Still stands Thine against sacrifice
A humble and a contrite heart.”
And the issue is clear enough when we look at it concretely to-day and contrast the men who have the inward resources with those who have not, the movements which are fed from deep ideal springs with those which deal skin-deep only with humanity. In one of our American cities the president of a large institution was shelved in the prime of life by younger and less conservative men who acquired control of the business. They treated the older man well, gave him the nominal headship with his former salary, but really transferred all the power to other men. It was the chance of a lifetime for the older man. He had his strength and his time for any service or ministry or pleasure he might choose. But the only meat which he had to eat was the management of the business, and accordingly he starved to death in a fine home and with a large salary. All that the bag of his body needed he had, but man cannot live by bread alone without a word from God. The Tinker of Bedford Jail heard the key turn in the lock behind him. And did he famish alone? He opened the gate of his house within and out they came—Christian and Great-Heart and Hopeful and Evangelist and Mercy and Dare-to-Die—and the loneliness of John Bunyan’s cell became the greatest society on earth, and the immortals who marched out of the wealth of his soul are the companions of millions who could not name one human being who was Bunyan’s contemporary. The rich men who have transmitted real wealth have been the lovers, the dreamers, the servers who ate bread at God’s hands and who knew and taught men that the life is more than meat and the body than raiment. “She was not daily bread,” wrote her niece of Emily Dickinson. “She was star dust.”
This above all was characteristic of Christ. Part of our Lord’s preëminence of nature and of achievement was the untold wealth of His inward resources. No philanthropist or social worker ever lived who was His equal in all that our ethical materialists admire and praise. But behind all this and as explaining all this He had meat to eat that men knew not, thoughts of God, ideas of origin and destiny, of whence He came and whither He was going, fellowship, purposes, a spiritual program. His wealth was an inward, a communicable and eternal treasure. It nourished Him and was for all men.
“I have meat to eat,” said He. “Who brought it to Him?” asked they. “A primrose by the river’s brim a yellow primrose” was to them; and it was nothing more. Meat was meat, mutton or beef to His disciples. But to Him the primrose was a volume of revelation. Meat was very life of God within His soul. Language to Christ was windows into the wealth of the eternities and the infinites. To men it was words. His discernment of latent values in men made Him a rich man wherever He found a fellow. He had cargoes of redeemable character afloat on the wide waters of mankind, and these He was forever drawing home. Men brought Him a sinner, flotsam of Galilee; and Jesus saw Himself rich with the latent life of Peter of Pentecost, victor of the gates of hell. The stained hand of the Samaritan concubine became under His faith purified to bear the chalice of the life of God. He had more wealth latent in human character than Crœsus ever dreamed of. His universalism, also, made Him rich with all the wealth of humanity. All around Him men choked and died in the stifling air of racial exclusion and prejudice. He lived in the whole free world. Thinking in terms of all mankind and all the ages makes the thinker rich beyond all the dreams of any racial avarice or national pride.
But above all His meat was simply this: to walk with God, to do the will of God and to accomplish His work. His life was in God’s will, His strength in God’s companionship. He lived powerfully among men because He dwelt deeply in God. His wealth was not herds and gold, nor bonds and credits, nor deeds; but the power to do deeds in the might and pity of God.
And the inward resources of Christ which are true wealth are accessible also to us; and not accessible only, but indispensable. We need not set much store by what the world calls wealth. Its one worthy use is as capital for human service; and Christ who had none of it here still did and inspired more service than all the world’s capital has performed. Louis Pasteur was living on a salary of a few hundred francs. All that he did was to examine with a microscope things infinitesimally small and to reflect upon them, and then in his laboratory to write down and send forth some new ideas. The practical men derided his “pure science,”—a mere student of theories, spinner of silk dreams thinner than the filaments of the silkworms of southern France. But Pasteur’s thoughts were the richest source of wealth in France. “Pasteur’s discoveries alone,” said Huxley, “would suffice to cover the war indemnity paid by France to Germany in 1870.”[3] True wealth is inward resources, the love of God’s world, of truth and holy thoughts, friendship with the living and the dead, the possession of the Son of God and His words which are spirit and life, and of His Spirit “whom the world cannot receive; for it beholdeth Him not, neither knoweth Him; ye know Him; for He abideth with you, and shall be in you.”
[3] Vallery-Radot, “Life of Pasteur,” popular edition, p. 374.
And all this wealth may be ours without going anywhere for it. No man brought it to Him. “I have meat,” He said. So He calls us to be rich. We do not need to go anywhere for it. No man needs to bring it to us. It is here. It is Himself—the Bread of Life. Can we also say, “I have it—meat to eat, of the world unknown, within my soul, within my soul”?
To be able to say that is our great American need. I will not say that it is a greater need now than it has ever been because we have deteriorated and need to recover the element of spiritual idealism in our national character. We have not deteriorated. Doubtless we have lost many things that it would have been well for us to have kept, and have kept much that it would have been better to lose. But we have gained in our perception of the higher values and we seek them more and not less than ever before. We are far from being what we ought to be, but the past was farther, and we only think otherwise because we clothe the past in mists of idealization. That very error is proof of our deeper spiritual discerning. Evils are challenged now which passed uncondemned a half generation ago. But though we have gained, we need to gain more, and what we need to gain is not something æsthetic or intellectual only, not broader philosophies or wider social programs, not anything external or merely ethical, but something biological and dynamic. We need the push and power of what One and One only offers. “The thief cometh not,” said Christ, “but that he may steal, and kill, and destroy: I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.”