The Warriors - Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
A third class which the Church needs to-day is that of the working-man.
The hand of the working-man is the hand that has really moulded history.
Working-men lead a brave and self-sacrificing life. From their toil come
the necessaries and many of the comforts of the race. The man of labor
knows the root-problems of the industrial world. While all his industry
and skill, all his courage, heroism, and strong-armed life are so
largely alienated from the Church, the Church is deprived of one of the
fundamental sources of inspiration and growth. The tree of progress can
never grow, except it has labor-roots. It is absolutely essential for
the health of the Church that every form of human energy be represented.
Suppose that by some great revival a very large number of working men
and women could suddenly be added to the membership of the Church. What
would happen? Would there not be at once a return to more simplicity of
life? There are two currents at work always in society--emulation and
sympathy. Rightly used, each is for the social good. If all classes of
men and women worked side by side in the Church, many great social
differences would become adjusted.
5. It holds sway over the fortunes of the home. Where, outside of the
Church, will you find the ideal conception of marriage, and the really
united and happy home? The Church makes for domestic happiness, because
it goes straight to the roots of life and plants happiness where
happiness alone can grow. More and more the Church is lifting the
standards of a noble, proud, pure, and rejoicing married life. Its ideal
of human love is sacred, because founded on the deeper love of the soul
in God. The Church is drawing hosts of young people under the shelter of
its teaching, and is placing before men and women ideals which cannot
fail to make their mark upon the social standards of the times. It
stands for purity, for patience, for tenderness, for the love of little
children, for united education and endeavor, for mutual hopes and
dreams, for large public service.
6. It is the militant force of time. We speak of the Church militant,
and of the Church triumphant. For us, to-day, the Church militant.
To-morrow, triumph comes. Armies have been, and armies shall be, but the
hosts of this world fight against material foes, and largely for
material ends. It is the glory of the Church militant that its conquests
are spiritual and its victories are eternal. Its fight is chiefly
against the inner, not the outer foe--against sin and wrong-doing,
impatience, strife, anger, clamor, meanness, evil-speaking, wrath. It is
the foe of tyranny and its heel is upon the head of the oppressor and
the avenger. Its banner flies over every country and has been carried
through tribulation, through sorrow, through danger, and through death
to the remotest parts of the yet-known world. Its troops are legion,
marching from the far distances of the past, and extending out to the
far confines of the eternal years.
7. It is the ascendant force of the future. Rightly conducted, it will
surely absorb the vigor of the world. To stand apart from it is to be
out of step with the march of nations. The processional of progress
to-day is the processional of the historic influence of the Church. What
force has there been in time gone by, which has lived and so greatly
grown for nineteen hundred years? Nations have risen, and nations have
decayed. States, once prominent, have passed into the oblivion of the
years. Plato and Pericles, Socrates and Sophocles, Philip and Alexander,
the Caesars, the Georges, and the Louis have passed away. Their
politics have passed from our following; their empires are no more. But
through these centuries of change, the Church of God has risen stronger,
more powerful year by year; stretching its arm out to the uttermost
parts of the earth; levying tribute on the islands of the sea; enlisting
all ages and conditions, and looking out over coming generations--not as
a waning, but as a growing and ever-increasing power. Think you that
such a Church can die? Think you that any spiritual power aloof from
this Church can be as efficient as if it were allied with it?
These, you say, are the reasons why one's allegiance should be given to
the Christian Church. Let us now look back over the processional as it
marches across the dim years. Saints, martyrs, confessors, evangelists,
and singing children have joined its historic train. Is there any other
processional in the world's history which, numbering such millions and
millions, began with only one? When the Christ enters the arena of
history, He comes as one to lead myriad deep-lived souls! Next, there
follow twelve. They, two by two, take up the marching line. Think of
their deeds and influence, of their inspiring power! What would have
been the record of those obscure fishermen of Galilee and of their
simple friends, had they refused to ally themselves with the leader who
called for their allegiance and their obedient love?
Next follow the early disciples. Tried by scourging, by stripes, by
poverty, by imprisonment, by all manner of danger and trial, they yet
remain true. Then follow the prophets, those whose clear vision looks
out on things unknown and things unseen. To the prophet is intrusted the
ministry of hope and inspiration. Then follow the martyrs who yield life
for the cause they profess. In torture at the stake, and on the cross,
by fire and by sword, they show forth an unshaken and undying faith.
Then follow matrons and virgins, babes and children, reformers and
mediaeval saints with a convoy of angels, singing as they march. These
are the Church triumphant, the Church above. But to-day we have among us
the Church militant--the long processional of congregations, elders,
deacons, members, ministers and missionaries, young people, and workers
in every phase of enterprise and reform. These all communicant on earth
are the Church militant, whose work is to keep alive the traditions of
the past and to march onward to an endless victory and to an unceasing
praise. Who, looking upon that processional, filing through the ages of
the years of man, would say that there may be a parliament of religions?
A parliament of boasts and pomps, of good precepts and queries, of
misuses and half-truths, of superstitions and infinite idolatries, no
doubt; but there is but one religion, though it be perverted in many
ways and rightly revealed at divers times; and there is but one God,
infinite, true, holy, just, loving, and eternal. Where now are the gods
of Hamath and of Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim? Bow thy head,
O Buddha! and do thou, O Zoroaster! hang thy head. Isis and Osiris grow
dim; Jove nods in heaven; the pipe of Pan is dumb; Thor is silent in the
northern Aurora; the tree of Igdrasil waves in midnight; Confucius is
pale; Muhammad is dust. Darkness is over the skirts of the gods of the
past--gloom receives them, Erebus holds outstretched arms. But the Lord
God, Jehovah, the Ancient of Days, encanopied in space and glory, leads
onward to the end of years His people in a mighty train, to a rule and
kingdom which shall know no end. May thou and I, dear friend-soul, in
whatsoever land thou be, may thou and I be numbered in that throng!
IV. THE WORLD-MARCH: OF KINGS
[DIE WACHT AM RHEIN]
_Jesus shall reign where'er the sun
Doth his successive journeys run;
His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,
Till moons shall wax and wane no more.
People and realms of every tongue
Dwell on His love with sweetest song;
And infant voices shall proclaim
Their early blessings on His Name.
Blessings abound where'er He reigns;
The prisoner leaps to lose his chains,
The weary find eternal rest,
And all the sons of want are blest.
Let every creature rise and bring
Peculiar honors to our King;
Angels descend with songs again,
And earth repeat the loud Amen_.
ISAAC WATTS
The elemental force of some men is appalling. They lift their
eyes--thrones tremble; they wave a hand--empires rise or fall. It comes
over the heart of many a man at times, Here am I, running my little
office, shop, factory, fire-engine, or professional circuit, with no
influence that I can see, beyond my borough or my barn-yard. But in the
world there are other men, no taller than I, no older than I--men born
within a stone's throw of where I was born--whose hand is on the fate of
nations, and whose decrees are universal law!
It is deeply impressive, the way in which one man, born not above
myriads of his fellows, begins to rise until by and by he stands head
and shoulders above his generation! What is the inner vitality which
presses him upward? What is this hidden difference in men by which one
remains in the by-eddies of life, and another sweeps out on the crest of
the rising tide of history?
Much of it is in the man himself. To be kingly is inborn. There is the
nature that refuses to be shut up to the petty, that will not content
itself with one street or town, that steps out into life from childhood
with the step of the conqueror, and walks among us; one who was born a
king. To be a king, one must have the powers of organization,
combination, discipline, direction, statesmanship. These qualities
enlarge as one passes from the particular to the general, from the
personal to the range of natural forces, emergencies, and wide pursuits.
Dominion is an inherent right of the soul. In all our hearts, did we but
listen and understand, there are adumbrations of kingly ancestors, and
the latent stirrings of kingly powers.
Which of us would want to be born at all, if we should be told in
advance, You shall never control anything? You shall never have the
slightest chance of self-assertion, of impressing your own individuality
upon the world? One might as well be born without hands or feet!
Kingship involves ascendancy and authority. Both are truly gained, not
by chicanery, but by personal force. There is a natural gift of
leadership, which is strengthened by endurance, perseverance, and
ceaseless hard work.
Kingship also involves a larger vision. One man looks at his
shoe-strings; another man looks at the stars. The first step toward rule
is to find a point of view from which one can look widely out over the
race. This is the primary value of education: it is not that books are
important, but that men are--the men who have swayed history--and books
tell of such men. Not the library is inspirational, but the life-spirit
of mankind, bound up in even dusty papyrus-rolls, or set on
clay-tablets of four thousand years ago. He who would serve his times
politically must first understand, so far as may be, all times.
Another basis of supremacy is conviction. Leadership belongs to those
who believe. The man who has a definite policy to propose, and a
definite way of working for it, soon outstrips the man who is just
looking about.
Kingship involves an iron will. An iron will does not imply necessarily
ugliness of temper, obstinacy, or pig-headedness. It is simply a
straight-forward, dauntless, and invincible way of doing things. What I
say, you must do, is back of all successful leadership, whether in the
home or in the world-arena. The man who is master of the obedience of
his child, or of his fellows, is master of their fate. We are all at the
mercy of the strong-willed.
Growth is development in right assertion; it is the assumption of
legitimate responsibility and command. To be lowly of heart does not
mean to be inefficient; to be humble does not necessarily mean to be
obscure. Luther and Lincoln were both of a childlike humility of heart.
What Christianity has not emphasized in the past, but what it must now
begin to emphasize, is the reality of dominion--its value, and its
relation to the kingdom of God. For centuries, religion has too often
been thought of, too often spoken of, as if it were the last resource of
the heart, A brilliant young professor of psychology not long ago
referred to religion as something to flee to, by those who were
disappointed in love! We have spoken so much of "giving up," that the
Christian life has wrongly seemed to mean the giving-up of one's
individuality, interests, powers. As well might we expert the deep sea
to give up its rolling tides, or the air to give up its four winds, as
to expect the heart of man to part with its human hopes!
This is not a right interpretation of life. When Nature plants an oak in
the forest, she does not say, Be a lichen, an _Eozooen canadense_, a
small ground-creeping thing! She says, Grow! Become a tall, strong,
mountain tree! When we hold our baby in our arms, we do not say, My
child, be good for nothing! Neither does God say, Be nothing, do
nothing! Just exist as humbly and meekly as you can! He says, "Quit you
like men!"
Each of us is born for a sceptre and a crown. It gives a strange new
thrill to life, to realize that we may be just as ambitious as we
please, that we may long earnestly for high things, and work for them,
if our inmost desire is not for self but for God. This new idea of
ambition should be at the root of education and of religious teaching.
Piety is not a namby-pamby sentiment; it is a great intellectual force.
Desire is architectural: our dreams should be of prestige and power.
True ambition is the reaching-out of the soul toward preordained
things. What else is the meaning of our love for excellence, our
insatiable yearning for perfection? "What is excellent," says Emerson,
"is permanent." To excel in any work is to combine in that work the most
enduring qualities of human labor; to excel in any place is to shine
forth with the great qualities of the race. Hence, ambition has a
rightful place.
The power of a king is the power of control. All about us are moving the
great forces of the universe--physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual.
What we can do with them is a test of our power. Life is in many ways a
majestic trial of one's power to command.
Three men buy adjoining tracts of land. One man mines coal upon his
acres. He amasses wealth and influence because he is in control of the
Carboniferous age and the human need of light and heat. The second man
tills his ground and raises wheat and corn. He is in command of living
nature--of the rotation of seasons, of wind, frost, rain; he uses them
to provide food for those that hunger and must be fed. The third man
lies under the trees. He digs no mine. He plants and reaps no corn and
grain. He simply lies under the trees, gazes into the sky and dreams.
Men call him idle, but he is not so. One day he writes a book. It lives
a thousand years. His control is over the spirit of man. He has entered
into its hopes and sorrows, its aspirations and its dreams.
This story is a Parable of Kings. Such is the power of control that is
granted to each new soul. Each child is bequeathed at birth a sceptre
and a crown.
The first rule is parental. The primitive monarchy is in the home. A
young baby cries. The trained nurse turns on the light, lifts the baby,
hushes it, sings to it, rocks it, and stills its weeping by caresses and
song. When next the baby is put down to sleep, more cries, more soothing
and disturbance, and the setting of a tiny instinct which shall some day
be will--the power of control.
The grandmother arrives on the scene. When baby cries, she plants the
little one firmly in its crib, turns down the light, pats and soothes
the tiny restless hands that fight the air, watches, waits. From the
crib come whimpers, angry cries, yells, sobs, baby snarls and sniffles
that die away in a sleepy infant growl. Silence, sleep, repose, and the
building of life and nerve and muscle in the quiet and the darkness. The
baby has been put in harmony with the laws of nature--the invigoration
of fresh air, sleep, stillness--and the little one wakens and grows like
a fresh, sweet rose. The mother, looking on, learns of the ways of
God with men.
Firmness is the true gentleness. There is a form of authority which must
be as implacable as the divine decree. Mercy is the requiring of
obedience to law; it is not a cajoling training in law-defiance, which
shall one day break the mother's heart and upset the social relations of
the world.
The next rule is personal: the direction of one's own energy in the way
of one's own will. The child moves his hands, his feet; he turns his
rattle up and down, and shakes it about. He discovers that he can pull
things toward him and push them away; that he can reach things that are
higher than his head. He begins to creep. He touches things that are the
other side of the world from him, that is, across the room. He plucks
fibres from the rug or carpet; swallows straws, buttons, and little
strings. He pounds, and sets up vibrations of pleasant noise; he clashes
ten-pins, he blows his whistle, squeezes his rubber horse and man,
rattles the newspaper, flings about his bottle and his blocks. He feels
himself a self-directing power, and at times asserts this power against
the will of those who would make him do what he does not want to do. The
love of rule is in him, and he lays his little hands on power.
Education determines whether this power shall be for good or for evil.
We cannot take away power from any child--he shall move the affairs of
nations--but we can direct this love of power, or crush it; strengthen
it, or weaken it; turn it toward the highest help of man, or deflect it
to tyranny, cruelty, and crime.
Child-training is guidance in the way of God's decrees. It is not the
setting of one's own ideas upon a little child; it is not the
gratification of one's own love of power; it is not the satisfaction of
one's own self-conceit. It is a firm, humble striving to carry on the
harmony of the universe: to bring up the child to love order, justice,
mercy, and truth.
Education is the teaching of how to direct energy for the universal
good. It lays hold of a child and, out of his destructive instincts--the
instinct to bang, and pull, and tear to pieces--it develops creative
power, the inventive genius that lies hid within him. It takes the pure
love of noise, and trains it to pitches, harmonies, intervals, and makes
a musician of the boy who used to whack his spoon. It takes the alphabet
and the early pothooks, and the boy by and by combines them into
literature. The apples and the peaches which he is taught to exchange
justly are by and by transmuted into trade and commerce. He brings
cargoes from Cuba and Ceylon, trades with Japan and Hawaii, and the
Asiatic isles. The energy of block-building is developed into sculpture,
architecture, and civil engineering. The stamping of his foot in anger
is directed to determination, perseverance, the rule of the brave
spirit, the unconquerable will. Nothing is more marvellous than this
grave upbuilding.
The next rule is social: the direction of personal energy that shall
leave a distinct impress on other lives. It is long before we realize
that for each exertion we are responsible; that what we do is held
against us in strict account, not only by fate, which builds our destiny
for us out of our own deeds, but by every other person with whom we come
in contact. Our fellows check off daily against us so much vitality, so
much magnanimity, so much idleness, cruelty, spite, goodness,
selfishness, meanness, or loving-kindness. Life holds a record of our
every deed, and from no least responsibility can we make our escape. We
are the prisoners of events which we ourselves have brought about.
The discipline of ethics, of home-training, of the Church, and of
religious teaching is addressed fundamentally to this social
consciousness of ours, this responsibility which we cannot evade. To
bear rule aright is to go forth into the world to build up, in
authority, talent, and influence, the kingdom of God.
1. There is the agricultural phase of social rule. A man tills a farm.
It has upon it trees, streams, woodland, and meadow-land. He may
rule--to what end? If he rules it for his own personal ends--merely to
fill his granaries, and lay up gold--he rules it for miserliness, with a
sort of thrift that is as passing in inheritance as the flying
April rain.
Or he may say: I will keep my land in trust for God. I will hold rain
and frost, heat and cold, storm and sun, in fee simple for the race. My
grain shall pass out into the world's mart, sent forth with love and
prayer. Such a farmer is the incarnation of moral grandeur. Let men
laugh, if they will, at his overalls and plough, his wide-brimmed hat,
his simple manners, and his homely, racy speech. His feet are by the
furrow, but his heart is in heaven, and his treasure is there also. Says
the author of _Nine Acres on the Hillside_, "The agriculturist walks
side by side with the Creator."
There is a fine integrity which lies in land. There is a resolution
which is concerned with crops. There is a wisdom born of wind and
weather. There is a power which comes from the constant revival of life
in seed and fruit and flower. This man is King of God's Acres. Let him
not despise his kingdom, and may the succession not depart from
his house!
2. There is a rule which is industrial. A man is sent into the world to
wield a hammer, a saw, and run an engine. If his rule over his hammer is
weak, if he does not know how to use it well, if its blow is uncertain
and its result unskilled, then he passes from the line of kings, and is
subject, instead of in authority, in his own domain. He is captive to a
piece of steel or wood. So with every tool of trade. Each man who
conquers his tool is a ruler--is in control of elements of human
happiness and good. The roof-mender, the furnace-builder, the
cloth-weaver, the yarn-spinner, the steel-worker, the miller--do not
these all keep the race warmed, and clad, and fed?
3. The next rule is commercial. Trade itself is neither menial nor
demeaning. Rightly used, it is a high form of control. People have
things to buy and things to sell. The maker is handicapped. He cannot
travel elsewhere to dispose of what he has. The buyer is ignorant. He
does not know where to go, or cannot go, at first-hand, for the shoes,
the hat, the reaper, the bricks, the lumber, the stationery which he
must use. There appears upon the scene the man of observation, of
investigation, of capital, of shrewdness, of resources. With one hand he
gathers the products of the Pacific and of the South Seas. With the
other, he takes the output of the Atlantic seaboard, the Gulf States,
the Mississippi valley, the northern lakes and hills. He sets up an
establishment, he puts forth runners, advertisements, and show-windows.
He stocks shelves, decks counters, and employs clerks, packers,
salesmen, cash-boys, buyers, and department heads. The man who wants to
buy, buys from a man across the sea and yet is served in his own town.
The man of commercial power is a man of world-wide rule. He may lay up
in banks a fortune which he intends to try to spend upon himself; or he
may say: I am accountable for the pocket-books of the world. I am in
authority over them. I open a market, or close it. I buy, dispense, and
disperse human labor. I create wants, and I satisfy them. I will
establish honest laws of trade. What I do shall be rated as commercial
law. What I say shall be quoted as a way of equity and probity. That man
is a King of Trade. His throne is set upon hills and seas. His subjects
are all men with needs, and all men with products of the land, the
coasts, the sea, or brain, or skill. This is the lawful King of Trade.
He represents God's mart of exchange. Primarily, goods are not bought
and sold in the market. They are first transferred in that man's brain.
4. Another rule is of concerted works: the rule of the Engineer. Back of
every advance in our country, in facilities of trade and transportation,
or of public health and safety, stands the man who thought it out. Take,
for instance, the development of the "Great American Desert." Who
projected its irrigation, by which areas have been redeemed from
barrenness and waste? Who planned the economic use of the Niagara Falls?
Who built the Brooklyn Bridge? Who projected the vast waterway from
Chicago to the Gulf? Who first thought of a cable across the depths of
seas? Who bridged the Firth of Forth, the Ganges, the Mississippi? Who
projected the gray docks of Montreal? the Simplon Tunnel? Who wound the
iron rails across the Alleghanies, the Rockies, the Sierras? Who drew
the wall that has encircled China for a thousand years? Who projected
the Suez Canal? the Trans-Siberian Railway? Who sunk the mines of
Eldorado? Who designed the Esplanade at Hamburg? the stone banks of the
Seine? the waterways of Venice? the aqueducts of Rome? the Appian Way?
the military roads of Chili and Peru? the Subway in New York?
Gravity, stress, strain, weight, tension, sag, cohesion,--a few
mathematical formulas, and a knowledge of the primary laws of
physics,--upon such principles as these, the world is rapidly changing
form and use.