On this point the Old Testament contains many positive assurances and many actual examples, and it may in general be said that for the presentation of the Laws of God the New Testament alone would not suffice; nor is that its purpose, for it always implies a knowledge of the Old Testament.
“The man who keepeth my laws shall thereby live,” is the sum of these promises. For these laws are the principle of life itself, and to ignore them is to come within the jurisdiction of death. That may be put to the test, and ought to be put to the test, if it is done with a sincere desire to know what to believe, and if it is not continually repeated after one has once gained a sufficiently clear knowledge. But for those who will not do even that there is nothing left save to make for themselves other gods “to go before them.”
These gods are, as a rule, human beings or the products of their mind in some form,—once again to-day, as in the period of the so-called Renaissance, preëminently in the form of art. Great crudeness of morals and the absence indeed of all ethical conceptions may go hand in hand with the finest and highest culture in this special direction, thus showing that art can not be the highest goal men can strive for and attain. We ought not to have had to experience this for the second time, though it is often to be feared that we are now doing so.
We should never make idols for ourselves of even the dearest and best men, not to speak of those who are highly gifted or hold a high place in the world’s esteem. Not only the New Testament, but even the Old, lays down in a very practical way the proper and easily recognized limit; for they prescribe that we are to love God “above all,” and men “as ourselves,” no more and no less. Even the simplest person can easily compute this; and if in certain exuberant, “heavenly” moments of life it seems too little, yet, taking one’s whole life into account, it is really more than any of us perform, and at any rate is much more salutary for our neighbor.
The opposite quality to “reliance upon men” is (what at first seems unlikely) sympathetic compassion; when reliance departs, compassion enters to heal. This is something quite different from what is ordinarily called “love to men,” and is much more. It is something, too, that does not naturally lie within us; we have to learn it, usually late in life and through troublous paths. But when a man has it, then it is henceforth sure that he is “fit for the Kingdom of God.”
If it is not men and their works, then it is possessions, ambition, or the continuous search for enjoyment that stands most in the way of that sincere union of the human soul with the divine spirit which necessarily forms the foundation of all Christianity;—above all, it is the “deceitfulness of riches,” as the Gospel well calls it, the very common delusion that possession and happiness are identical, a delusion from which the man first awakes when he holds in his hands that for which he was striving and for which he had often sacrificed body and soul; and now for the first he discovers that, looked at closely, it was not, even on the best interpretation, worth all this exertion.
In the Gospel are found these words of Jesus: Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth; ye can not serve God and Mammon; whosoever he be of you that renounces not all that he hath, he can not be my disciple. If I were an adherent of the atheistic Socialism of our day, I would constantly hold up these sayings of their Lord and Master before the sincere followers of Christianity, who are by far the most dangerous opponents of Socialism; for if they should obey these sayings, without any further effort the solution of the social question would follow. But there are many passages of the Bible which are almost divested of their value because of a kind of disqualifying law of customary usage; or they are at least not spoken of in religious circles, because they have little that is “edifying” for many of those present.
If we must admit that such passages designate the goal or ideal toward which we should strive, rather than that to which every one can at once attain, we should, nevertheless, keep our eyes continually upon it and have the earnest will to make our way thither; else all the other messages of the Gospel profit us nothing and are for us as if they were not there.
To speak practically, then, one must never fix his heart upon possessions, nor regard them as the most important thing to be lived and striven for, nor make them the measure of his valuation of men and circumstances, nor be unready or disinclined to diminish them at any time for the sake of God or the common good, and if necessary even to give them up altogether. They who can do this when it is required of them are the only men who are free and worthy of God’s kingdom. At different times in life they will often be put to this test, and if this has never yet happened, it is no good sign for their inner life or for their standing in God’s grace. Often it goes no farther than the testing of their will, and when the will has surrendered, God does not require of them the actual deed, or he lets the trial so shape itself that in the end it is the more easily endurable. Sometimes, however, as with Job, it comes to a real loss of all one’s goods; and not always is there finally a double compensation therefor, but there always is a complete consolation for what one has done, provided one will seek for it and not merely helplessly and weakly bewail. In order always to have the mastery of oneself and to put this to the proof, it may often be a good thing, even before one resolves upon Christianity, to make the test of Polycrates, who cast a much-treasured ring into the sea. Try it once, this surrender of your dearest possession; though, to be sure, the test will in most cases come to you unbidden, if it is your lot to become a free man by God’s grace instead of a slave to Mammon. But no matter how it comes to you, if you have shown yourself able to make this surrender, you will be set free from the strongest fetter with which the spirit of the world keeps man bound; the rest of your possessions will henceforth become more a matter of indifference to you. Of course, in this question of possessions, the concern is rather with the spirit and the will than with the mere deed. One can also “possess as though he possessed not” (though the possibility of deception here is very great), and if one no longer spends anything for mere enjoyment or luxury, but applies everything to useful ends, not counting among such ends the mere senseless heaping up of possessions for heirs and successors down to the remotest ages, then one may believe his actions respond to the real meaning of the words of Christ. We at least will not cast the first stone at those who so comport themselves.
One good help in this, besides the firm resolve to forego all luxury, is, as already explained in a former chapter, systematic giving; another is, to reckon and calculate as little as possible, and to busy oneself as little with money as is compatible with a necessary order in one’s business and private affairs. For money has an evil charm about it like that of philosophical heresy; neither will easily let a man go again when once he has become much involved in them.