brow of your own consciousness as with a hot iron " Liar/' Brought up in a Christian land, with an open Bible, with a knowledge of Christ's true life, and still a liar!

If a man finds that he is accustomed to crowd others that he may get the best for himself; that he always takes, but seldom gives; hunts the best seat in church, or streetcars or steamcars; if he bribes the waiter at the hotel with a big tip to wait on him out of his turn ; if he " crowds in " at the ticket-office instead of getting in line like a man ; if, I say, he finds himself doing that, let him not say, " Well, one must look out for himself in this wicked world. I know it is not nice, but I must do it." Rather let him remember that he does not like that conduct in others, and others do not like it in him. Let him say, " This is piggish, and it will grow to be hoggish, and by and by I shall be justly called a human hog."

If a man finds himself saying, " Well, I do not know about this matter of Jesus. Let that get settled elsewhere " ; that is unbelief in Jesus; and the unbeliever has no part with Jesus; and that means that the hope, and the help, which Jesus gives is not his. Christ's care, his promises, his hope, his heaven, his likeness at the last — all these he drops out of his hand when he drops Christ from his faith. Do not call it " honest doubt. " Doubt whom? What would you say if your wife should say, " John, I have doubts about your loyalty to me " ? Honest doubt! What would your banker say if you told him you have an " honest doubt" of his financial integrity? What would your friend say if you told him that you honestly doubted his friendship? The more you protest the honesty of your doubt, the more damning your doubt becomes. You may have inquiries about Jesus. You will have great and honest, and in some things inevitable, ignorance of him, but do not attempt to sugar-coat your unbelief with the name " honest doubt." Call it unbelief, if it is unbelief, and face the consequences.

You may find yourself worrying about little things : do not call it nervousness, call it little faith. You may be without glorious anticipations : do not call it lack of imagination, call it hopelessness. Call your critical disposition uncharitableness. Call harsh criticisms of all things cynicism, and that, if literally translated, is doggishness, for " cynic " is the Greek word for dog. Call your hesitation to ask God for help, prayerlessness. When you have an audience with yourself, tell yourself the facts. Mr. James B. Colgate once said to me, " I pity the sons of kings, for no one dares tell them their faults to their faces." Tell yourself your faults once in a while to your face with courage. Get a true diagnosis of your case and name it in English — not Latin. In New England, near Canada, there used to be what the doctors called, when wealthy people had it, a " troublesome eczema," but when common folk had it, it was plain " Canada-itch!' Call not your covetousness an " eczema," but the old-fashioned " money-itch." Name your ebullition of unkind words quick-temper; and your pious economy in missions what the prophet called it, stealing from God. When you have had such an interview with yourself, you will feel as if your soul was coming from the Osteopaths. You will be sore in heart. But it will bring forth good.

Again, search with the candle of the Scriptures. They are the highest standard for goodness we have. No men have written more pointedly and profitably than the writers of the Book of books. The goldsmith takes our jewelry and puts a drop or two of acid on it and lets it stay awhile. If the metal is not good, there will come little bubbles of gas, and changes in color; then the surface gets roughened because the acid has found the metal that is not gold. The Scriptures, if you apply them to your life and hold them there, will soon reveal to you what you have not seen of alloy in your conduct. For example : " Be not fashioned according, to this age." That is, do not regulate your conduct by the principles which those follow who are not calculating on another life after this one. " Avenge not yourselves." " Let no corrupt speech proceed out of your mouth." " Let all bitterness and wrath, and clamor and evil speaking be put away from you." " Put away all wickedness and guile and hypocrisies and envies and evil speakings." " Abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul." These, and similar passages, held up by the side of our lives, will soon make known to us in what particulars we are deficient.

This sort of examination is not pleasant to make. It is not at all well to make such too often, and thus to become morbid, or discouraged about ourselves. But we are to make the examination simply as preliminary and for the sake of improving ourselves. Let one take some hours for this examination, as if he were about to move into himself to live; and before he moves in he wishes to repair his dwelling because it is unsanitary. Let him go through it, upstairs

5<d Tillage of the Heart

and down, to see what needs to be done. Are there any old decaying grudges left over from last year's social life which must be taken from the cellar of memory? Do all bitterness and jealousy and unkind thought get carried off daily in the great drain of forgiveness ? Is there any shadowy upas tree of envy which makes it hard to be cheerful and glad at others' prosperity? Are the living and sleeping rooms of the heart, where he will stay most of the time, open toward the sunny side of things so that he gets a little sun of cheerfulness part of every day? Such examination will not be oppressive, but (when we remember that Jesus' special business with mankind is to " save them from their sins," and that he is "able to save to the uttermost"), will be an effective and profitable exercise in the cultivation of goodness.

And in all this pray with the psalmist: " Search me, O God, and know my heart ; try me and know my thoughts, and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the Way Everlasting."

Ill

"So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed upon the earth: and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring up and grow, he knoweth not how. The earth beareth fruit of herself ."—Mark 4 : 26-28.

I UNDERSTAND this word of the Saviour to teach us that in the very nature of things there is an arrangement which makes for righteousness all the time, as the forces of the earth lie in wait for the seed to make it fruitful. All the year sun, air, and land seem to watch for the hand of man " as the eyes of a maid are unto the hand of her mistress/' and when he sows the seed, at once without any delay, these forces are at work to bring forth the harvest.

I take it that there is thus an inherent and latent power in men, predisposed to the production of goodness. It is wrought into the nature of things ; and when we meet the conditions, this power works with us to will and to do right. It is an important part of the theory of at least one school of medicine that nature is seeking to set ills right; the physician only reenforces nature.