The Cap and Gown

by Charles Reynolds Brown

“I will now turn aside and see”—and what he saw his own subsequent career indicates! He had the power of vision and he saw not merely the shapes and colors present in that sheep pasture. He saw things absent, things historic, things possible as present and real. He saw away yonder on the banks of the Nile where he formerly lived, the life of his own fellows being crushed out of them by wrong industrial conditions. He saw the capacity of that race, burning but unconsumed even by those years of oppression, for moral idealism and spiritual leadership among the nations of the earth. He felt within his own breast a fitness for service wider, higher, and more significant than that of keeping sheep. He felt himself commissioned from on high for that responsible service, and he became dissatisfied with his own easy content there in the land of Midian. He saw the great divine heart filled with sympathy for an enslaved and oppressed people. He heard the divine voice say, “I have seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt; I have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters, and I am come down to deliver them.” He saw the divine hand reach out to employ mysterious agencies for the release of that people from the bondage of Egypt.

He had the power of vision and this is what he saw when he led his flock to the back side of the desert, even to Horeb, the mountain of God. The sheep saw nothing of that burning bush or of those other mysterious realities. The dull Midianites watching their flocks a few hundred yards away on the same slope saw nothing of it. A man standing in Moses’ own shoes, his face turned in the same direction, would have seen nothing unless he had brought to the situation the insight of this man of vision.

And Moses himself saw and heard what he did in that high hour because through long years he had cherished a profound sympathy for his brother men and a great abiding faith in God as one who works on behalf of suffering people everywhere. It was the whole mood and purpose of his life which stood declared in those splendid words, “I will now turn aside and see.” He was always saying just that! He was never content with the mere surface of reality. He was never satisfied with that which a hasty glance would bring in any given situation. He must get beneath the surface and know the deeper, hidden meaning.

How much depends upon that power of vision! What mighty issues are knit up with it in this familiar scene! If Moses that day had seen and heard nothing more than did the Midianites, he would have gone on keeping his sheep and would have died a comfortable and prosperous sheep grower. If the Israelites along the banks of the Nile had been without the power of such leadership as he alone among the men of his generation seemed to be able to furnish, they would have gone on making bricks without straw until all capacity for spiritual advance would have been crushed out of them. If that Hebrew race, first among Semitic peoples in its ability to see and to impart spiritual truth, had never had its chance to develop in the free air of the steppes or within the pleasant borders of that land of promise, how different apparently would have been the moral history of the race! It is idle to speculate on what would have been the result had something never happened which did happen, but just this glance shows the momentous consequences which may at any juncture attach to the ability of some man to see. It is of the utmost importance in every quarter that some man should be at hand who can see the great sight.

Your own life, the richness of it, the promise of it, the successful unfolding of it on higher levels, is bound up with this power of vision. If the world about you is only a sheep pasture, if success in life is to be measured solely or mainly in terms of wool and mutton, if the skilful avoidance of discomfort and the securing of easy content for yourself and your family are the main considerations with you, then by that limited outlook you are doomed. If here in these days of high privilege on the campus no bushes burn for you with a strange fire, if no hillsides in life become vocal with a divine voice, if no flames of sympathy, of moral passion, of aspiration burn within your breast, then alas for you! You are not entering into the meaning of life! You have eyes, but you see not, ears, but you hear not!

“Can ye not discern?” Jesus said to those who regarded themselves as the most exemplary people of his day. They could look up at the sky and from the fact that it was red or lowering make a fairly good guess about tomorrow’s weather, but they could not discern the signs of the times. There they were in the presence of the beginnings of the most important spiritual movement in history, yet all they saw was the tired face of the Man of Nazareth, whom they finally put to death because his claims confused them. Can ye not discern? Will you not take pains to cultivate the power of turning aside to see the great sights awaiting you all in the sheep pastures of earth, in all scenes of industry and in all places of trade, in all lines of civic effort and in all forms of charitable intent, in every schoolroom and in every home? Will you not turn and with heightened power of vision see there the hidden, unrealized possibilities?

“Where there is no vision, the people perish!” Something lives on—flesh and blood shapes which buy and sell, walk the street and talk small talk, but the people created potentially in the likeness and image of the Most High are gone. Where there is no vision, any life perishes. What keeps alive the mother-love in the face of all the hardships, sacrifices, buffetings it is called upon to meet? It is the power of vision cherished and cultivated more actively, perhaps, by women than by men. When her child is first laid in her arms it is only a bit of red flesh—that is all the canary in the window or the thoughtless observer who cares not for children would see. This bit of existence, so undeveloped as to have nothing one could call moral life, no power to choose or to aspire; so undeveloped as to have nothing one could call mental life, no power of recognition, discrimination, inference, has only the power to cry and to feed. But the mother sees in that tiny form another promise of a diviner day when the unsearched possibilities of that new life shall have been trained and nurtured by her love. And throughout the years when she nurses the child in sickness, bears with him in his ignorance, woos and wins him back from his moral waywardness, she is sustained by her maternal vision.

No one can live strongly, effectively, joyously in any other way. The dull, dry, prosaic man who never sees the deeper significance of any given situation may be able to saw wood or add up columns of figures, but when it comes to relating these ordinary details of life to some over-arching, underlying, far-reaching purpose which will bring out the meaning and the beauty of existence, he fails. He has no power of vision and his real life goes down in defeat.

It might be illustrated in this way—read Baedeker on Mont Blanc and then read Coleridge! Baedeker has the facts; he tells the height of the mountain, the exact distance from Chamounix to the summit in kilometers; he describes every glacier and crevasse. But Coleridge’s “Ode” to the mountain brings out the meaning and the beauty of it. Baedeker has facts, Coleridge has vision.

Read Baedeker on Edinburgh and then read Robert Louis Stevenson’s little book on the same city; read Baedeker on Northern Italy, including his description of the city without streets, and then read Ruskin’s “Stones of Venice.” Read Baedeker on Belgium, including his description of the field and of the Battle of Waterloo, and then read Victor Hugo’s chapter on the same event in “Les Misérables.” In one case you have the camera recording the outward, visible, prose facts; in the other you have insight and vision interpreting the meaning of them. It is written, man shall not live by Baedeker alone, but by every word which proceedeth out of the mind and heart of that higher power of vision shall man live.