Wind-wavered, corpse-lights, daughters of the fen,
The more we feel the high stern-featured beauty
Of plain devotedness to duty, steadfast and still,
Not fed with mortal praise,
But finding amplest recompense
For life’s ungarlanded expense
In work done squarely and unwasted days.”
And take this matter of Christian service that lies before the thought of every earnest young life. Why are so many of us going to be, in the cities and homes from which we came, the same useless driftwood that we have been? Why? Simply because of our want of courage to face the work that needs to be done there, and to undertake that work without fear that we cannot do it, without fear that God will desert us in attempting to do it, without fear of the irregularity and uniqueness of our being seen engaged in it. Throughout the world Christ waits for men and women to-day, as He waited for them—and so often in vain—while He was here on earth. Who will hear His call now? “Lay aside your fear and trust Me to be with you and to enable you to do the thing. Come and take up My task after Me.”
Some of us would dread to go out to live among the Chinese or Mohammedan peoples, so far away. But we would not dread going out to live in the legation, nor would we dread it much if we were to be employed in some great commercial enterprise. Yet the geography would be precisely the same, and our dangers and friendlessness would be far greater. But we would not fear all that, because others would think it natural and appropriate for us. But this other thing—the missionary call—would be so exceptional, so unusual, so fantastic, even fanatical, that we would fear to do any such dreadful thing! But which life of us is worth mentioning in the same breath with the life of God’s Son Who came into a carpenter’s home in a wretched little Jewish village amid an outcast race, in a bare remote corner of the earth, and lived there among peasant folk and farmers, pent up in the charnel house of humanity, and Who was willing to count His equality with God not a prize jealously to be retained, Who emptied Himself and took on Him the form of a servant and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross? The contrast between our life, with all its privileges, to-day and the most squalid African village is invisible over against the contrast between what Christ laid down and what Christ took up for the love He bore us and His world.
And we need greatly this fearlessness in our confession of Him,—that, without concealing Whom we follow and Whose servants we are, we should go out now, openly to avow our discipleship and the vow we have taken of loyalty to our Lord Jesus Christ! Think how many betrayals of Him there have been, and how much of putting afresh to shame the Son of God and crucifying Him anew by men and women who had said they were going to follow Him faithfully, just as Simon said he was resolved to do on that very night in which before the cock crew he denied his Lord. Shall we not go out into the coming days with something in us that casts out this fear?