Think again for a moment about the effects on society as a whole of the intemperate use of strong drink. They are incarnated in horrors, look where we will. The injuries which simply swarm out of our licensed temptations to drunkenness are not exceptional and irregular; they are, as one of the most eminent of our publicists has said, "uniform as the movements of the planets, and as deadly as the sirocco of the desert or the malaria of the marshes." There is not a profession round which drink has not thrown the spell of its sorcery; scarcely a household that has not been despoiled by its leprous pollution. And who is responsible for it? Does any one doubt that if the Christian Churches looked at this accursed traffic through the eyes of God, and attacked it with faith in His omnipotence, that we could not break its back within the next ten years?
Long as we are content merely to run the eyes of our intelligence over the episodes of this great battle of wrong against right; to mark down its critical moments, and to analyse its issues while careful above all things not to implicate ourselves in the agonies of its crises, then let us not challenge the faithfulness of God for wrongs and sorrows brought into the world, and kept here by our selfishness. Those of us who have part or lot in this selfishness--and most of us have--let us, at any rate, play the game, and accept our own responsibility.
I do not wonder at the severity there is in the human world; for hard as it falls in places, it is yet the sign-manual of its uplifting and hope. We sometimes talk bitterly about the crucifixions in our life; but believe it when I say, that a world without them would be a dark and terrible vision. If we could do evil with impunity, if its punishment were a mere peradventure, it would mean that evil was the heart of the world. We may be profoundly thankful that wrong and suffering are cause and effect which nothing can break. Were it not so, it would mean that under skies dark and pitiless, a brutal scramble to survive would be the law, as in the animal world it is said to be the instinct. I know that many come into the world and leave it, never having had the chance to be all they might have been in more gracious circumstances. But I can trust them with Him who is too wise to err, and too good to be unjust.
This, then, is as far as I have got with the general merits of the subject before us. To say there are experiences in the lives of individuals, and even of communities, which we cannot explain, is no proof that the universe is immoral. I submit to you, that the good in our lot infinitely outweighs the ill for which we are not directly responsible; and that the consequences of the ill for which we are directly responsible are intended to chastise it out of existence.
May I counsel you to think about what has been said? Remember there are some things God cannot do for us, and yet leave us men. He cannot make a better world without the consent of our individual obedience and the co-operation of our will. I should, I trust, be the last man to ask people to be content, or even patient, with things as they are in the life that now is, on the assumption merely that they are to be better in the life that is to be. I do not say that heaven is here or nowhere; but I do believe that it ought to be here, in its degree, as truly as anywhere else. If we can think of contempt as part of the Being of God, surely this must be His feeling for much of the wrong and suffering that finds a place in the human world. It is so gratuitous, so insensate, so unnecessary. Is it not a terrible reflection upon some of us, that after the Cross has been silently teaching the world these well-nigh two thousand years, it can yet be said with some show of reason, that the two forces that keep society, as we know it, together, are the ignorance and the patience of the poor? Why should they be so long ignorant? Why should they be so chronically patient?
The sorrow of God must be, not only that they suffer, but that they are so patient under it as to make it scarcely distinguishable from content. And why are they so patient? This is the question God is asking through every thoughtful and humane man of us; and one day--man with God speed its coming--we shall be numerous enough, and in earnest enough, to establish some real harmony, some true correspondence, between the inner dignity and the outward lot of the individual, and, through him, of the community. In the meantime, then, instead of asking, how can God be God and permit wrong to be in the world? let us face the truth, however it may smite us, the truth that wrong is in the world for this reason--that we permit it.
Growing out of what has been advanced, suffer me to press the subject a little further, under one or two statements. I purpose to do little more than indicate them, and to ask for them your good consideration.
God is faithful: therefore good must be possible. I was talking some time ago with a very intelligent man, who has a well-known name in the world of letters, and he said to me: "I admit that we have made something that answers to progress in material things, but I deny that we have made any advance in moral attainment. A few rise above the average level, for the rest it is the old story of cycles of abortive effort with no lasting good to the race. We may theorize and idealize as we like," he went on to say, "but Bebel is right when he tells us that 'every man is the product of his times and the instrument of his circumstances.'"
It was talk that exactly expresses much of the "time-spirit" of our modern day. It is a doctrine with no God in it, and no invisible world. It assumes that man has no vision and no volition; that he is a mere billiard-ball in the game of existence, which goes whithersoever the cue of blind fate sends it. That one man rises, and another falls, is neither the virtue of one nor the vice of the other, but the necessity of both. We follow the better if we have the accident of certain gifts, or we take hold of the worse, if we have not. In either case we are no more responsible for our direction than we are responsible for the fact that we have to take a direction at all.
I shall not build up words in trying to answer this position. I can conceive of no man who has some conscience left, however he may seek a refuge from himself in this doctrine of moral irresponsibility, who, at the soul of him, does not know it to be a lie. We commonly use the terms evil and sin as interchangeable; and in doing so we are apt to fall into confusion. Evil is, as it were, embedded in our nature; and for that we are not accountable. Sin, as I have said before, is in yielding to the evil, and that is our responsibility. St. Paul speaks of the evil he found in his nature, and while he admits its malignant power, he does not represent himself as powerless to contend against it. He accepts no responsibility for the fact that evil is there; but he does accept responsibility for what he does with it, or what it does with him.
"Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, Another thing to fall."
I know with any man the power of evil in my heart; and while it may come, as it were, in spite of myself, I can determine the question as to whether it shall stay. It is the vilest heresy of our day to preach and believe that circumstances can absolve us from our duty; or that they can prevent us from following the right. The battle is hard, at times very hard, but what battle is not hard that is worth winning?
Put religion out of the question, and do we find that the prizes of the world offer us easier terms?
It is the greatness of the Christian religion, that it not only tells us what it were good to do, but it offers to us the power to do it.
The great teachers of the world have said to their disciples: "Accept our ideas"; Christ says: "Accept Me." "He makes everything centre in His Own Personality." And the men who have helped to make what so far in our human world is grand and glorious, have shown us that Christ's word is a real word, meaning a real thing.
One who has the right to testify has told us that, when we do the will of God as if it were our own will, we realize that God is doing our will as His own. There is a great truth in this. We so often fail because ours is a broken obedience. We expect God to do His part, while we keep back part of the price of our own, and what response we have is the sense of being mocked in ourselves. We have to find out that we cannot serve two masters. However we fall short in practice, the intention must be all for God, or it will be none. But let us be genuine co-workers with Him in this great work of personal character-building; and we find that we have a power not ourselves, and infinitely greater than ourselves. Our achievements are not so much a question of gift, as of dynamic. They are not in the machinery, but in the driving power.
"How is it"--was a question recently asked concerning one of the most useful men in the Christian ministry--"that with his obvious limitations he has accomplished so much?" And the answer was: "Because he has made it possible for God to use him for all he is worth."
Failure is impossible in the man who can say: "I live, and yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." We cannot explain the power; but it is there, and we all may have it by obedience to the conditions through which it can be given. "I have been down deep in the hell of moral failure," writes one, "and by the grace of God I have come out of it.
I may not be able to explain His grace to the satisfaction of others; but will others explain me to my own?" Our lives may be the living evidences of this power. The world asks for no more; the world will accept no less. Our day, we are told, has ceased to believe in such miracles. It were truer to say that it has ceased to believe in anything else.
Goodness is possible; and not to achieve it is to defeat the purpose for which we were born into this world. Let us believe in goodness.
Let us learn to love goodness because it is goodness. Let us say, and live our word, that there are no charges we can pay which we are not prepared to pay to be, and to do, that which is possible to us--and God will not fail us. Any man who is putting out all his strength in work and prayer to build up his higher nature need have no devil-fear that his strength will not be equal to his day. He may not be able to choose his circumstances; but he can show that he, and not the circumstances, is the master. He can offer to the world the living proof that the triumph of good is possible to him whose power is the faithful God.
And once more: Because He is faithful who has promised, we may safely leave the issues of our life in His keeping. If by the help of God we are trying to do the will of God, nothing else really matters. The crooked places of to-day will be made straight to-morrow. After all, it is not more knowledge we need, but more power to use the knowledge we have. Much of our unrest only means that we want to know more than the silent God sees fit to tell us. We know enough for the wise ordering of life; and the highest, holiest thing any of us can do, is to do the wisest and best we know, in whatever honest sphere circumstances have placed us. The riddles of the universe, and the perplexities and heartache which come out of our attempts to reconcile much that we know and see with the rule of an Almighty, an all-wise and faithful God--these will be here long after we are gone. We must just take the Master at His word when He says: "What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter."
"We cannot," says a wise teacher, "take up a drop of water, and find in that drop the flow of the tides, and the soft and then loud music of calm and storm. To see the ocean we must grasp it in all its rocky bed, bordered by continents." So before the very present troubles of life, we cannot see all the government of the faithful God. It has boundaries wider than these. Human life is but a fraction of the sum of life. The tides of the mind, the music and the tumult of human waters, cannot be heard and felt in this drop of existence.
We may believe that the moral government of the world is in the hands of Him whose love and law are both the same; and we may, at the same time, have to recognize the fact, that so many suffer grievously from forces they have not called into being, and which they are almost helpless to control. We may have to reconcile as best we can, a general Providence, with much apparent severity in its particular operation. Unless this be understood, some parts of this address will appear inconsistent with each other. I leave this order of suffering--not its causes--with the responsibility of God; and, for myself, I am persuaded that our last word about it will be one of praise, and not of reproach--
"Right for a while may yield to wrong, And virtue be baffled by crime, But the help of our need and the might of our creed Are faith, patience, courage, and time."
But to say that the faithfulness of God cannot be fully measured now is not to say that it cannot be measured at all. Do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God, and our life will not only come out right at the end, it will come out right all the way. The lesson for us to learn is to labour and to wait; to give God and ourselves space to work in. Whether God is in His heaven or not, of this I am sure, that, given time, right always comes to its own, and all wrong, sooner or later, is defeat and disaster. Time forgets nothing, it omits nothing which God requires at our hands. It may not be ours to choose our task, but we can choose to do it well. What is really everyday religion is to do common things in an uncommon spirit. There is nothing for us in the world that needs a lie; nothing that excuses us from the wise admonition--
"Count that day lost whose low descending sun Views by thy hand no worthy action done."
Then let us just go on doing the highest we know, and the best we can.
The reward may not seem to be to-day, nor yet to-morrow; but we shall see that it was everyday and all the way, when we look back upon it from the shores of the life eternal. Let us trust the faithful God, and we shall be taught to regard the troubles that test, and the limitations that perplex us, as the agents of His Providence through the courses of time. And as we see in each new revelation of His goodness and mercy towards us an added circle of splendour in His halo of light, we shall learn to say of ourselves, and the race of which we form a part--
"The God of Truth and Love, The Ancient Friend of man, Makes every age an onward stage, And has, since time began; Sing ye praises, oh, sing praises, God has a glorious plan."