Make such a selection of your life-work as will enable you to regard it as the main expression of your spiritual life. Every man, no matter what the special form of his employment may be, can so relate himself to it and so strive to relate it and the results which flow from it, to the life of the community as to make his ordinary work the main utterance of his deeper nature. There will be the expression of his spirituality in worship, in directly religious activity, in other forms of effort, but the main expression should lie in that useful work which claims six-sevenths of his time and strength.
“Give us this day our daily bread,” the Master said in the model prayer. It ought to be the daily utterance of every serious man’s life. Utter it with your lips alone and your body will starve to death! Utter it with hands and brain alone, and your soul will famish! But utter it with your entire nature, hands, brain, heart, and soul, addressing themselves to God, to the resources God has placed at your call, and to the need of the community for the service you can render, and then your prayer will bring the bread which feeds the total nature up to its full strength! Industry, intelligence and moral purpose, cooperating with the divine bounty and with the needs of men, will work out the highest type of character and make one’s daily employment sacramental in its influence upon his own heart and upon the lives of others.
I have not spoken of the claims of the various vocations, but let me utter one last word, as strong as I can make it, for the Christian ministry. There are splendid rewards and honors to be won today at the bar, in medicine, in the work of education, in commerce, in manufacture, in engineering. Into all these callings strong and useful men are going in such numbers that there is no cry of need coming back. It is not so in the ministry. There is in every branch of the Church and in all the states of the Union, a loud and a sore cry for young men of sound health, good sense, trained intelligence, social sympathy, and genuine character, to enter the ministry and furnish the moral and spiritual leadership the country craves. Like the man of Macedonia the modern pulpit stands up and cries, “Come over into Macedonia, and help us.”
If I can read my Church history aright there never was a time when the opportunities and the rewards of the ministry were so great. A man will earn less money in the ministry than the same degree of ability would command in other fields of labor, though congregations, especially in cities, were never so generous with their pastors as now. What he carries away in his purse, however, is only one of many rewards the vocation brings. In the Church today there is liberty of thought; in some branch of it every man desiring to aid his fellows in doing justly, in loving mercy and in walking humbly with God, can find a hearty welcome and a place to work. There is a wide-spread hunger on the part of the people for a competent and helpful interpretation of this literature in the Bible. There is a call for men who can intelligently and effectively apply Christian principles to modern conditions and problems. There is an abiding demand for men who can bring the eternal verities of the Spirit before their congregations with power, and offer strength, cheer, courage, and comfort to those who come up weary and heavy-laden out of the work of the week.
And in return for this highest form of service any one can hope to render to his fellows, there is a mighty tide of appreciation and gratitude waiting to flow in upon the heart of the man who has been doing genuine, helpful service as a minister of Jesus Christ. The field is wide, the rewards are rich and perpetual, the opportunities are like wide-open and effectual doors, but the strong, wise, devoted laborers are all too few! You cannot anywhere on earth invest your life with more satisfaction to yourself, with a greater sense of serviceableness to your brother men, with a warmer sense of God’s own approving favor, than in the ministry of the modern Church.
In selecting your life-work, you wish to consider the whole man, to estimate possible success by the utility of the service rendered, to have a vocation to which all minor interests shall bow in glad obedience, and to make it the supreme expression of your spiritual life! Does any work on earth so meet these requirements as does the Christian ministry? In your individual case, if the call of God, the recognized needs of the world, and the sense of spiritual obligation should bear you into that vocation, you would forever thank him that among all the good things in life he had given you the best! You would gladly put away all the allurements which might defeat your spiritual effectiveness! You would say, to all beholders, by sincere and whole-hearted devotion to your calling, “I am doing a great work; I cannot come down.”
VI
MORAL VENTURES
The old saw, “Nothing venture, nothing have,” is true in mining; the miner who is unwilling to risk his money on a hole in the ground without knowing what may lie at the other end of it never grows rich. It is true in farming, for the man who is not willing to throw his seed wheat away on an uncertainty will never reap a harvest. It is true in business, for if no man had been willing to invest a dollar until he had something as sure as a government bond, we would not have reached first base yet in our commercial development. It is true in all the finer forms of outdoor sport. The plaintive cry goes up now and then from certain quarters against the idea of having any element of risk or danger in college athletics—such people had better stick to ping-pong or croquet, leaving the other games to those of us who still have a sprinkling of red corpuscles in our veins. Nothing venture, nothing have!
The same principle holds on the higher levels of moral life, for in all the more heroic forms of duty there is an element of risk. There are those who hold that right is nothing more than expediency and that wrong is simply a bad blunder. They can make quite a showing on paper. “Honesty is the best policy” in the long run, but it is a great deal more than that. Genuine honesty, financial, physical, intellectual, moral, the sort of honesty that adds two and two and gets four every time with never a fraction more nor less, is something more than good policy. It reaches down and takes hold of things fundamental in a way that mere policy never does, never can. And the fact stands that the saints and the seers, the heroes and the martyrs, the poets and the singers who have furnished inspiration and leadership, who have kindled the fire of moral passion in other breasts because it burned hot in their own, have been men to whom right was more than good policy. The moral leaders have been men who were ready to take risks in doing certain things because they believed those things to be right.
There is a certain short story which brings this point out in telling fashion. There was a king who lived “somewhere east of Suez, where there ain’t no Ten Commandments and the best is like the worst.” He was the fortunate possessor of a big stick and he wielded it with striking success. To celebrate one of his notable victories he caused to be made a huge, gold-plated image ninety feet high and eighteen feet broad. He set it up out on the campus and called upon the people of his realm to bow down and worship it. He coupled that invitation with the stimulating announcement that if any man refused he would be cast into a furnace of fire.