Men in the Making Part 3

And once more, we may defile the temple of the body by Drunkenness. Or if this term, and the state it connotes, be unduly aggressive, let me say by an intemperate use of strong drink.

There are those who tell us that any use which pa.s.ses it through the lips is intemperate. If I offer a word of criticism on this position, it is because I want the a.s.sent of your reason in the few things I have to say about this part of the subject before us. The first condition of permanent reform is, that it shall be founded on truth. The peculiar temptation, it has been said, of the ardent reformer is to exaggerate. Intense feeling is apt to build upon a half-truth--the unsafest of all foundations. It is one thing to insist upon the evils that are inseparable from an intemperate indulgence in strong drink, it is quite another thing to a.s.sert that it is evil, and evil only, to touch it at all. The latter order of polemic is always liable to bring about a reaction which is terribly prejudicial to the good we desire to accomplish.

I have no warrant to question a man's loyalty to the forward movements of our time, who conscientiously for the sake of health, as he thinks, or social arrangements, cannot recognize it as his duty to forswear drink altogether. When a man claims his liberty to be the arbiter of his habits in his home, or in society, for me to arrogate the right to censure him may be impertinence; and, so far as I am concerned, to read him out of Christian consistency may be to make myself, as St. James puts it, a judge of evil thoughts. When a man has reached fifty years of age, and has worked hard and lived sparingly, if he should consider it advisable to relax somewhat the severities of earlier years, I have nothing to say to him unless it be to remind him of the example he owes to others, and of the need there always is to keep before us the warning: "Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall."

I think it right to put this side of the question in its just evidence, and having done so I willingly dismiss it with the remark that I am not talking to middle-aged nor to old men. My appeal is to young men, and I say to you without qualification, without a suspicion of mental reservation, you do not need strong drink. There are conceivable circ.u.mstances where it may be medically prescribed, but such prescription from competent men has well-nigh reached the vanis.h.i.+ng-point. Near as any statement can get to its ultimate, I affirm that you never have need of this drink. Keep it, then, out of your blood in your threshold years, and you will have less or no craving for it at all in those that are travelling your way. If you should imagine that you inherit the craving, there is, at any rate, one rampart which, if held, the craving cannot force--that is, total abstinence from the thing craved. Range yourselves with the abstainers, and be proud of your legion. It will be better for you in every way, whether it be in physical health, mental efficiency, moral force, or spiritual attainment. Settle it with yourselves, that there are no conditions in your life which can be called normal, and few that are abnormal, where you need the drink, and that to trifle with a thing so unnecessary, and yet so dangerous, is moral idiocy.

I plead with you to take high ground in your conceptions of the duty you owe to yourselves, and to your day and opportunities. As a nation we have to conquer drunkenness, or it will go far, as it is doing now, to conquer the nation. And we have a right to look to you young men to lead us forth to this great victory. We have the right to ask you to quit yourselves like men in mighty attack upon this devil's trinity of impurity, gambling, and drunkenness. I have said little in this address on what is called its distinctively religious side. The religion is in the subject itself. Realize what it is that needs to be done in yourselves and in the world around you, and I will trust religion to take care of itself. Face this work of conquest first by self-conquest, and you will find the need of a help not yourselves and greater than yourselves. And the help will come: "I can do all things," said the Apostle, "through Christ which strengtheneth me."

"I wish he would find the point again in this speaking man, and stick to it with tenacity, with deadly energy, for there is need of him yet."

So wrote Thomas Carlyle of the preacher. "Could we but find the point again--take the old spectacles off his nose, and looking up discover, almost in contact with him, what the real Satanas, the soul-devouring, world-devouring devils are." I have tried, however imperfectly, yet faithfully, to talk to you about three of these "soul-devouring, world-devouring devils." Give them no inch of foothold in your life, and do a brother's part for others who, perhaps weaker than you, are waging the same conflict in the interest of the things that are sacred, and kingly, and divine. And when your brief mortal life is over you shall have the n.o.ble satisfaction of knowing that you have done something to make sure and real the power of that new day when our "sons shall be as plants grown up in their youth, and our daughters shall be as corner-stones, polished after the similitude of a palace."

TEMPTATION AND RESPONSIBILITY

"Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of G.o.d: for G.o.d cannot be tempted with evil, and He Himself tempteth no man; but each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own l.u.s.t, and enticed."--St.

James i. 13, 14.

V

TEMPTATION AND RESPONSIBILITY

St. James has been called the Saxon of the goodly company of the Apostles. It is in many ways a happy description. We a.s.sociate the term with thought, rugged, perspicuous, easily grasped, and expressed in the shortest and most readily understood words. St. Peter, in a reference to the letters of his "beloved brother Paul," warns the reader of these letters that there are things in them hard to be understood, which the ignorant handle only to their own confusion. If the former part of this warning were written about the Epistle General of St. James it would be dismissed at once, as having neither point nor application.

St. James does not think deeply, but he thinks clearly. He knows what he wants to say, and he says it in language that he who runs may not only read but understand. He touches most of the great themes that engage the commanding mind of St. Paul, and settles them--for no other word so well describes the process--in his own characteristic fas.h.i.+on.

In the pa.s.sage before us he attacks the most difficult subject which the mind of man can approach, and disposes of it to his own satisfaction in some forty-two of the shortest and most decisive words to be found in any speech or language.

It is well to come across a man like this occasionally; he may not be profound, but he has abundance of common-sense. We see him just as G.o.d made him--genuine, sincere, calm, and clear, touching with searching words, if not quite the roots of things, yet, without a doubt, the things themselves. He was the Apostle of that myriad-headed person known as the "man on the streets." St. Paul, however, to the end of his manifold and strenuous life, was always the student and the theologian.

And in nothing does the difference between these two men better ill.u.s.trate itself than in their separate treatment of what is called the Problem of Evil. St. Paul speaks of evil as the law in his nature, as so entrenched there that the good he would do he does not, and the evil he would not do he does. Unless we weigh these words carefully, we overlook the significance, in the connection before us, of this term law. It implies that evil is, somehow, a part of our being; a something not our higher selves, and yet so deeply rooted in our nature, that like an unsleeping sentinel must a man be on his guard against it to the end of his mortal days. Were it not for this Apostle's mighty faith in Him who can give us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ, we should say that he stands ever on the margin of that dark river in whose mysterious deeps are possibilities of wickedness and disaster, the sorrow of G.o.d, and the despair of man.

St. James would not have put himself in opposition to a single thing that St. Paul wrote about the seat and nature of evil, but to him the practical question was not its source but its control, and concerning the latter he is sufficiently explicit: "Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of G.o.d: for G.o.d cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth He any man; but every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own l.u.s.t, and by his own l.u.s.t permits himself to be enticed." You will notice that in this pa.s.sage the writer puts no emphasis on outward inducements to sin; he says nothing, for example, about a devil. I do not a.s.sume that he would have questioned for a moment the traditional teaching about Satan. But he will allow no man to transfer to circ.u.mstances, inheritances, temptation, or devil, a responsibility which is his own. Comprehensively speaking, he declares that if men do wrong it is because they want to do wrong, or because they are not disposed to make a creditable fight against it. So far as men know the right, the right they can do, if they will.

We can readily imagine how this Apostle would handle one of the modern and enlightened critics, who appear to think they have but to refuse a name in order to get rid of the thing which the name is held to represent. "You tell us," he says to a man of this order, "that there is no devil; that to think or talk of him in any personal sense, say in the sense that Milton incarnates him in _Paradise Lost_, is mischievous and absurd. That sounds formidable, but to what does it amount? The word, or name, 'devil,' you, tell us, simply connotes a principle.

Very well, take the initial letter from the word, and what have you left? You have 'evil,' and that is the only thing about which you and I need concern ourselves. In what degree have you advanced 'liberal thought,' as you choose to call it, by telling us there is no devil, while yet there is so much that is devil-like in yourself and in us all?"

The Apostle leaves a legion of questions unanswered, and, as compared with St. Paul's treatment of this complex problem of moral evil, he moves on the surface. But he is himself; and, in his plain and terse fas.h.i.+on, he forces upon our attention one truth which, on the principle that an inch of fact is worth a yard of theory, is, if well in the mind, more useful than acres of metaphysics which leave us very much where we were. His broad affirmation is, that temptation does not, and cannot, put sin into a man's mind or heart. Temptation does not make, it only finds. "The prince of this world cometh," said our Lord, "and hath, or findeth, nothing in Me." And His Apostle takes his stand on the position, that temptation does no more than reveal the latent evil within us, waiting its opportunity to come out. I mind me of a remark I once read, and which has suggested whatever of worth there is in this address. "As to the notion," says the writer, "that our adversary the devil puts evil thoughts in our mind, I contend that neither G.o.d nor devil does it. G.o.d would not, the devil cannot. The most that the enemy of our souls can do, is to stir and use the possibilities already there." [1]

This, if I rightly apprehend his meaning, is essentially the contention of the Apostle James. The temptation is to the latent evil what the spark is to the inflammable material. If the material were not there the spark would be as harmless as though it dropped into ice-water. "I can hear words, I can see things, but they will have power over me only in the measure that something in me answers to the words and the things." "I was so tempted," says a man, "and I yielded," which means that the desire already there came into contact with the opportunity to gratify it, and in what struggle there was, the desire was greater than the will-power put out to control it. To say that the sight of opportunity to do evil often makes evil done may be true, but the sight does not make the evil, it only discovers the evil ready for the sight.

In the first place, then, the Apostle admonishes us, that we cannot refer the guilt of our sin, or the responsibility for moral failure, to causes and sources outside ourselves. We may do that with failure of many kinds, but never in a case of conscious moral obliquity. The Apostle James would have agreed with the greater Apostle when he said: "I find a law within me, that when I would do good, evil is ever present"; but he would not the less have stood his ground and said: "Call it a law if you like, but it is not, and is not meant to be, beyond our control. It is one thing to be tempted, it is another thing to fall." Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own l.u.s.t and enticed.

Let us allow at this point for a word of qualification, or we may find ourselves in confusion. As I have just hinted, we must not confound moral guilt and its consequences with the consequences of troubles and failures over which we have next to no control.

Here is a man, let us say, who is a hard worker, temperate, enterprising, and upright. He is making headway in a certain business.

But a powerful combination is formed in the same line, which offers him the two alternatives of absorption or almost certain ruin. He decides to hold out against it, to find possibly after a time that his business is gone, and with it his capital, and he himself in a world that apparently has no further use for him. Then, soured and bitter, nursing a sense of wrong, he gradually parts with his self-respect, probably takes to drink, and goes down below the hope-mark of social redemption.

The man--and you probably have known such an one--may, or he may not, have been responsible for his business disasters. He had a right to trust to his own judgment, and providing that he did not choose to enter the combination, he was justified in making a struggle for his own independence. Whether his decision was a wise one is nothing to the point; it was his decision, and he had the right to exercise it.

It brought trouble. That was a contingency to be reckoned in the risk; but having taken it, he had no right to sacrifice his manhood to his trouble. He might not be able to resist the strength of the circ.u.mstances that selected him for a commercial victim, but he was bound to overcome the weakness in himself to which the circ.u.mstances appealed. He might not be responsible for losing his business, but he was responsible for losing himself.

We talk about people doing wrong from force of circ.u.mstances. Well, every man who knows anything about it, has felt something of the touch of omnipotence there may be in circ.u.mstances. It is not always either kind or wise to try to hearten people who are in difficulties, by concealing or underrating their force and gravity. It is a terrible experience for a man past a certain age in his life, to find himself in the grip of financial difficulties, and face to face with social annihilation. I have seen men there, and the very thought of it unnerves me.

But past it all, the old saying holds good, there is nothing in life we can afford to do wrong for; and if, in the stress of circ.u.mstances, a man elects to take a wrong turn, he takes it according to the teaching of the text, because the inclination towards wrong is there, waiting its turn. We may sympathize with a man who goes down in his outward affairs and social status before the impact of circ.u.mstances he cannot resist, but we must maintain at the same time, that while circ.u.mstances may explain the trouble, whatever it is, they cannot justify wrong-doing either to escape trouble or as a refuge when in it.

Victor Hugo declares that for every crisis we have in us an instinct to meet it. That is a fine saying. If any man, who has had some moral training, will obey his first instinct of right, it is marvellous what possibilities there are at the heart of it. If, finding himself after the best he can do apparently defeated, he will take heed and be quiet--that is, do the best he can with what is left, and trust G.o.d--he will also find that the resources of the old word are not yet exhausted: "Light is sown for the righteous, and gladness for the upright in heart."

He may have to lose his means, and step down in the world, as it is called, but let him do it with a clean conscience and a fine integrity; and just as "man's periods are only G.o.d's commas," so this man's going down is but a more splendid way of going up. I can imagine that nothing is more pleasing in the sight of Heaven than to see uprightness only the more enlightened, quickened, and made imperative by the troubles and vicissitudes of life. Let a man keep, if he can, what he has honourably got; but if go it must, let it go rather than attempt to save it at the cost of moral integrity. Let him say: "Empty my purse if need be, but fill my soul; take my world, but spare my life; darken my circ.u.mstances, but keep bright my spiritual outlook." And what are the slights and neglect of a pa.s.sing and superficial world to a man whose life is in tune with the Infinite, who hears in secret what one day will be said from the housetops of time and eternity: "Well done, good and faithful servant"?

We are not always responsible for the temptations that sweep into our life. I will go further than that, and say that we are not necessarily responsible for what the attack of temptation finds in us; that, in some cases, may be our inheritance, and in others faults of early training; but we are responsible for what temptation does with what it finds. For it cannot be repeated too often that temptation never puts evil in our thoughts, it only makes manifest the evil that is there.

And hardly more do we differ in our features than we do in the things which, and through which, we are temptable. We cannot all be tempted by the same thing, but all of us can be tempted by something. You remember how Achilles was dipped in the magic water and made invulnerable in all parts except one. "Where the finger and thumb held the heel it was dry, and, though the arrows glanced off from the other parts of the body, when they pierced this one soft place he was wounded, and that unto death."

Each one of us has his vulnerable place, and it is our life-business to guard it. The weak place is there; the arrow will be aimed at it, and if it find the place it is aimed at, we may refer the blame to what or where we will, it does not affect the truth, that the blame is nigh unto us, even at our own door.

"Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of G.o.d: for G.o.d cannot be tempted with evil things; neither tempteth He any man with, or unto, evil things; but every man is tempted when he is drawn away, when he yields to his own l.u.s.t, and by it is enticed, by it is overcome."

Which means, in the second place, that not only is a man his own worst enemy, but that no enemy outside of man's self can vitally hurt him, except so far as he places himself within the enemy's power. This is not to say that other people cannot hurt us; still less is it to say that it is not their will and wish to hurt us. To commit oneself to such a statement would be to speak in the teeth of the commonest experience of human life. There are men, and women too, who have the will, the wish, and the power to hurt us. They are, as Christ said of this brood in His day, of their "father the devil." To say a kind word about any one, to do a generous turn for others on the road of life, would be to them a positive task. There are people with whom I would as soon think of entrusting anything I held sacred, as I would think of risking the blood in my veins to the instinct of a deadly snake.

Nor is it want of charity to say this; it is want of sense to deny it.

"Beware of men" is as much a word of Jesus as His command to love one another. There does not seem to be in the mind of most people any clear conception of the att.i.tude of Christ towards sin and sinful people. And this confusion is at the bottom of many of our speculative difficulties, as well as of our practical troubles in the Christian Church. When we are convinced that a man's policy and his motives as translated in his policy are inimical to the highest interests of others, to the commonwealth of good, then we owe it to ourselves and others to speak and act upon our conviction.

There are men, again, whose vested interests mean our hurt, working through inst.i.tutions that are co-extensive with our civilization. Look about you on the effects of drink, and then think how attractive its surface accessories are made. Consider the men who make fortunes out of l.u.s.t itself; how seductive they make the openings and avenues which end in the lethal chambers wherein are dead men's bones. We have in our midst a well-organized body of men who make it their business for money to trade upon and to tempt the lowest and most dangerous forces of our carnal nature. And what does it mean when these men are, by the acknowledgment of public sentiment, the representatives of what is called "legitimate business"? It can only mean that the sentiment which should be the active and protective side of a worthy manhood is being used to destroy it.

Beware of men who say to evil: "Be thou my good!" Reckon with the fact that in so far as we stand for anything in a life worth living, there are people who have the will, the wish, and the power to do us hurt.

And yet, I say again, they can hurt us vitally--mark the word vitally--only so far as we place the opportunity within their power.

We have to hurt ourselves before we can be hurt by anything outside us.

We have to be our own enemy to give the enemy his advantage.

"Nothing," says St. Bernard, "can work me harm except myself; the harm I sustain I carry about with me, and never am I a real sufferer but by my own fault."

Recall once more the word of the Lord Jesus, how He said: "The prince of this world cometh, and findeth nothing in Me." The prince of this world crucified Christ; he made Him the victim of the fear, the hate, the murderous fury of the organized religious cla.s.ses of that day. But the prince of this world could not pa.s.s by a shade the extent which the saving purpose of the Saviour had Himself decreed and set fast. When the prince of this world came to the soul of the Saviour, the power of the prince of this world had reached its limits. Had there been, I will not say sin, but a sin; had there been the shade of a suspicion of what the world significantly calls a "past" in that Soul, the devil would have had his leverage, and the Divine Saviourhood would have thinned out at the most in the ordinary tragedy of a human martyrdom.

The emissaries of the prince of this world could lay violent hands on the body of Christ--that was permitted for your salvation and mine; but their power became impotence when it approached the soul, and there is where the battle is won or lost. "Fear not him who can kill the body only, but fear it"--that is the better translation--"fear it, the evil principle within thee, that can cast both body and soul in h.e.l.l."

We are told that a man once wrote the late Mr. Spurgeon saying that unless he received from him within two days a specified sum of money, he would publish certain things that would go far to destroy the great preacher's hold upon public estimation. And Mr. Spurgeon wrote back upon a postcard: "You, and your like, are requested to publish all you know about me across the heavens." There is a world of meaning in the answer. This master in Israel had his enemies, who would have hailed as a providence any report, true or false, which could have been effectually used to strike at the message through the man. And it was because the man had not made himself his own enemy, in the past or in the present, that he could look this devil in the face and tell him that he was the devil.

This is how one man came out of an encounter with an enemy outside him; take another case where the enemy of a man was the man himself. He came to me, this man, when I was working in the South of England. In a bitter temper he told me that he had been dismissed from a business house in the town. He had left a good situation six months before he entered this house, and was now ousted to make room for one who had resented his appointment from the first, and had been his enemy. I spoke, as I promised to do, to the employer, with whom I had some influence, and in whose integrity I had implicit confidence. "It is an absolute misrepresentation of the facts," he a.s.sured me. "The man," he said, "got his situation on no better than false pretences. He had not been with us a week when it was evident that he was quite unequal to the duties of the position he had professed himself competent to fulfil. It is nonsense to say that any one has ousted him; the truth is, that he has wasted his time, and thrown away his opportunity, so that in what should be his own line he has neither training nor proficiency to be other than a low-placed man."

This is a single line in a large literature. It was a foolish use of the past that became the man's enemy the moment his present required something better. And this is an instance of how we can so become our own enemy, as to make it impossible for G.o.d to be our friend, in the sense we imagine G.o.d should be our friend. It would be, not the law which is the deepest expression of divine thought and love, but immoral force, if we could waste the time sacred to the preparation for a better position, and yet be ready for the position when it comes our way. G.o.d can forgive the waste, but G.o.d cannot give us back what the waste has lost out of our life. We must never lose sight of the fact that divine forgiveness cannot be vulgarized into impunity. I do not say for a moment, in the case of a middle-aged man, that the enemy he has made of himself is irredeemable and hopeless. I believe that a man's own effort and the grace of G.o.d can change this enemy into a valuable friend, if a man is man enough to accept and honour the cost of the great transformation. But how few people, past a given age, ever do quite conquer the inward foes whose sinister power is of their own cultivation? For one man who goes down before an outward enemy, there are a score who lay themselves in the dust and keep themselves there by acts that become habits, and habits that become character, and character that hardens into something that looks like destiny.

This, therefore, suggests a closing word to you younger people. Many of you to whom I speak are in the making. You are on the threshold of your manhood, with practically the future in your own hands.

I often recall my faltering energies in thought of a remark I once heard the revered princ.i.p.al[2] of my college make to a body of students who were about to enter upon their ministry: "Gentlemen," said he; "you may be able to offer twenty good reasons in after life for your failure, if fail you do. People will not concern themselves about your reason, they will simply look at the fact that you have failed." The truth in this remark is preeminently a truth for young people. The world, on one side of it, is very hard and cruel. It will apologize for failure in the abstract under tricks of speech, and cant about charity, but for individual failure it has no mercy.

Listen to one who has to fight bitterly his own self-made enemies, when I counsel you to begin straight from the beginning. Beware of making to-day the enemy of to-morrow. The present, says a wise man, has always got to pay the purchase price of the past. Never let the temptation overcome you, to take a "short and shady" cut to the gratification of desire, or in the achievement of what is sought as success. Nothing in life is unrelated, and everything you do which cannot pa.s.s the bar of your higher self is not only sin, but also a blunder. It may sleep to-day, but it sleeps to wake. When you can least afford it, it will be more than awake, it will be hungry.