The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character

by Robert E. Speer

Yes, I may come if I will, by His life Who will live again in me.

But the trouble is men do not believe this. They do not believe in any latent capacities adequate to the great task of life. They accept the principle of surrender and incompetence. They have nothing for God and God can make no use of them. And I imagine that it is such unbelief, such misgiving as to whether after all we have any possibilities for God in us, the undervaluation of God’s need of us and power to make and use us, that lead many of us to live the futile, unfruitful, negative lives which we do live. Men do not think their lives worth very much. They do not deny that there are great men and that great work is to be done in the world, but they think that God requires only those, that He builds His kingdom on a few outstanding figures, that the common men can look after themselves, and that they are not indispensable to God. If we are to prevent this waste, and if we are to secure the life without which God is impotent to build His kingdom in the world, we must somehow bring home to men the recognition of the great truth that God cannot get along without every man and all of that man, and that every human life and all its buried powers are essential to God.

One of the great purposes of our Lord’s coming here to earth was that He might show men the value of a man’s life in the plan and thought of God. Even the most sacred and time-honoured institution our Lord weighed over against one man and found him outweighing the institution. What was His own example but the illustration of the immeasurable value of man? He did not come to teach the uselessness of human life, but its pricelessness. He did this by becoming a man Himself. And this principle of God’s need of men and their latent possibilities is not mere theological theory. It is the hard historic fact that God has ever needed men and waited for them and for what they were the men to do for Him. Look at the great inventions, discoveries, achievements. What is the whole lesson of the Incarnation but that there are things that God Himself will not do except as He uses man? God Himself, we must say reverently, was communicable and a Saviour only as man. And His call to-day as it has been all through the years is for men who will believe that the thing God wants done can be done by Him through them. The Western Hemisphere was here before ever Columbus drew aside the veil and broadened the horizon of mankind. These great energies which drive the modern world were here from the beginning. We did not invent any of them. There is not an ounce of power in the world to-day that was not here when the world began. All that man has done has been simply to discover existing secrets. He has created no power. He has only found out what God has put here for him to find out. It took man a long time to discover this. But God waited for him. And God needs these finding men now as much as He has needed them at any time. He needs such men now to break open what is still concealed. The past has not exhausted all the heroisms, has not accomplished all the tasks. There are greater ones yet for the days that are, if God can only find His men.

Think how greatly God needs men to-day just to bring need and supply together in the world. You remember the incident in the life of our Lord as He came by the Pool of Bethesda where the sick lay, and spoke to one poor man lying on his pallet.

“Are you going in?” said He.

“No,” said the man. “I have no friend who will help me in and others get the benefit before I can come near.”

There was the good, waiting to be gained, and here was the man, but he had no man to stand for him between the need and the supply. A few years ago a great famine raged just back from the coast of China. There were millions of Chinese families who were in want and hundreds of thousands died of starvation because there was not bread enough to feed them. Little children lay crying at the breasts of dead mothers by the roadsides. At that very hour the wheat was piled up at railroad stations in Argentina as high as church spires. There was grain enough to feed the starving millions in China. Here was the supply and there was the need, but where were the men? God had not men enough on whom to float the supply across to meet the need. What is true of outward need is true of inward need as well. There is never a want where there is not an adequate supply. No little child on this earth need go hungry because God has not put enough in this world to feed it. No human heart need go starved because there is not enough love to meet its wants. There is all the food and all the love that humanity needs. But there are lacking the men who for God will bring the supply to the demand. The human need in the world can be met by the supply only through men who will fill up the gap. God can do it only as men lend themselves to Him. That is why, through all the years, the call of God has been for volunteers. For every unique, external, individual call that has been given to men, you can find a million calls that have been just the answer of men to the great call of God for volunteers. And God surely values the volunteer above the conscript. Isaiah did not wait for any special coercive call. “Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.” That call was enough to cover him, and he answered it. There is so much work to be done that God cannot go marching through the world looking for individuals, performing new miracles by which each individual is to be thaumaturgically led up to his particular work. God’s general way has been to picture before the eyes of His sons the work to be done and to wait for their hearts to leap in response, as Isaiah’s leaped: “Lord, let me have a share in this work ‘Here am I; send me.’”

Men are indispensable to God to put meaning into the words in which He tries to tell His message to men. Words have no meaning of their own. Words mean only as much as one man puts into them, or another man takes out of them. The meaning of the word does not come from the word; it comes from some life in which the word gets incarnated, or from some other life which interprets the word. What would the word “friend” signify to a man who had never had one? What does “tenderness” mean to one who has never seen a mother and her child? Or what is “patriotism” to one who has never seen or felt the contagion? You remember what the eunuch said when Philip met him in the chariot reading the prophet Esaias. “Understandest thou what thou readest?” Philip asked. And he replied, “How can I, except some man should guide me?” Things mean nothing to men until they are shown to them. Men go to China or Japan and preach the Gospel. How is it done? Why, they take words that have old meanings and fill them with new and different meanings by living new ideas in deeds before the people. In our colleges this year what meaning will honour, truth and friendship have, except as these words derive their meaning from the object lessons in some men’s lives? There are places where honour means dishonour; where purity means impurity; where truth means falsehood. These noble words are confused with their very opposites because no man has incarnated their right meaning in his life. That was one reason why the incarnation was necessary nineteen hundred years ago. There was no adequate religious or spiritual vocabulary and never could have been otherwise. If God had not come in the flesh, men would not have had the ideas that we use to describe God’s coming in the flesh. To-day, as then, God is dependent upon men in whom He can put meaning into His message to the world.

Men are indispensable in enabling God to get His other men. He gives men guidance for their lives. But how? I appeal to your own hearts. How do we get the guidance of our lives? There are many who are sure of having divine guidance in their lives, surer of that than they are of any material thing, and yet, as we look back upon this supernatural guidance, we realize that it has all been mediated through men. We can name man after man who did for our lives, in smaller measure, just what that man of Macedonia did for Paul. We get our guidance through men. Saint Paul got his through a man. Through what man was it? Sir William Ramsay has no doubt whatever that the man whom Saint Paul saw in his dreams was none other than his friend Luke. A real man and a friend, and no ghost figure, was the man of Macedonia through whom God gave Paul his great missionary call.