MY NEXT GREAT PROBLEM IS MY ENVIRONMENT

ENVIRONMENT

"For in Him we live, and move, and have our being." Acts 17:28

            We have considered the problem of Self. We now turn to the consideration of the forces which affect a man from without—his environment. We shall deal with Environment, first, as a popular conception; second, as a Di­vine revelation; and then we shall dis­cuss the relation of these two views.

            Primarily, let us take the popular idea —an idea based upon facts which are obvious to all observers, and evident to every one of us, not merely from our observation of the lives of others, but from our own experience.

            Man is acted upon and changed by the everyday surroundings of his life. This is seen in a striking way in the effect produced upon a man by the company with which he associates. If that com­pany is refined and cultured, he will, al­most in spite of himself, become in some measure refined. If, on the other hand, a man, born in refined life, choose to make companions of the debased, sor­did, and brutal, he will undoubtedly weave into his own character those ele­ments of baseness, sordidness, and bru­tality. Every man is made, in some measure, by the company he keeps.

            Again, a man's character is molded, imperceptibly to himself it may be, but most surely, by his daily occupation. There are some people cleverer than others, who profess to be able to tell you to what profession a man belongs as they look at him in the street. There certainly are men who carry the profes­sion they follow stamped on their face and marked in their manner. I am not, however, speaking so much of what can be seen on the surface, as of the deep inner reality of the case; and I say that a man is very largely molded in character by his occupation.

            You will agree with me that a man's character is molded and fashioned by his reading. Men and women make or mar their lives by the books they read in their spare time. Literature that is frothy, sensational, light will create character that is lathered, sensational, and light. On the other hand, a book of solid thought and set purpose—a book that cannot be taken up flippantly for five minutes now and then, but arrests the kingly quality of mental power, and demands undivided attention—will pro­duce character that is strong, true, and abiding.

            It is indisputable also that a man is made or marred by the place of his abode. Small town men know less of the stains of the big city boys. The man who lives in the tene­ment-house or the slum is of necessity a widely different character from the man who is born in the cottage on the hillside, amid the clustering roses and trailing honeysuckle, and the sweet­ness of the garden with all fragrant herbs.

            Thus all through life man is being in­fluenced by his surroundings. Out of these facts certain teachers have been deducing a philosophy of life which, at the first make-up, seems to be plausible, possible, and even probable. That philos­ophy may thus be stated:—if a man is influenced by his surroundings, all you have to do to effect the transformation of the man is to re-make them. Remove the man out of a slum to a model dwelling in the country or the suburbs; take him out of his workshop—which is a veritable death-trap on account of its unhealthy conditions—and put him into one that is well ventilated with all modern appli­ances, and the atmosphere of which is pure and sweet; take him away from the neighborhood where crime is ram­pant, and plant him among the green fields; hang a few pictures on the walls of his house; supply him with a bath; and you will re-make the man. That is the popular doctrine of environment.

            It has been said that the doctrine of environment was smashed to pieces in the Garden of Eden; and it is perfectly true. God did not start man in a fac­tory, or a tenement-house, or a slum; He started him in a garden where there was the most perfect environment for all his complex nature; for physical life is always at its best in the country, though we say it that live amid the grime and toil of the city. Surely mental vigor has always been most perfectly developed when it has escaped from the restless crowd to the loneliness of mountains and forests, and has dwelt "near to Nature's heart." I think it is much easier to pray under the blue, and the trees on the green­ hillside, than where the houses congregate so thickly that your vision of Nature is limited; and you forget the blue, and the tree, and the green. In this perfect environment of the garden God put man, without hereditary taint; and yet he failed. We see how great a fall that was.

            We need not go so far back as the Gar­den of Eden, but come to later times; and, out of Bible history, take one man who started his life with environment more complete than that of any other man; who had his kingdom prepared for him by the heroic warrior-spirit of his father, and who entered, not only upon the kingdom so prepared, but upon the heritage of his father's penitence and tears; a man who came to the building of the House of God, prompted by High Heaven, and took up a work which his father had not been allowed to touch on account of the failure in his life. What splendid opportunities for the develop­ment of an unique personality; and yet I have no hesitation in asserting that of all the miserable failures recorded in the Book of Truth, no failure was ever more miserable or complete than that of Solo­mon. Perfect environment was not suffi­cient.

            When, in this country, our politicians and thinkers were facing the great prob­lems of educating the people, it was the Iron Duke, a man of stern will, the hero of many a hard-fought battle, and yet a man of keen perception, who said, "Gentlemen, if you are only going to educate the children, you are only going to make them clever devils." And what he said was true. The whole history of man proves that environment is not suffi­cient. If you take a man from the slum and put him in the suburb, he will, unless you touch him in the very center of his being with some marvelous regenerative force, by his very presence in the suburb degrade it to the level of the slum. So that the popular doctrine of environment is one which experience has proved to be futile. Our slum rebuilds end in yet another slum, better than the original.

            We turn to our second consideration, that of Environment as a Divine revela­tion. We have it in our text, "In Him we live, and move, and have our being." If that teach us anything, it teaches us that every human being has the living God as true environment. Now we are face to face with something that is so familiar, that it has lost its power to touch and move our hearts. No one will quarrel with that statement; and, believe me, the most difficult task is to get peo­ple to believe the things they think they do believe. If you make an announce­ment that will challenge men's naivety, they are aroused to attention; but if you tell them the things in which they be­lieve, they go away unbelieving, simply because of their familiarity.

            "In Him we live, and move, and have our being." Then our first environment is God. "In Him we live." What is life? None can tell. Life is a perpetual mystery that baffles the thinkers and scientists of every age. Whether you take the life of plant, or animal, or the higher life of man, you are still in the presence of mystery. No man has ever seen life, or been able to analyze it. A scientific observer sat for long and weary years in his laboratory in Germany, taking the component parts of man's material na­ture and endeavoring to combine these parts so as to produce life; but he failed. You stand by the bedside of a dying man. He is alive: he is dead. What has happened? None can solve the rid­dle. No one has ever saw pass away from him the very principle that made the difference between clay and humanity. (Spirit)

            While our text does not give us final and detailed explanation of this problem of life, it declares a great principle concerning it. "In Him we live"—that which is life that which differentiates between us who live, and the dead bodies that wait for burial in our city, is that which is in God. It is "in Him we live." Then, to bring that great essential truth more closely to our notice, the apostles write, "In Him we live, and move.” No hand is uplifted except under

Divine energy; no step is taken except in the power of God. We have found our way from various homes and various circumstances into a Church house on Sundays, and the energy that has brings us there—very little as it seemed in its distribution among the units, but enormous in its mass—was the energy of God. And then again, repeating the whole fact, he adds, "and have our being." Then the first environment, the nearest fact, the ultimate truth in every life is "GOD." All other environment is false and partial, and therefore does not touch the man himself.

            Falling back for a moment upon our first article in this series, think of man at his best, with the body kept under in its proper place; that is to say, physical and mental life-power subservient to the spirit. When spirit dominates, what then? Then God is conscious environment, and everything else in man an­swers that first influence. It is in God that man lives, and moves, and has his being; and so, nearer to him than the book he reads, than the house in which he dwells, than the occupation of all the days, than the companions of his life—nearer than all is God. It is in "Him man lives, and moves, and has his being."

            As we have combatted the false de­duction that is made from the ordinary statement of environment, we now pro­ceed to make a true deduction from this Divine relation. The man who con­sciously abides in God is greater to every other environment, master of every other force that comes against his life. The man in the slum, what shall we do with him? Take him out of it? No; we will lead him by the way of the Cross into living communion with God. He will re-make the man, and within a very few days or weeks he will change his own environment by moving from the slum somewhere else. The man whose work and reading, and all his na­ture is tending to degrade and debase him—what shall we do with him? Be­gin with the environment? No; begin with the man. Restore him to right re­lationship with the Omnipotent, the Om­nipresent, and the Omniscient. Let him, not merely as a dead theory, but as a liv­ing fact, "live, and move, and have his being in God," and with all-conquering might he will put the foot of his man­hood upon the neck of every adversary from without, and will re-make his entire environment in that Divine strength.

            The law of environment still holds, but there is a higher law of environment; and when man obeys the higher law, all the lower laws become subservient, and contribute, not to his disaster and defeat, but to his making.

            May we humbly take as our best example of that fact the one perfect Man, our adorable Redeemer, and compare Him with the man of Old Testament-history whom we have mentioned. One would hardly care to compare Jesus with Solomon, were it not that Jesus did so Himself. "A greater than Solomon is here." (Matt. 12:42; Luke 11:31) Now mark the difference in this particular consideration. Solomon start­ed, as we have said, in perfect environ­ment, and he failed. Think, if you will, of the environment of the life of Jesus Christ from the standpoint of His peculiar mission to the world, and you will see that from first to last everything, humanly speaking, was against Him. A man of the people, born a peasant, and all through life suffering poverty—and poverty then, as now, was a crime in the eye of the crowd. When He gathered His own disciples round Him they never understood Him; and in the critical, tragic moment of His life, they all forsook Him and fled.

            Solomon, through perfect environment, comes to the days of shadow; and listen, he gives you the story of his failure: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith the preacher." Jesus comes to the close of His sojourn on the earth, and what does He say? "All authority is given unto Me, in heaven and in earth." Con­trast the two statements: "Vanity of vanities." "All authority given to Him." The former is the language of a man who through his own sin lost the sense of his true environment, and so became the slave of all the varied surroundings of his position. The latter is the experi­ence of the perfect, victorious Man who lived in the true environment. He con­sciously lived, and moved, and had His being in God, so that He could say, "I am alone, yet not alone, for My Father is with Me"; and in that environment He was Master of every other—He put His hand upon every opposing force, and transmuted it by the power and magnifi­cence of His pure manhood into an oc­casion of victory, into a stepping-stone to the very throne of the universe. We may go from that one notable illustration to others from every age of the Christian Church. Every true Christian is an illus­tration of this same great fact of men and women moving out of the realm of the false into the true and becoming victors over the very forces that yet had damaged and debased them. Out of circumstances that thwarted and hin­dered, God has made His fairest saints.

            Now, third and last, let us look at the inter-relation of these questions. En­vironment must have a basis on which to work. Suppose, for the sake of argu­ment, that there is in front of us a gar­den, well watered, carefully tilled, prop­erly tended. The soil is rich and fertile. I am going to bring into that garden something that I may plant there; and I hold in my hands two things: a pebble that I have picked from the seashore—smooth and beautiful in form—and an acorn that has just been shaken from the oak by autumn's blast. I suppose for the moment that I do not know the na­ture of these two things. They are about the same size; they are not unlike in appearance; there may be a difference in their weight, but in most respects they appear to the casual observer to be very much alike. I put the pebble in the garden; I put the acorn in the garden. The environment is the same in both cases, the soil is the same, and the same sun with shafts of light will penetrate the soil, and the same soft showers will reach the pebble and the acorn. But you have already solved my riddle, and this is no problem to you. The acorn will burst its shell in spring; and we pass rapidly over the intervening cen­turies, and there it stands, a proud oak battling against the blasts of winter, and in its turn shedding acorns on the ground. Where is the pebble? No one has dis­turbed its resting-place. It is there still, a lonely pebble. The environment is the same—what, then, is the difference? Environment must have a basis. In the pebble there was no germ of life; in the acorn there was. The perfect environ­ment of soil and light and air upon the pebble produced no result; but upon the acorn it produced the springing of life out of death.

            "In God we live, and move, and have our being"; and there is no exception.

            It is not the preacher, the Church mem­bers, the Christian people merely, that in God do "live, and move, and have their being." Every soul—the most profligate man, the most licentious man, the most greedy man, the most ungodly man, "lives, and moves, and has his being in God."             Life to one man means growth, advancement, and movement forward, until that man is as a tree planted by the rivers of water, and his influence is going out, not only in his own generation, but to the generation of generations. The other man, living in the same environment, is unmoved thereby. God Himself cannot act upon that man so as to produce the fruit, and life, and beauty that are being produced in an identical environment in the case of his fellow man. Now, wherein lies the difference? In the one the spirit-life is dead. To use an ex­pression of Scripture, so glibly quoted, and yet so little trembled at, that man is "dead in trespasses and sins." His lower life is there, the physical basis is there; but that never consciously touches God. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. The mental vigor is still there—keen and wondrous; but that never consciously touches God, for "no man by searching can find out God." The spirit neglected, starved, is dead; and that man living in God never feels Him, never responds to the tender, gracious influences of the Divine heart and the Divine strength. This man, on the other hand, has spirit dominant, and has recognized that man is more than matter and mental power, and recognizing it, has yielded himself to Divine control, and in that act of yielding he has been born again. He has passed from death unto life; he has become a new creature. For him "old things have passed away and all things have become new," so that he touches God and feels the Eternal, and communes with the Di­vine; and that touch, that feeling, that communion, are creating character, and building it for the palace and the home of the Eternal. One man lives in his environment consciously, because his own spirit is quickened by the Eternal Spirit of God. The other, living in the same environment, does not know it, because he is dead in his trespasses and in his sins.

            In a few closing sentences I want to make a personal application of this article in order that I may help some soul who feels the contradiction and the difficulty of environment.

            Man is saying: "Certainly I could be a Christian IF I could get out of this position; if I could get out of this business; this particular situation in which I am en­gaged, where there are ungodly men round about me. If I only lived in your home instead of mine, I could be a Christian. My environment is against me."

            If you cannot be a Christian where you are, you cannot be a Christian any­where. God is no more in my home than in yours.

"It is so easy to be Christians while we are in the sanctuary, and the very breath of eternity is upon us and God is at hand. Tomorrow in the city, in the workshop, in the office, on the mart, it is very hard."

            God is no more in the sanctuary than He is in your shop, or your office, or the mart; and it is no more difficult to pray when ungodly men are thronging around you than it is to pray where you are at this point in time. So long as you are longing for free­dom from your present environment to be a Christian, you will never find the deliverance you seek.

            What, then, is needed? That you should believe what you think you be­lieve. The most difficult thing to get a man to believe is the thing which he thinks he does believe. You believe in God—you live, and move, and have your being in Him. Believe that—believe that only, believe that completely, and then begin life in that belief. And in that be­lief, believe above everything else that:

“Hell is nigh, but God is nigher,

Circling you with hosts of fire."

            The poor trembling servant of the prophet, when he saw the "host with horses and chariots round about the city," said, "Alas, my master! How shall we do?" It was a false vision of envi­ronment. But the prophet had the true vision. He replied: "Fear not; for they that be with us are more than they that be with them." Then he prayed, "Lord, I pray Thee, open his eyes that he may see." The servant looked, and "behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha."

            That is the lesson. God is grander to the slum or the tenement; to ungodly companions or influence God is greater than the sneer of the mocker. Live in God consciously, and you have found the environment that is highest and clos­est and strongest, the environment which is greater to all others.

            Yes; but how can I get to God? "No man cometh unto the Father but by Me." "Come unto Me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest." "Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out."

May God help us to believe the things we think we believe!