The Cap and Gown

by Charles Reynolds Brown

Go through any modern city with your eyes open and you will find this statement about Sisera written out in a plain hand. You will find people, some of them well-dressed, some in rags, with their hearts draped in wretchedness and despair. Poor deluded mortals, they have been butting their brains out against the moral corner-stones of the universe in the vain hope that possibly the way of the transgressor might not be hard for them. Some by intemperance and some by licentiousness, some by sly dishonesty and some by cold-hearted selfishness—the roads to ruin are various, and men travel them all! Here they come at last, bruised, battered, and broken! They have been fighting the stars with the usual result. If here and there one keeps his head up and his face like polished brass, thinking he may escape the same ugly fate, you have only to wait for a time to see him with his face broken and his heart crushed like the rest.

Here are two young men at college, one of them living a true life, maintaining good habits, keeping himself hard at work, cultivating the right sort of friends! The other young fellow keeps his lungs drenched with cigarette smoke, his brain drugged with alcohol; he seeks out the shady places in the life of the city and cultivates the refuse; he loafs when he ought to be at work. You can tell at a glance which one will be sitting in the directors’ meeting or in some similar place of responsibility twenty years from now, and which one will be out somewhere on a high stool or tramping the streets periodically in search of a job, wondering why his luck has been against him. There is no luck about it. He enlisted in the great army of fools who, under the leadership of Sisera, are undertaking to fight the stars. Certain habits, certain courses of action, certain aspirations bring honor, joy, advancement; certain other courses of action bring just the reverse. It is all as sure as the movement of the planets; it comes according to law equally unyielding.

The ultimate well-being of any life is secured through cooperation with those forces symbolized by the stars. I was on the Mediterranean once on my way from Italy to Egypt when off the coast of Crete our ship ran into a terrible storm. We were beaten and tossed, for the wind was contrary. An accident made it necessary to lay to for several hours while the waves dashed over the highest decks. In the absence of either sun or stars, exact reckoning was lost, but toward midnight of the second day the storm broke and presently the stars shone out, here and there, in the irregular patches of the sky. Then the first officer appeared on deck with his instruments and soon he knew exactly where we were on the face of the troubled waters. All uncertainty was over; we were sailing by the stars and the next day we were casting anchor off the coast of Egypt. The motion of the ship and the tossing of the waves were uncertain, but the movement of the stars was sure.

Our safety in the whole cruise of life depends upon the adjustment of our movements to those universal forces which enfold us. My watch, carried though it is in my individual pocket, keeps step with the stars so that I could show you where each hand will be tomorrow morning when the sun comes up over the horizon. And our purposes, our affections, and our wills are to be similarly adjusted so that they shall keep step with God’s infinite will and purpose for us. Those universal forces of love and grace, of forgiveness and redemption, of guidance and comfort, to which in all ages men have learned to look, they are all ours if we will only use them. And when we learn to use them aright they bring peace, and strength, and joy.

There was the sense of an adequate horizon, then, in the words of this ancient poet as he stood that night on the field of battle looking up at the stars. The wind and the rain, the hail and the sleet had all aided the Israelites in winning the victory. The very skies seemed to be interested in that moral struggle there on the plain of Esdraelon. And he was correct—the stars helped; they always help; they fight perpetually in their own appointed way on the side of right.

You may trust the forces which they symbolize! You may work out your own highest well-being in joyous confidence, for God is working within you toward the same great end! You need have no doubt about it, for the evidence is plain. Heroes and martyrs lay down their lives for a principle. The mother cares for the sick child, counting not her pleasure, her comfort, or even her own life dear if she may save the child. The poor dog attached to his master goes to the spot where he saw them lay the body and whines for the sound of a voice that is still. Has the Creator of such moral integrity in the heroes and martyrs kept none of it for himself? Has he out of the ages gone produced such devotion in the heart of the mother with no devotion in his own heart toward his helpless child? Has he instilled such faithful affection in the very dogs that perish, but failed to share in that love himself? Serious men cannot bring themselves to believe in anything so absurd. These forces which produce attachment to the right, devotion to the helpless, faithful affection, are universal forces.

“O heart I made, a heart beats here”—that was the word of God through the lips of the poet! These forces of love and grace are universal and enduring as the stars. To fight them spells defeat. To coöperate with them, bringing the scattered and aimless activities of the life into harmony with the supreme purpose of God declared in Jesus Christ, means life abundant and eternal.

XI
THE POWER OF VISION

In an old school reader there was a sketch, “Eyes or no eyes.” Two young men went for a walk in the same field. One of them saw just the commonplace shapes and forms; he saw nothing that a dog or a kodak would not have seen. He had eyes to see, but he saw not. The other one saw the bumblebees appearing later in the season than do the honey-bees, and thought of the relation this fact sustains to the production of red clover seed—a relation which every farmer understands when he cuts the second crop in place of the first to get seed. He saw at one side of the field a great granite boulder deposited there in the glacial period, and although the day was hot his mind was cool as it dwelt upon that age of ice. He saw the imprint of the shell of some water-breathing creature deep bedded as a fossil in a piece of stone. His imagination went back to the time when that very field was part of an inland sea, and this bit of life was making its impress upon the soft mud of some ancient seashore. He saw a score of interesting things which need not be named here; they were all there to be seen, but his friend had overlooked them. It was a question of “eyes or no eyes.” What any man sees in a field, or in his fellow beings, in his college course, or in life as a whole, depends upon the power of vision that he carries with him.

Here in a well-known story was a man keeping sheep on the slopes of Horeb. In reading the narrative it seems that the imagination of the poet has blended with the plain prose facts of history. We do not know what kind of fire it was which burned in that mysterious and vocal bush. We may believe it was the same kind of fire which burns in the grate or we may conclude that it was an extraordinary bit of autumnal splendor which at a certain season of the year is aflame on many hillsides as if the glory and color of a thousand sunsets might have lodged in the tree tops. However that may be, what Moses actually saw and heard that day is far more important than any conceivable amount of literal fire or of autumn color.