In that sterner war where there is no discharge, in that age-long, world-wide fight against the evils of earth this same sound principle holds. Money is needed; counsel is needed; organization and administrative ability are needed. The bringing in of that kingdom which is not meat and drink, nor shot and shell, but righteousness and peace and joy in the divine spirit, requires all these fine forms of effort. But nothing can ever take the place of that personal consecration of each man's own soul to the service of the living God.
In that high hour when Isaiah saw the God of things as they are, high and lifted up, sitting on His throne, he did not say, "Here are any number of fine people, send them. Here is a man who could perform the task better than I—send him." He said what every man must say who means to stand right in the Day of Judgment, "Here am I, send me."
He was the son of good fortune, and his life was bright and rich with many an advantage. But this did not prompt him to claim any sort of exemption from the call for volunteers. His vision of the awful difference between the earthly majesty of that king who sank so swiftly into a leper's grave and the heavenly majesty which rose above it sovereign and eternal, made him feel that nothing would suffice but the gift of himself.
What shall it profit a man, this man, that man, any man, to gain the largest measure of earthly success you may choose to name, if in the process he loses himself, his real self, his best self, his enduring self? What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, but feels within himself a capacity for higher things unrealized? In the great outcome nothing really matters save the devotion of the personal life to the highest ends.
In the year 1840 near the city of Louvain a child was born, who came of good stuff. He was educated for a business career, and there in prosperous little Belgium the outlook at that time for wealth, for social position, and for a life of joy was very bright. But at the age of eighteen this boy offered himself for the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church. He joined the Society of the Sacred Heart. He went out to the Hawaiian Islands as a missionary and was ordained as a priest in the city of Honolulu.
He was at once impressed with the sad condition of the leper settlement on the island of Molokai. He resolved to give his life to those poor, diseased, horror-stricken people. He knew that to live among them would mean banishment from his ordinary associations and the loss of all possible preferment in the church. He knew that he might himself contract that terrible disease and suffer a lingering, painful, frightful death. "No matter," he cried, "I am going." And he went.
He not only preached to those lepers the Gospel of the Son of God and ministered to them in spiritual things—his own labours and his appeals to the Hawaiian government secured for them better dwellings, an improved water supply, and a more generous provisioning of the unhappy settlement. For five years he worked alone, but for the occasional assistance of a priest who came to the colony for a single day. He finally succumbed to the dread disease of leprosy and in his forty-ninth year died a martyr to humane devotion. His name was Father Damien, and he shed fresh luster upon the Christian ministry.
The young man who was born to the purple, called now to be a prophet of God, seized upon the vital elements of religion and uttered them with power. "What does it mean to be religious?" men were asking. Some of the dull, blind priests of that day were saying, "It means sacrifice and burnt offering. It means the careful and showy observance of the forms of worship." Israel did not know; the people did not think.
Then this young prophet gave them the word of God with an edge on it. He showed them the folly of all those outward signs of devotion apart from the inward spirit of righteousness. "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices? Who hath required this at your hands? When you spread forth your hands I will hide my eyes. When you make many prayers I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean. Put away the evil of your doings. Cease to do evil, learn to do well. Then though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow."
"Salvation by righteousness—this is the message of the Old Testament," Matthew Arnold used to say. "Righteousness through Jesus Christ," this is the message of the New Testament! And this nineteenth century man of letters was but echoing the words which fell from the lips of those prophets in the eighth century before Christ.