The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character

by Robert E. Speer

Looking back across the years it could be seen that bread sown upon the waters returned again. Absolutely no energy goes to waste in this world,—no moral energy, no spiritual energy, any more than physical energy. All that is released goes about its work. Let us thank God, that there that Saturday morning in the dark of the grave all that broke free the next day was, and was not dead beyond the resurrection of life.

And the assurance that a man simply cannot do anything in vain is not only a word of great courage to us in the work that we are trying to do in the world, it is a word of hope and courage to us also in our own personal life and struggle for character. All the energy we need to accomplish anything that ought to be accomplished in us is in our reach. “All power,” said Christ, “is given to me in heaven and in earth. I stand within at the centre of your life. Draw on me. Go out in the faith of that and do whatever your work is in the world. I have the energy that you need.” All the energy that we require for any task in life or out of life is there, by token and assurance of the closed grave and resurrection, in Christ, waiting to be drawn upon by any man who wants to make use of it.

And all this is not the exaltation of human will, the setting up of a man’s own resolution and high purpose. It is precisely the opposite of that. It is saying to a man: “There do not lie in the boastful surface of your life the power and the resources that you need. Retire upon God. You must get behind into the unplumbed depths where Christ waits. You must go back of the Easter morning in the grave, the unopened womb of the grave, to find it there. All of it is there in the now Risen Christ Who that Saturday morning awaited resurrection.” This is simply making faith a living, acting reality by which a man works; so that he arises in the morning and can say: “O God, I have in Thee in me all the energy and strength that I shall need this day. No temptation can come to me to-day that I have not got the power in Thee, that I never have used yet, to draw upon, that will enable me to meet and conquer. No work will come to me to-day that is too much for me, no matter how exacting or unprecedented in my experience. There is power in Thee for me for this work that is come to me to do.”

That Saturday morning, more vividly than any other day that brings back the triumph and pain and glory of Easter to us, makes a man assured that all the energies he needs are near by, that in God’s own presence there are all the powers he wants, awaiting release by God’s grace for all the necessities of his life. And if we could not believe this about the world we are living in to-day, surely a man could not go on living in it. If we had to surrender to the present order and temper of the world what would be left to uphold us? It is because we know it is Saturday night in human history that we can live through it.

We know that as in individuals so in all the races of mankind, God has planted these great dormant energies and powers. For scores and scores of years the Chinese had despaired of their power to throw off the opium curse. They knew it was sapping the very vitality of their land, and yet they wondered whether the day would ever come when they would have power enough to break those hateful chains that had been forged upon them, and get back their freedom. Twenty years ago, as we went to and fro in China, the most striking odour in the Chinese streets was the pungent stench of smoking opium. One could scarcely go into a Chinese city or walk in a Chinese highway without seeing the wretched shipwrecks who were the products of that vice. Poppy fields bloomed red over the Empire, and the race had almost come to despair. And what do we find to-day? There is scarcely a great poppy field in the Republic, scarcely a fume of opium that you can smell on the public street in any Chinese city. The bonfires flared across the land as they burned up the signs of the old bondage. A great race arose in power and in a massive moral upheaval shook itself free. God had planted the energies there that needed only the touch of a living faith in Him, a new assurance of the freedom of man to do His will, and in this matter the whole nation came out of its bondage into its liberty.

For generations men wondered whether slaves could ever be set free. We almost feared in our land here that slavery was a permanent institution. But there came a time at last when from the wrist of every American slave the chains fell away. It might have been generations before; it might not have been until generations after; only in that time appointed the moral energies awoke and came forth, and Saturday burst into Easter Day for the negro bondmen of America.

Precisely the same principle holds with regard to the things that we fight to-day. It holds with regard to the war on war. Some day we shall slay it. The kingdom of heaven, said Jesus, is among you. Well, let it loose. The kingdom of heaven will have no war in it; the kingdom of heaven will have no brothers cutting one another’s throats in it; the kingdom of heaven will have in it no vice and lust dragging its slimy trail across men’s hearths and hearts. If the kingdom of heaven is within, why not set it free, that we may live in it as well as have it buried inside of us! The world that we are living in is calling us to go back to that principle of Saturday morning and to believe that all we need to do the will of God is made available for us by God’s grace now, if we will but obey.

And if some men say that all this is only to put in other words the theory of development, of historic evolution, why, what of it? Of course it is, but what is development except the drawing out of what has been folded in? What is evolution except the letting loose of what the mind of God Himself at the beginning had planted within,—when in the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world He poured the blood of Christ into humanity in order that humanity might be reinforced with the adequate energies to enable it to accomplish the thing that was God’s first dream for it? Of course it is, and that is precisely the ground of Christ’s constant appeal. “Come unto me,” He said to men, believing that they could. “Unless you hear My call and follow Me, you cannot be My disciple.” What meaning was there to His summons unless the power to respond was there in answer to His call? “I stand at the door of your inner being,” said He, “and knock. I am there waiting.”

And so to us to-day, just as clearly as in those days, His voice speaks: “Come out of your tomb, out of your chains, out of your narrowness, out of your limitations, out of your despairs, out of your dejections, out of your failures,—come out of them. The power of the endless life is here for you, if only by faith and love you will lay hold of it to-day.” Is that not, after all, the great central message and the fundamental principle of Christ’s Gospel to us, which He symbolized and illustrated in the shadow of the Saturday before the Easter victory? It is in one of the old hymns: