But what, in the next place, is our part in this matter? How is this power to come? How, to use a better term, are we to realize it? Have we to wait for something, or have we to do something to make it a real experience?
A youth, let us say, or a girl, is beginning to learn music, to play the violin or the piano. At first it is drudgery, and its immediate results are a trial unto all that are in the house. The parent or teacher says: "Persevere, obey instructions, and as you pass through routine into the soul, the task will soon be lost in the pleasure." The beginner may not believe it; but granted the facility is there, and determination to bend to the task of learning, and the reward comes. That which is within is brought out, and by the only way it can be brought out: "Stir up the gift that is in thee."
This hints to us the answer to the question, Have we to do something that salvation may become a known and felt reality? We have to do something. We have to do, as we are told by Him who only can tell us what it is we have to do: "Will to do the will," says the Christ, "and ye shall know." And if we are really seeking a basis of assurance in His saving power, we ought surely to take Him at His word, when He tells us how to find it. It is not first through assured belief that we become sure of Christ, it is by doing Christ's will that we become sure of our belief. Have we to explain to a child the mechanism of its limbs before it can attempt to walk? The impulse comes, and the child walks, that is all. But the child has to walk to know that it can walk.
But what, you ask me, are we to say about sudden conversions, of which we once heard so much, and which we are still taught to seek and expect? What, I ask you, about those sudden flashes of insight which at times seem to reveal in a moment a way out of difficulties which for years we have sought in vain? A man told me lately about a period in his life when through drink and betting he was reduced from a prosperous man to a wreck in body and means. "I was down," he said, "low as a human creature could get in this world." He was converted to God, and from the very hour his change came, he declared that his craving for drink, and mania for gambling, dropped out of his being, as a piece of dead matter falls away from a living organism. And there are such cases, thank God, but we must not make our teaching about them misleading by making it despotic. As in the instances of sudden insight, we do not because we dare not say they are general, deny that they occur. The soul-development on its immortal side is, for the most part, gradual and slow. The life-faculty is there, but it often means hard work, patient waiting, and great faith, to realize its presence and bring out its power.
[2] It has been said that modern psychology confirms scientifically this method of seeking and finding the truth. It teaches that action has often to precede thought and feeling. If this is the word of psychology, it is really in accord with the method of Jesus. Practically all His teaching is addressed, not so much to the intellect or to the emotions, but to the will. He does not put doing and believing in opposition; in actual life they are really indistinguishable parts of a healthy spiritual growth. But our Lord does put doing before knowing, as He puts religion before theology, and life before the understanding of life. His unmistakable object is to constrain men to take action, rather than to wait for emotion, or even for intellectual confidence and conviction.
As a matter of experience, we find at every turn on the road of life we have to do things we do not want to do, to secure the things we want to have. Necessity does not humour us, and that is the reason the world owes so much to necessity. We may be very "superior" about dogmatism in theology, but well for us that dogmatism will have no such nonsense in life. It is just doing the duty that tasks us most, whatever our feeling about it, which makes the difference between the worthy and the unworthy in character; between the numerals and the ciphers in the human world. It is doing, not what we would, but as we ought which changes reluctance into interest, and the sense of futility into the joy of achievement. It is doing what we know to be true which illumines its ever-lasting significance. "You could write stories which people would read," said Lecky repeatedly to George Eliot. She did not believe him, and, strange as it may seem, she had almost a morbid shrinking from making the attempt. But she did make it, and we know with what results. The attempt to write a story had not only to precede the belief that she could write one, it had to reveal the gift.
And so Jesus, who came to manifest God, says to you and me: My brother, My sister, there is that in you which, brought out and cultivated, can achieve in you the highest order and quality of life in this world, and fit you for whatever environment lies beyond. Believe me. Just take me at my word when I say to you, will to do my will, and doing it you shall come to love it—and that is to be saved; for it is to be at one with the Father in me. Leave your past, however unworthy it may be. What I have done and suffered for you has atoned for all. Do your part, and you, too, shall testify: "I live, and yet not I, but Christ that liveth in Me."
This, then, is my position; and whether or not it answer to fact and to Scripture, I leave with your judgment. I ought to have accomplished something if I have made myself understood. It probably overlooks much that many of you hold to be integral to the nature and meaning of salvation. I have only to repeat, that what has been advanced is a setting of this great subject; and I venture to urge it upon your consideration. It now remains for me to notice very briefly one or two further questions as I draw to a close.
What, I may be asked, are we expected, as young people, to understand about the doctrines and dogmas of Christianity as necessary to an intelligent religious faith? And what about feeling or emotion, which is usually represented as a vital part of the driving power of Christian life and conduct? Well, speaking for myself, I make no pretension to the lofty disregard of doctrine which in so many quarters seems to be regarded as the hall-mark of enlightened thinking. We do well to beware of a so-called "breadth," which is but a pet euphemism for thinness.
But after all, we can hold a thing for true, and yet find no explanation of it which quite satisfies us. Theories about the heavens have come and gone, but the stars remain. Christ was, before creeds gathered about Him; and it is because He is, that men must formulate doctrine to explain Him. I have long had the conviction that in religion nothing really matters but the Spirit of Christ. This is not to say that if we have, or claim to have, the Spirit of Christ, it makes no difference whether we do, or do not, believe in the "historical Christ." To my thinking such a position is nonsense. We may as well talk about an effect without a cause. Spirit must needs clothe itself with body. The "external may come in at different points of the process, but the internal without the external cannot exist." I am simply saying, that everything we need to know in a general sense about Christian doctrine becomes intelligible and reasonable, not when we approach Christ through our doubts and difficulties about doctrines, but our doubts and difficulties through Christ. In Him is life, and the life is the light of men. I care not for the moment what dogmas about Christ you accept or reject; I ask you to think, and then say, what heaven worth entering, of state or place, could close against us, were we in the Spirit of Christ walking in the footsteps of Christ?