Men in the Making

by Ambrose Shepherd

For in this connection it suggests the influence of companionships. There is a well-known saying that a man is known by the company he keeps, and it is truer than many sayings that are oftener on our lips. "Do you think him beyond further effort?" I said lately to a good man concerning one in whom we were both interested—a young man fast heading towards ruin. "I am afraid there is, humanly speaking, no hope," was the answer; "he has taken up with company that forbids it."

When we are young we are apt to evolve friendships out of our imagination. We do not so much prove them as create them, according to the impulses and undisciplined generosities of our disposition. It is only time, here as elsewhere, that can teach us how much there is that is human about the best of friends. But how much may have been done, for better or for worse, before we realize that the angels have gone away only because they were never here? As we get older outside friendships count for less. Life fills with other interests, or it empties in a sense friendships can never fill. If we who are older have carried into the later years one or two, or two or three, well-laid, well-tested and useful friendships, let us be very thankful, and cherish them. They are pearls of great price, for no friends are like old friends, and as they drop off we have to make the best we can of acquaintances. It is when we are young that we have the genius for friendships; they are, indeed, a necessary part of our life. And whether or not it is much use to warn young people about the formation of friendships, the warning is seriously needed. Much will be determined by affinities and by mutual sympathies. You may have to sample many friendships before you find a friend. And while it is difficult, not to say impossible, to lay down rules where affinities are involved, one thing you can do, you can allow the moral instinct to decide, as it can decide, whether in the real interests of character a given friendship is worth cultivation. If you realize that you must surrender something of your better self to be the friend of a certain person, you will be almost sure to establish that friendship at your peril. It is far harder to save your life than it is to lose it, and the chances are, not that you will lift the friendship up to your level, but that it will pull you down to its own.

These remarks on the general subject of personal friendship are warranted by its importance. But there is another aspect of it which, as a question of widespread and deep-seated influence, is even more important. And it is one that is too rarely touched in or out of the pulpit. There is something which begins with only an acquaintance, but it readily grows into more, and that more is supplied at a heavy cost to the individual and to the community.

In a well-known passage in one of his letters, St. Paul asks: "What concord hath Christ with Belial, or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? Wherefore come out from among them, saith the Lord, and be ye separate; touch not the unclean thing." Both the question and the admonition apply to personal friendships and to other relationships, such as marriage, social and business intercourse. But it has another and wider application. They refer to the general attitude of our thought, our bearing towards interests and people whom we have reason to believe are hurtful themselves and represent hurtful institutions. For me to call myself a Christian, and yet be on terms of apparent friendship, of easy good nature and tolerance of men and things that stand for Belial, that are Belial, is one of the most effective ways I know of crucifying Christ afresh, and putting Him to open shame. Whatever the King of Israel might think of his company, the fact that he was in it gave to their worthlessness a new tenure of existence and to their wickedness an added licence. He did not make them better men, but they made him a worse man. And for us to appear to countenance wrong things, so as to favour an impression that possibly they are not so wrong after all; to strengthen the wickedness which would hide itself behind the sinister expression, that the "devil may not be so bad as he is painted," is to be on the side of the devil. It is to hearten the foes of good and perplex and discourage the enemies of evil.

In that remarkable book, Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, the writer speaks of a day when politics will become a matter of life or death, dividing men with really private love and hate. "I have heard it said," he tells us, "that we ought to congratulate ourselves that political differences do not in this country breed personal animosities. To me this seems anything but a subject of congratulation. Men who are totally at variance ought not to be friends, and if Radical and Tory are not totally but merely superficially at variance, so much the worse for their Radicalism and Toryism. Most of us," he goes on to say, "have no real loves and no real hatreds. Blessed is love, less blessed is hatred, but thrice accursed is the indifference which is neither one nor the other, the muddy mess which men call friendship." The truth underlying these words is put in a severe form, but there is truth in it. Our compromises in politics, and the consequent slow and doubtful progress we make in social conditions, have many explanations, but the abiding one is, that at the moral root of things we have not, as Mark Rutherford means it, those real loves and hatreds which vitally influence conduct. Take any wrong that happens to appeal to your sense of indignation, and ask why it continues? in what does it get its lease of existence? And the answer is, the fact that we have too many Sauls among the prophets. The wrong remains because, although we do not profess to be its friends, its friends have no need to reckon with us as its foes.

I have already alluded to my experience in a hard school. Indulge me if I return to it for a moment. My earlier years were spent in a Lancashire cloth mill. In it I wrought from morning to night side by side with youths of my own age and men who were older. For the most part, young and old, they were practised in almost every conceivable coarse and brutal way of casting their existence as rubbish to the void. But I think I can truthfully say that, while I tried to be loyal to the conditions of contact, and as a comrade in the ranks was not unpopular, yet they knew that neither within those grim walls nor without them was I of their world.

It is not easy, sometimes it is very hard, to take up this positive position amid one's daily surroundings. And it is not only hard to do the thing itself; it may be even harder to do it wisely. It is not pleasant to have your conscientious attitudes to things which to you are neither expedient nor permissible interpreted by the old words used as a sneer: "Stand aside, for I am holier than thou." Young people like to be what is called "popular" with those who touch their lives; and within well-defined limits they owe it to themselves and others to cultivate the qualities that invite popularity. If, however, the price of popularity is some form of compromise with things that harm and things that hate—then, if you are worth world-room, you will draw the line sharply and keep on one side of it. And that can be done without giving the impression that you are either a prig or a snob. When you go the right way about it, the attitude I advise is far harder in contemplation than it is in practice. The real difficulty in eight out of every ten of the critical places in life is not what is in them, but what we imagine is in them. Let it be felt that the things you hold to be wrong must expect from you neither compromise nor show of friendship; that you are the open and declared enemy of unclean speech, filthy jesting, secret sins, with their hints and implied fascinations, brainless pursuits, frivolous conversation, and low down levels of existence, and, with the exception of those whose enmity it is a distinction to have, people will come to realize that your position is neither that of the religious crank nor of self-righteous conceit—that it is the expression and outcome of your reverence for whatsoever things are pure and lovely and of good report.

Human society has no need more pressing than its need of young men and women with moral courage and religious conviction to take up the right attitude to wrong things. "Know ye not that whoever will be the friend of the world is the enemy of God?" When Saul was found in a certain company he had ceased to respect himself. This is why he was found there; and these two things were more than enough to sweep his life to its tragic close. How many of us have read this man's life-finish? Let me suggest to you something new to read. A story that has in it more elemental material than half the fiction that ever was written, or half the facts that mortgage the attention of a superficial world. Read that chapter where Saul, face to face with the last things in his darkened career, and hard upon the Nemesis of his own evil past, seeks out the woman with the familiar spirit, and in the words that he addresses to the apparition which he conjures up before his distorted vision you have the confession of a lost soul: "The Philistines make war against me, and the Lord answered me no more, neither by prophet nor by dream." "I have read nothing," says a well-known novelist, "quite like this man's experience in its utter abandon of lonely horror."

Think what you may about the setting of this story, you will be strangely lacking in moral insight if you miss the meaning that pulsates through the words that were wrung out of Saul in his extremity. They point to the lost, which once lost is lost for ever. Even God, I say again, cannot give us back the yesterdays. Once they are gone we can only say: "That which is written is written."

Many of you have practically the best of your chances before you, but every day takes some part of them out of your hands, and gives it to an irrecoverable past. Be jealous about your own self-respect, and do only the things that command it. Take care of your self-respect, and your success will take care of itself; as also will your companionships. "Seek ye the Lord while He may be found; call ye upon Him while He is near." Do not put off and forget, forget and put off until your clock strikes, and so far as the best of your opportunities are concerned, you have to say: "The Lord answereth me no more, neither by prophet nor by dream." Lay hold at once upon the help that comes through genuine decision for God. Place yourself in position where God can help you; and you will find that God in Christ denies you nothing except that which disappoints in the seeking and defeats in the finding. You will realize that He offers you life; strong, sane, happy life all the way, and at the end the more life and the fuller.