"Thus is Christianity concerned, not with merely a section of life—with the 'affairs of the soul'—but with all of it. No life—as I think Luther has said somewhere—is more worldly than a Christian's. It embraces everything that makes us what we are—all that, lived in a certain light and treated from a certain point of view. One of the great wrongs that ecclesiastical Christianity has done religion is to disparage or deny this, to give us the impression that a Christian life lived in the cloister is higher and holier than one lived in the family, the market, the secular arena of the world, and to bid us look to types of the former rather than the latter for saintship. I cannot find any meaning such as this in the fact of Christ. The carpenter of Nazareth, who was among men `eating and drinking '—He is `our only Saint.' We must secularize saintship by sanctifying the secular life."—P. CARNEGIE SIMPSON (" The Fact of Christ ").
PRACTICABLE BECAUSE OF ITS NATURE
For the reasons as stated, we grant that the Will of God should be the best law of life for man. Having granted so much, a new question immediately arises: Is the doing of the Will possible to man? An ideal that cannot be realized may be a vision of beauty, but it lacks the essential element that creates the true ideal—that, namely, of practicability. Men do not climb after the inaccessible although they have reached the moon. Grant the accessibility, and distance becomes an incentive to climbing and John Kennedy embraced that challenge. The Will of God is practicable for three reasons:—
1. Because of its nature.
2. Because it is revealed.
3. Because of supernatural power, communicated to those who will to do it.
We proceed to deal with these three statements in these three articles.
The Will of God includes and conditions all that God has created. Doing the Will of God does not consist in the development of the spiritual side of man's nature, at the expense of the other sides. The apostle prayed for the Thessalonian Christians, that their "spirit and soul and body" might "be preserved entire, without blame, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." (1 Thess. 5:23)
We are suffering from the art of the Old Masters. They gave men a wrong conception of God and of sainthood. Take, for instance, what Ruskin speaks of as "that infinite monstrosity and hypocrisy, Raphael's cartoon of the charge to Peter." Let me give you an analysis of his criticism on the picture:—
(1) Twelve apostles, when only seven were present.
(2) Curled hair and sandals, after a night in sea mists.
(3) Dresses with trains—an apostolic fishing costume.
(4) No fire of coals, but an Italian landscape with villas and churches.
(5) The apostles not round Christ, but in a line to be shown.
That is a fair sample of the conception of sainthood which the Old Masters gave the world. They lifted men and women out of the ordinary experiences of human life, and put them upon impossible planes. This was due to a misconception of the Will of God. These Old Masters did not understand that God does not call men away from the commonplaces of the busy days, but conditions their life within them, until the meanest thing flashes and gleams with the glory of the heavens.
Another illustration is that offered by Monasticism. The monastic system was the outcome of a pure and holy desire, but it was based upon a misconception of God. Men desired to serve their age by prayer; and to do so, retired from the hurry and rush of life, turning their back upon marriage, parenthood, home, and friendship. It was a fatal mistake. When men retire from the conflict to pray, they cut the nerves of prayer. Men only pray with prevailing power, who do so amid the sobs and sighing of the race. If the genesis of monasticism was a pure desire, its history proves that it issued in lewd and awful corruption.
These illustrations are given to show that any conception of God that makes it necessary for man to depart from the commonplaces of life to find Him, are wrong. The Old Masters saw no possibility of the identity of an actual fisherman and an apostle. The monks went alone to pray, because they thought that God was out of the midst of the strife.
"The parish priest, of austerity,
Climbed up in the high church-steeple,
To be nearer God,
so that he might Hand His word down to the people.
"And in sermon script he daily wrote
What he thought was sent from heaven;
And he dropped it down on the people's heads
Two times one day in seven.
"In his age God said, Come down and die';
And he cried out from the steeple,
Where art Thou, Lord?
and the Lord replied, Down here among My people."
The Will of God touches us at every point in our life, because He is interested in all its details. This is illustrated by some of the most simple and exquisite statements of Scripture.
"Put Thou my tears into Thy bottle."
"The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord."
"Thou knowest my going out and my coming in."
"Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine uprising."
God among His people gathering up their tears ordering their steps, knowing their going out, their coming in, their down-sitting, their uprising. Then hear the words of Jesus.
"The very hairs of your head are numbered."
"Not a sparrow falleth to the ground without your Father."
"Take no anxious thought; . . your Father knoweth that you have need."
If these sentences teach anything, they teach the intense interest of God in the smallest detail of the life of His children, in what we eat, in what we wear, in our recreation, in our homes, in the hidden facts of character. He is so interested, that He takes us one by one, and thinks of, and arranges for, every detail of our life. To Him there are no little things. What we call great things are but the perfect union of the small ones, and every small one has the element which makes the greatness of the great ones.
"Nothing's small:
No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee,
But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;
No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere;
No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim."
By this interest in, and arrangement for, all the details of every individual life, God makes His Will the simplest. the easiest. the most practical law of life. It is within that Will that man, in the best sense of the word, may be natural, true to the possibilities of his own being, unafraid.
One other word as to the nature of the Will of God. Not only does it include and condition all that He has created in infinite wisdom, it also manipulates all circumstances. The proof of this is to be found, in the majority of cases, by retrospection. Looking back, how marvelous is the mosaic of the Divine arrangement! In the midst of the darkness yonder we thought the light had forever failed, and yet we were but in the foyer of clearer vision. Another day we counted ourselves defeated, but today we see that the defeat was in itself the greatest victory. God's transmutations run through the years. He is always bringing gold for brass, silver for iron, brass for wood, iron for stones. All contradictory circumstances He presses into the service of progression. It was not idly written in the Song of Solomon, "As the lily among the thorns, so is my love among the daughters." (Song 2:2) The thorn and the lily both live in the same soil, in the same atmosphere. Both receive the same ministry from without, and yet how different the result. To those outside the Will of God, sorrow, trouble, disappointment, come; and the tendency is to harden and embitter. To those living in the Will of God, the same sorrow, the same trouble, the same disappointment, come; and the effect is that of transformation into new grace, and tenderness, and beauty. Sorrow is a minister, creating character for those who dwell in the Will of God; for such, sorrow is turned into joy. The Will of God, including and conditioning all God has created, and manipulating all circumstances, is a possible and practicable law of life for man.
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