Brightening the world

Dedication

These chapters are inscribed to the Christian Endeavor Societies^ the Epworth and Westminster Leagues^ the Student Volunteers, and all similar organizations of the young people of our day — the Church of the near future — and to their near of kin. In the crimson dawn of a new era of life, light, and love for all men, these words are penned, in the hope that Our Lord Christ will use them to hasten the day of His kingdom and glory,

THE AUTHOR,

WASHINGTON

Contents

PAGE

A Word to Begin With, . . - - 7 I. Thyself Rightened— Righten the World, 9

II. Thyself Brightened— Brighten THE World, 16

II. Be Thyself Brightened— Brighten The World

The man Tightened in a Gospel way is meant to' be a happy man. Happiness is brightness. Rightened and not brightened ? Here, verily, is something wrong. The divorce of gladness from righteousness is not only a mistake, it puts the Gospel in a wrong light. It subtracts from its fullness of blessing in experience, and from the possibilities of doing good. It takes a brightened life to brighten others. It was the sun of righteousness in the Christ that made Him the light of the world. Man of sorrows, though He was; once, '^exceeding sorrowful even unto death yet do we feel that His was a joy that sounded the depths of Peace. And Peace is never weak, never despairing. It is strong with a courage born of Hope.

And what could He ask for His disciples more than that His joy might be fulfilled in them ? The joy of the Christ was the perfect oneness of His will with the Father's will, and the delight of being a constant benediction to others. Blessed, He was made a blessing. The Psalmist was right. "Restore unto me thy joy, then will I teach." Let us see. (i6)

BE THYSELF BRIGHTENED.

I. The Tightened man is a man forgiven. Conscious of forgiveness, he sings, and lives in sin no more. Forgiveness is such a happifying thing. When is a child happy if not when folded to the parental heart after some bitter experience of evil-doing. It is not a laughing, noisy joy, but still and too deep for words. My Peace I give unto you,*' has measureless depths of blessed content. God's way of rightening men thrusts forgiveness to the fore. From the Cross : Yes, from the Cross, hear it ; Father ! forgive them ! " Give them another chance, it says, in behalf of sinful men. What saith the law ?

Stone her." What saith grace? "Go and sin no more." Forgive the breach of the law and win to the obedience of the law. The cross makes possible what is thus set forth as the good news of God; as saith that mysterious — " the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.'* The love of Christ constraineth.

Many have stumbled at this, seeing how it has been perverted into an opiate for the conscience, as if men were to say : " God is merciful ; let us sin on." As though the child's unconcern over wrong-doing were the all-and-end-all of a great business when it says : " God loves to forgive sin. That is what God is for"! But "forgiveness is not a substitute for goodness." It is an inspiration to goodness. ^^It is the setting loose of a new moral force, a new means of restoring in man that which religion and morality alike seek to restore — the perfect character." Awfully abused it has been, both before and since the Reformation. But to him who thinks the gift ol i8

BRIGHTENING THE WORLD.

forgiveness can be purchased with money, and enjoyed without a change of heart and life, but one thing is to be said: **Thy money perish with thee/' Forgiveness is the starting point of a new life dedicated to the service of God and man ; the setting free of new forces for the regeneration of the world." The fact of forgiveness is to be read in the renewed life, as in the fruits of the Spirit we read the evidence of faith.

In that beautiful picture of forgiven souls in the second chapter of the Acts, where love prevails over all selfishness, and day by day they did take their food with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God and having all things common — small wonder is it that they are said to have had "favor with all the people"; or that ''the Lord added to them day by day those that were being saved." Such gladness is the direct sequence to forgiveness, and carries in itself a happy and winsome contagion.

2. The new life that begins with forgiveness is meant to be glad, and true, and strong — ought to be, needs to be. Ought to be, for it is the life of a filial child in the Great Father's house. He hears as from the heaven of Divine love, All things are yours, my child, — things present, things to come ; life, death — all are yours, for ye are Christ's and Christ is God's.

Child-life in a true home is the ideal of bright and joyous life on earth. It is throughout the embodiment of pure impulses and of healthy activity. So the forgiven man steps into a child's place to lead the life that befits the new relationship. The Christ Himself fulfilled it, so teaching us how. He made it His meat and drink to do the will of His Father in heaven — to heed the laws which God has impressed upon both soul and body. Hear him : " I do always those things which please Him/' There was in Him no diseased mind, no perverse will, no cramped, belittled intelligence, no selfish ambition. All was open, free, clear, bright, and strong.

But Christ is more than an impossible ideal. The successes of this world, surely, as often discourage as stir to emulation. See," we say, " what this man has done by his unaided exertion ! Now, why not you be somebody too ? Come, bestir thyself ! " As often as otherwise that call falls on the ears of men oppressed with a certainty of conviction that it is not for them; that the obstacles and limitations in their way are insurmountable. And if Christ were only a perfect ideal, a great way removed from us, as if set upon a pedestal for us to copy, nothing could well be more disheartening. Not so. He puts Himself by our side ; nay. He comes to be the inspiration of our life — to make His abode with us — to make the impossible possible ; that we may despair at nothing : that we may see that, casting out devils, raising the dead, cleansing the lepers, opening blind eyes, stilling the storm, He is teaching us, as if all this were a parable, that so it shall be with us if we take Him into the partnership of our lives.

What a wealth of divinely inspired courage is in Paul's saying: " I can do all things through Christ, which strengtheneth me ! " And what a buoyancy of healthy life in the words: "We are pressed on every side, yet not straitened; perplexed, yet not un-

BRIGHTENING THE WORLD.

to despair; pursued, yet not forsaken; smitten down, yet not destroyed." "Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." This is the language of sonship in Christ, full of inspired and inspiring hope.

Such not only ought, such needs to be the new life we live, for our own sake and the sake of the world. Not otherwise can we realize in ourselves the greatness, the fullness, the blessedness of our calling in Christ to be the sons of God. To fail here is no light matter were we alone concerned. But this is less than the half of it. It has been well said : " Every good that enters the world, enters through an individual — a conscious, reasonable, moral man "; and it depends on the quality of the man what measure of good he brings to the home, to society, to the Church, the State, to the great family of the human race. One may be a good deal of a man, and set the Gospel all aside and reckon this Divine indwelling a thing of words — words only. And men, who assent to the truth of God working in us to will and to do, may still so put their emphasis on merely human elements of culture and discipline as to make scant use of the divine power within their reach, and still be men of a good deal of consequence.

But put with all a man can do with his unaided powers, all that God can do through him, when welcomed to warm his heart, to inspire his thought, direct his energies, fill him with courage and hope, and how much more of a man you have, or can have, than on any other possible line of movement. If this world is to be brightened, it must be through persons thus brought into vital relations with Him who is the fullness of Divinity, the very effulgence of God. For the problem is immense. It is too great for man unaided. He cannot brighten himself, much less the world. Think what the Christ made of the men He called from the fisher's boat, and the receipt of custom. Think how He has been fashioning the great lights of history, the moving spirits of the world's great eras, calling them oftener, far oftener than otherwise, from the humbler walks of life, as freer from the trammels of a blind conservatism, less hampered by traditions, narrowed by systems of men, tied up to the old, afraid of the new. These be the men He has fashioned as instruments of power — " a stream of living men, whose course was ruled by love," from the little company of believers, baptized of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, to this very day ; a stream hemmed in by no high barriers of mountain wall, but overflowing its banks to fertilize the world. Such living is glad, true, strong, redemptive.

3. But man must suffer, and suffering must be brightened. From suffering no man is exempt. This world never learned the meaning of suffering, never thought of glorifying it, till the lesson was learned in the Holy Scriptures of Jew and Christian. Herein is the faith of the Bible isolated from all other faiths. How the refrain comes down the ages — Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God." And the God of consolation is the source of

BRIGHTENING THE WORLD.

the comfort, who says : I will never leave thee nor forsake thee"; who unveils the possibility that present suffering may work out "a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." Nay, of us as of Christ is it true — " made perfect through suffering." There is not a couch of pain nor a haunt of poverty, a burdened spirit nor a wronged through others' guilt, a heart bereaved, a home made desolate, but the Gospel has a word of cheer and a messenger of comfort ready, which may be ours if we will. Your sorrow shall be turned into joy."

Look at the facts. Hear the greatly suffering Apostle : I am filled with comfort, I overflow with joy in all our affliction." This is one of the men who, in the inner prison of Philippi, his feet in stocks, not knowing what daybreak might bring with it for him, prayed and sang praises unto God. And the brightness of the prison brightened the jailor's heart and house ! To certain Hebrew believers this noble testimony is borne : " Ye both had compassion on them that were in bonds, and took joyfully the spoiling of your possessions, knowing that ye yourselves have a better possession and an abiding one."

This patient gladness of the followers of Christ in the early centuries of persecution smote the Roman world into amazement. This cheerful courage, born of faith, they knew not. Likewise, from the great army of missionary workers, in loneliness, sickness, hostility of evil men, what an array of testimony to the power of the Gospel to make the chamber of suffering a chamber of peace ! This is true — the power is here — in spite of the fact that there are so

BE THYSELF BRIGHTENED.

many inconsolable lives, so many who only feel the abrasions of pain, and chafe as though there were no balm in Gilead and no physician there.'* Also in spite of the fact that funereal custom often shuts out all the Gospel light, and wraps in sackcloth the faces that, upturned to God, might catch the light that streams from the crowned head of the once man of sorrows. What a mercy if all the sackcloth of all the looms in the world could be gathered into one great bonfire, and the New Testament Son of Consolation robe us in garments of praise instead of the weeds of woe. How the great poets interpret for us the spirit of the Gospel, and bid us be of good cheer.

" Grow old along with me ! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made ; our times are in His hand,

Who saith : ' A whole, I planned ; youth shows but half; trust God ; see all, nor be afraid ! ' " * ** Blindfolded and alone I wait ; Loss seems too bitter, gain too late ; Too heavy burdens on the road ; And joy is weak, and grief is strong, And years and days so long, so long ! Yet this one thing I learn to know Each day more surely as I go.

That I am glad the good and ill By changeless law are ordered still. Not as I will."

" Not as I will, because the one Who loved us first and best has gone

* Robert Browning..

Before us on the road, and still For us must all His love fulfill — Not as I will."*

Every one in whom suffering is brightened is by so much the better qualified to brighten others. "Our highest thoughts, our noblest movements, have issued from suffering souls.** "Agony wrung the Reformation from Luther. When David's soul was smitten sorest, his harp was sweetest." And do not we ourselves know, who have been in the school of suffering and resigned ourselves to God, what a school of wisdom He has made our day of trial for some greater work that lay before us ?

4. Men must die, and dying needs to be brightened. In itself and by itself, it is a very sad, repellant experience, this dying. But it is the one thing from which no man can get away. And the Gospel that floods the grave with the light of immortality, and challenges death to do its worst, and enables us to say, we conquer though we die, conquerors are we and more than conquerors," is a great Gospel ; never greater than just here, in the face of utter rout, to inspire undying hope, with the vision of heaven opened, and the risen Christ, Vanquisher of Death, saying : " Fear not ! Be of good cheer, I have overcome." And the child of faith trusts and sings :

" Out to the earthward brink Of that great tideless sea Light from Christ's garments streams.

* Helen Hunt Jackson.

Believing thus, I joy although I lie in dust,

I joy, not that I ask or choose.

But simply that I must.

I love and fear not ; and I cannot lose One instant, this great certainty of peace ! Long as God ceases not, I cannot cease : I must arise."

Thyself, rightened, brightened after this fashion, take out into this poor, troubled, disjointed world of ours, everywhere, the Gospel that has rightened thee, and never fear but that thus God, through you, is putting forth His power to save and brighten the world.

Ill

CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? —THE DESPAIR OF THE PESSIMIST.

That this world of mankind needs Tightening in every aspect of individual and associate life— the family and the state, society and business — we need scarcely, trouble ourselves to affirm, much less argue. The fact nobody questions. But what can be done about it ? Is there a remedy ? Is any genuine rightening and brightening possible ? The problem is immense and there are pessimists not a few.

But find its parallel in the physical world. There is not a square foot of soil, nor a square yard of desert jungle, that does not await the kindly touch of intelligent husbandry to bud and bloom. The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them, and the desert shall bud and blossom as the rose." This is literal fact as well as spiritual symbolism.

A lazy man and a dullard stands before a square mile of thicket and marsh land, and sees in it no possibilities of good. It is not to be taken as a gift, he says: while he is napping, his enterprising neighbor of faith and intelligence clears off the thicket and burns it over, drives a ditch or two through it, tears up the roots, harrows and sows it, and now awaits the best of harvests from the richest of loams ! The wilderness is glad.

"Wise men" shake their heads over vast tracts of desert lands, worse than worthless; a positive menace to civilization, a great separating expanse, worse than the salt sea which may be sailed and is all the time fished ! But the conclusions of the "wise" are brought to naught, when a sensible farmer digs a ditch through the arid waste and lets in upon it the treasures of the snow now flowing in torrents down the mountain sides, a great supply for a great want. Or he bores into the earth and touches its hidden springs that gush forth in welcome abundance. And lo ! homes and gardens, grains and grasses, fruits and flowers, flocks and herds, yea, towns and cities, where the " WMse men " saw only desolation ! The desert buds and blossoms. " The restorer of paths to dwell in, has been here." "The soul is satisfied in dry places, and the bones are made strong, for the desert has become a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not ! "

The desolation was not overrated by wise man or brain-sick, heart-sick emigrant, traversing the interminable waste, but the possibilities were not seen. The supply of God's ordaining, to match want, was not so much as in their thought.

So of this world of mankind. The " wise men " look into this and that city "slum " of mingled nationalities in poverty, degradation, and sin, and shake their knowing heads. The only question that comes into their minds is — How to fence it in ? How to defend themselves from this breeding-place of pestilence, anarchy and crime ? They have no thought but that it must rot ! The suggestion of Tightening and brightening it, is to such men wholly Utopian. At best, we can only suppress with the strong hand of law.

But, plant in the midst a little colony of half a dozen Christian workers. Give them a chapel and the Word of God. Give them a modest supply of food, raiment, and medicine, — don't be mean about it, — and let these sisters of the risen Lord go to and fro among these homes of sin and wretchedness, cooling the fevered brow, tending the couch of sickness, praying by the bedside of the dying, caring for little children, preaching the Gospel of the resurrection — and the whiteness and the brightness of these souls, radiant with the love of God, will begin to righten things ; to reduce chaos to order, to shame the turbulent, to win the sinner to the righteousness of Christ, to transform the slum into a citizen neighborhood.

The "wise man'* says, "That's fine! How do you know?" Because it has been done once, and again, and again. Ask Chicago, Boston, New York ! It is being done all the time ; increasingly done more and more ; needs to be done on a larger scale still. There is no other way to transform the moral wilderness and make it glad. This is God's way, and it wins.

The " wise men " come upon this and that race of savages in the untrodden wilds of this contir nent, unkempt, ignorant, brutal, vermin-covered, herding like beasts, making slaves of their women, living by the chase and the catch of rivers and lakes. Nothing can well be more hopeless of uplift ! All the "wise men" can do is to run to the shelter of their guns. All they think the red man good for is to be shot. " The only good Indian is the dead one." The idea of civilizing savages, of Christianizing these beastly men, is to them too absurd to waste breath upon !

Then here is something too tough for God and the church. Then this Gospel is not for universal man ! Have we come to this ? Find a hero of the Christian faith willing like men of old to take his life in one hand, the Gospel in the other ; give him a wife of courage and consecration to match, and send them forth, and don't forget them as they pass beyond the confines of civilization, and press on into the wilderness to seek these lost children of the Great Spirit, and tell them the Gospel of His Son !

Now, hear from their own lips the wondrous story of the marvellous transformation. No pen can overdraw the abject degradation to begin with — only a pen dipped in the blood of redemption can tell how they drank in the story. And when light broke into their souls they began to righten their lives ; to make themselves homes and brighten them ; to share their burdens, men with women ; to pattern after the "praying master" and his wife with the white skin — the missionaries ; to clear fields, sow grain, adopt the arts of peace — a Christianized, civilized community of three thousand souls, " living like white folks," which is supposed to be the ultima thule of the human race.* All this in twenty years or less ! The wisdom of the " wise " He bringeth to nought. The wilderness is glad.

Follow a little band of American missionaries into the heart of the Pacific as they touch the Hawaiian Islands. It is April, 1819. ^*A strange revolution had destroyed the national idols, burned the temples, abolished the priesthood and human sacrifices. But society was in ruins. The language was unwritten. The nation was composed of thieves, drunkards, and debauchees. The land was owned by the king and his chiefs, and the people were slaves. Constitutions, laws, courts of justice there were none, and no conception of such things in the native mind. Property, life, everything was in the hands of arbitrary, irresponsible chiefs, who filled the land with discord and oppression." f Forty years thereafter Hawaii was declared a Christian nation, though but partially civilized. Everything was on a Christian basis, and one-fourth of the people were members of the Christian church. They had witnessed Pentecostal scenes as wonderful as that recorded in the Acts, and the story of redeemed lives takes up and continues the narrative of the Gospels, for it is the same Christ that touches these leprous ones, and they live the life of the renewed in spirit.

Of this great work of transformation Richard H. Dana, a Boston lawyer, said: "In less than forty

* Edgerton Young among the Crees of British America, t A. B. C. F. M. Mem. Vol., pp. 254, 393.

years they have taught this whole people to read and to write, to cipher and to sew. They have given them an alphabet, grammar, and dictionary ; preserved their language from extinction ; given it a literature, and translated into it the Bible and works of devotion, science, and entertainment. They have established schools, reared up native teachers, and so pressed their work that now the proportion of inhabitants who can read is greater than in New England. And whereas they found these islanders a nation of half-naked savages, living in the surf and on the sand, eating raw fish, fighting among themselves, tyrannized over by feudal chiefs, and abandoned to sensuality, they now see them decently clothed, recognizing the law of marriage," selfgoverned, and so on. This was in i860.

The story of these islands for the last thirty years has been complicated with that of people of other nationalities who have been drawn to this paradise of the Pacific for commercial reasons, till its annual commerce has risen into the millions. This creation of something out of nothing, this transformation of abhorrent savagery into Christian decency, is a triumph of the Gospel in the face of infidel pessimism declaring such a work an impossibility, and consigning all such peoples to hopeless and irredeemable destruction.

Had they ever made any approach to these islands during this century it would have been under cover of men-of-war. If they had taken possession it would have been to have driven them with shot and shell off these fair isles into the sea. The Gospel of Peace at the hands of American missionaries made these islands accessible, in safety, to the outside world, a coveted possession by the nations of the earth. If they belong to anybody, it is to the United States.

Not a whit less marvellous is the story of the Fiji and the Samoan Islands,— the one under the touch of the Wesleyans; the other, of the Independents, of England. In the face of death, and appalled not by martyrdoms, they persisted in carrying the Gospel to these cannibal isles, for they were children of simple faith in Him who said, This do — Lo, I am with you alway ! The Gospel triumphed and made these beautiful tropic isles accessible to the outside world, safe of approach. Once, where only man was vile, now the vile are chiefly imported from without.

And in the wake of the missionary come the great powers of the earth, — Germany, England, Spain, setting up the right of might to gather the harvest of gain — which they call a " protectorate.*' To these tropic isles, with their sunny clime, and soft and perfumed gales, hasten the invalids of sterner lands, and novelists who slander the faith, but for whose benign and saving power going before, they had never risked their precious heads beneath the palms, nor trod their shell-strewn sands.

Oh, at what cost have these Pacific Isles been brightened because rightened and whitened by the Gospel of the Son of God at the hands of men of faith who hazarded their lives. Many of them perished through the blind cruelty of the very people they went forth to save, while the unbelieving and the worldly stayed behind in safety, carping at their foolish waste and satirizing their blessed work. But it's the old story of the Gospel of sacrifice — the grain of wheat falling into the ground to yield a great increase. Still the mouth of gainsayers is never stopped. " Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof ! Because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty ! "

How many times, and for how long, have the ^Svise men" been saying: it is idle to think of Christianizing the African ? They have even denied him a place in the human race. Consistently with this affront upon God, and this outrage upon man, they have enslaved him, bought and sold him, till the story of African wrongs is too appalling for belief — too outrageous to read and sleep on, except in troubled dreams. Can the Dark Continent be blanched into whiteness ? Brightened, till the dusky faces shine in the light of God ? Rightened, after these ages of crookedness? Do not ask the ^'wise men." Have done with the unbelieving. Do not take the serious inquiry to the rank and file of the Church of Christ, even. Take it to the elect souls of Christendom. Call up the shades of heroes and martyrs. Let Lindley and Adams and Pinkerton and Moffat and Hannington be heard ! Listen to the intrepid and versatile Mackay of Uganda. Let Livingstone speak from under the vaulted arches of Westminster. These be the knights of the Holy Cross, whose faith took them far afield, and who triumphed though

BRIGHTENING THE WORLD.

they fell. They knew who had said : " Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God." They had had a vision of the multitu de innumerable before the throne, and discerned the eunuch of Ethiopia, and the later born of like precious faith, from the North and the South, the East and the West, from the heart of the Dark Continent, and made no question but that they were the forerunners of a mightier host to be gathered out of Africa's dark races. The continent brightens under the touch of Divine love.