The presence in our life of a difficulty is a call to responsibility, and the acceptance of a responsibility is the admittance into personal experience of God in His triumphant march toward the great consummation; it is correspondence with victory. Just as the glory of duty consists, not in its immediate issue, but in its performance, so the main inspiration for responsibility comes not from external goads and spurs, but from the very thing which lies at our feet, looking at first sight like a task given to mock rather than inspire, to denude of what little power we have rather than to equip, to undo the would-be doer rather than to be done by him. Responsibility without doubt is a task, but much more is it an inspiration. Of course the measure of inspiration which it imparts is proportionate to the faith and courage with which it is approached. Responsibility handled with dilettante fingers will only cut and wound; grasped in firm embrace, it will bestow so much illumination and vigour that the pain which inaugurates the gift will be forgotten almost before the last ache has faded out. And again, it is not too much to say that the greater a responsibility is, the greater is its power to inspire. In other words, inspiration is always commensurate with responsibility. "As thy days, so shall thy strength be." In the common Christian duty, which has been outlined in the foregoing pages, so great is the responsibility imposed that nothing short of the highest conceivable incentive can carry a man through. And the inspiration lies within the task and will declare itself only in the doing of the task.
Even on the natural side man finds attraction and inspiration in problems, puzzles and difficulties.[39] No sooner is one problem solved or one difficulty surmounted than another is eagerly sought for and grappled with. The spice of life lies in its antagonisms.[40] It is not the prospect of some reward of wealth or honour that carries men to the crown of their task; it is the joy of the doing, a joy that is felt even in those preliminary experimentations which only pave the way to the real undertaking. Men—we are not thinking of butterflies—cannot exist without difficulty. To be shorn of it means death, because inspiration is bound up with it, and inspiration is the breath of God, without the constant influx of which man ceases to be a living soul. Responsibility is the sacrament of inspiration. The miracles of Christ, whatever else they did, suggested new responsibility to the race, opened up a new field of daring and enlarged the scope of human operations. They encouraged men to attempt the impossible; and without question the hidden but no less effective cause of all scientific development has been and is Christian aspiration, roused to its highest pitch by the marvels performed by the Man Christ Jesus. Christian faith has educated us to a belief that the first promise of order lies in the discovery of chaos, and that every problem carries in its own pocket a key formed to fit the hand of man. Thus interest in the sorrows and perplexities of the multitudes rises from a nerveless compassion that of yore worked laboriously with its "law-stiffened fingers," to a wide-reaching ministration of power; the secrets of nature become invitations to knowledge; and effort that was once merely instinctive and random becomes rational and triumphant.
But Christ enabled men to achieve what before they had only sighed after, not by releasing from, but on the contrary by adding to human responsibility. He saw the inspiration of responsibility, so by making the latter great He made the former reach its height; He equipped man to do the smaller duties of life by giving larger ones. It will for ever hold true that to bring men up to their best, we must call them to the highest. They are to be won, not by the promise of a gift, but by a ringing call to duty, not by something to eat, but by something to do. One reason at least why Christianity is bound to supersede all other religions is because of the supreme largeness of its demands on human character and the supreme inspiration that those demands contain. The fault of most modern prophets is not that they present too high an ideal, but an ideal that is sketched with a faltering hand; the appeal to self-sacrifice is too timid and imprecise, the challenge to courage is too low-voiced, with the result that the tide of inspiration ebbs low. The call to each soul to contribute its quota toward the realization of the most remote ideal so far from being depressing is stimulating, and a necessary goad to the promotion of individual as well as corporate development. Mr. Kipling's prophetic voice rings out above the Babel of a garrulous age and inspires men in the only way they can be inspired, by pointing out human responsibility and bidding men take up their burden.
Go to your work and be strong, halting not in your ways,
Baulking the end half-won for an instant dole of praise.
Stand to your work and be wise—certain of sword and pen,
Who are neither children nor gods, but men in a world of men!
Clothed with the conviction that true inspiration lies in responsibility, what better words of inspiration can this closing chapter bear than what will come from a final insistence upon the vastness of the ordinary man's spiritual responsibility and the grandeur of his opportunity? In these days a true man rises instinctively to a broad outlook. He does not labour for his own self-fulfillment and nothing more. Of course, every act of self-sacrifice for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake helps toward that end, for self-sacrifice for the promotion of whatever cause is always the negative aspect of self-fulfillment. But Christians strive toward the best not from selfish motives, not merely because what God commands must be done, but because He has opened up to our gaze a vision of His world-purposes and shown us that obedience means coöperation with Him in their fulfillment. Thus small actions become big with import. Personal purity means a contribution toward the solution of the divorce question which exceeds in its constructive influence the most wisely worded canon of marriage. The commercial honour of the individual is the forging of a ward in the key that will some day unlock the closed door of the industrial problem. Faithfulness in spiritual duties in the most circumscribed life is a voice that reaches the uttermost part of the earth and gives its undying witness to all who have ears to hear. Loyalty and charity working hand in hand in the Christian soul will do as much as the most carefully framed and comprehensive formula of agreement, to bring about that Christian unity for which our Lord prayed[41] when His time was short and His thoughts only upon that which was the objective point of the Incarnation.
Whether or not men recognize the extent of their influence, that influence tells. But what a source of inspiration and strength is lost when these things are hidden and one sees only the natural side of life, the prison-house of environment and the task without its incentive! The Architect of life would have His least workman know the full plan and not merely that of the small bit of it which is his special care. Once to discern our personal relation to God's world-purposes is to be for ever purged of dilettantism; is to be for ever emancipated from a certain religious littleness that shackles so many Christian feet, and to move out into a breadth which involves no loss of depth; is to shake non-essentials into the background, and bring fundamental truths to the fore, where they can burn themselves into our very being; is to receive a new motive for living and doing.
Fired by a sense of large responsibility, sustained spiritual effort on a high plane becomes possible for each in his own little corner. The demand upon men to pray well, to seek to make the moral life blameless, and to deepen and enlarge the sphere of service,—in a word, to aspire to the stars and reach out to the four corners of the world, suggests privilege rather than hardship to the rank and file of the Christian army. The layman may not look to the priest as a vicarious man of prayer and of righteousness. The priesthood is representative, not exclusive, in character and service. The priest is a man of prayer not because he is a priest, but because he is a Christian, his priesthood but determining the accidental features of his devotional life. He is a holy man not because he is a priest, but because he is a Christian, his priesthood but determining the sphere in which his holiness is to be expressed. The priest does spiritual work not because he is a priest, but because he is a Christian, his priesthood but making him a leader in service, primus inter pares. Faithfulness in prayer, righteousness in life, full spiritual service, are the responsibility as much of the layman as of the priest. Failure in any one of these departments of life is as culpable in the layman as in the priest. It is notable that of all the vows in the Ordinal, whether in the ordering of priest or deacon, or in the consecration of a bishop, the majority are but the expansion of common Christian duty and could be as well taken by layman as by cleric. The functional peculiarities are as few as the representative duties are many. The priestly life is mainly, though not solely, the intensification of fundamental relations with God and man, as the Ordinal testifies, and the ideal priesthood, so far as it touches devotion, morals and common service, is but the perpetual and living reminder to the laity of what they should be and do. There are many ready to decry sacerdotalism; but few of these have sufficient logic to recognize that the more completely the ministry is denuded of all but its representative character, the more fully is the layman weighted with spiritual responsibility.[42]
And spiritual work is as wide as human activity. The tendency to make religion a department of life instead of the Christian synonym for the whole of life, has given rise to such a redundancy as "applied Christianity." The life of common activities, social and industrial, is as truly the sphere of religion as the sanctuary. The natural is not the antithesis but the foundation of the spiritual. First that which is natural and afterward that which is spiritual—by transformation, not by substitution. The Resurrection of Christ is a parable as well as a fact. And it is for the layman, whether he be the thinker in his study or the labourer in his ditch, to exercise his priesthood in the sphere of his occupation, lifting to God for His transforming touch each transaction in which he is engaged, recognizing that all life is divine, and all business God's business. It is for the layman to enter into the bent of his age and train it to God, not holding aloof from popular movements and ambitions, but laying hold of them and labouring for their conversion and sanctification. Thus will the natural become the spiritual. The witness that the world of to-day is most in need of is that which will testify that if God is the God of the supernatural and extraordinary, just as really is He the God of the natural and ordinary, revealing Himself through and using common things as the general rule, turning to what is uncommon as the exception. Who can bear this witness so well as the layman in the home and in the market? Certain it is that until this is done and theology has become much more than now part of the web and woof of common life among common men, theological assent or ecclesiastical unity will accomplish but little toward unifying life in Christ in any worthy sense.
This, then, is the ordinary duty of a Christian layman. It is not something optional, to be assumed or not as we prefer. It is what we must accept as our responsibility, if we accept Christ and look for acceptance in Him. The Church of to-day is coming to recognize this more and more, and is settling down to the work before her with wisdom and zeal. Even beneath the reaction against "organized Christianity," which has appeared of late, and partially explanatory of it, is moral earnestness, an earnestness that deprecates that conventional religion which, narrow in both its vision and methods, fails to touch life with a hand of power. Men of action wish a Christianity which is weighted with responsibilities. Here and there one finds a nerveless Amiel who can speak fine phrases, but who shrinks from responsibility. And here and there, too, is a doctrinaire philosopher or an idle onlooker who croaks of degeneration and declares that life lacks inspiration. But all the while the workers, with eyes gleaming with hope, plunge into the most hopeless problems, and reap their inspiration from their toil.