The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character

by Robert E. Speer

And it was because our Lord knew this that He set over against men’s wills the strait door of the kingdom of life. He did not betray the trust that had been given to Him. He did not say, “Come, I will make life easy for you.” He did not say, “Come, let us indulge ourselves to heart’s content.” He said, “If any man will come after me, let him leave all that behind, let him deny himself, and let him take up his cross daily, and let him come after me.”

Now, I know what many of us will be saying of all this. We will be saying, “God did not bring us into the world with any cross. All our life long has been a sheltered life. None of this hardness of which you speak has ever come to us. Maybe our fathers and mothers knew it before us, but they have shielded us from its pressure. Are we to go back to crudeness and asceticism for the good of our souls? Are we who have no cross deliberately to take our smooth lives and roughen them?” Yes, that is precisely what I am saying. Those of us who were not born with a cross must find one, those whose lives have been smooth are deliberately to find ways of roughening them, so that we may know a life of power and fellowship with the suffering God, and can go out to real work, and be prepared for that greater life and greater service which await us elsewhere than here.

We shall not have any great difficulty in obeying this call of Christ to roughen our lives. There are many crosses in the world too heavy for the men and women who are trying to carry them. We can go out and find one of these crosses and help to bear it. They are not far away. Here is a clipping from the New York Sun:

“A comely young Hungarian woman with a three-months-old baby in her arms dropped to the sidewalk at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street late yesterday afternoon and lay half conscious. An ambulance surgeon who came said the woman was starving and that her baby had bronchitis.

“The woman recovered enough to tell the surgeon that she was Mrs. Mary Scheinn, twenty years old, and that her husband had died recently. She had been living with a friend at 97 Seigel Street, Brooklyn, she said, but this woman also was very poor and expected to be evicted to-day, so Mrs. Scheinn had walked to New York to try to get her sick child into a hospital. She tramped from hospital to hospital, and everywhere they refused to take the child, she said. But she kept up the quest until she gave out. She had had nothing to eat since yesterday and little then.

“The ambulance took the woman and child to Bellevue Hospital. Both are in a rather serious condition.”

Being young and comely, doubtless, if she had not had the baby, some pimp or other American citizen, for a consideration within her power, might have helped her, but being innocent and carrying a baby there she stood until she fell down, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, in the heart of the city, a woman carrying a baby and a cross that were too heavy for her. There were millions of Christian people round about her. Thousands of us never knew what a cross was and we let the woman with her child in her arms fall down under the weight of hers. This world is black with the shadows of crosses. If we have none of our own, in the name of the great Cross, let us borrow one.

Here is a note from a girl. She is one of thousands and the note is real. I had been speaking in one of the New York churches and the next day came a letter from her asking me, if I really believed what I had said, to answer some questions for her. I wrote in reply and this was part of her answer: “The great trouble with me is that I have to fight continually against despondency. Life to me is a series of sorrows and troubles, that accumulate and grow larger, and just when I am at the point of giving up altogether some little word or act deters me.... I know I would be happy if I were, as you say, truly trustful towards God, but God to me seems very far off and rather mythical. Your letter, also the fact that you wrote, was a help to me. The part that perhaps appealed to me most was the idea that God and God’s love are longing for us. It is very fine to feel that when one is always lonesome.” I learned more of her story but it is not for telling here. It was a cross too heavy for her which she was trying to bear. Women who knew her lifted its weight for her, taking it over upon themselves.

And not only by taking up crosses, of which the world is full, can we roughen our lives. Many of us can do it by simply cutting off some of our waste and extravagance. There are many of us who never ask before we spend money, “How can I get the greatest return from this money?” We waste it like water, while Belgium, Serbia, Poland and Armenia call. It is said that there are thirty million people in India who have only one meal a day, and who never know what it is to have enough to eat. Some of them say that if they could have enough to eat for just two days, they would be willing to lie down and die content. Again and again, hundreds of thousands of people in China have been the victims of famine, while we were throwing wealth away. We can roughen life a bit by denying ourselves, by abridging expenditure and devoting the money to human need and to some of the services the world is dying for.