The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character

by Robert E. Speer

Not long before his death, as all remember, the late Mr. Morgan was summoned to testify before a congressional committee which was seeking to locate the seat of the money power. The object of those examining Mr. Morgan was to bring out the extent of his own influence and control, and to show, if possible, that in the hands of a few men was concentrated the real domination of the financial life of America. The popular impression, after the examination was over, was that Mr. Morgan’s modest disavowals were justified by all the testimony, and that there was no one person, or any group of individuals, in this country who possessed so much power as was supposed to reside in the hands of a little company of men.

Now, at the best, there was no question of creating or producing anything. Nobody thought of asking Mr. Morgan whether he could create a grain of wheat, or heal a disease, or bring into existence anything that was not already here. The main question was how much of something that was here already was he, or any other man, able to control. As one read the testimony, the one dominant impression it made on his mind was how small and weak and ineffectual even the strongest human life was, and how little was the effect that it could produce in what it was able to do in behalf of others.

How weak does even the strongest personality appear when contrasted with One Who can say such words as these I have just quoted! Suppose some great man now living were to say to us: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. I am come that they may have life, and may have it abundantly,” how startled we should be! But we have become familiar with the claim on the lips of Christ and do not realize what we are really confronted with in that single great Personality standing among men and offering to meet the ultimate human need, to give us the deepest, richest, most priceless thing in the world, which no one of us can give another. “I am come that ye may have life, and that ye may have it abundantly.”

And notice that here is not a claim only. There is a strange and startling contrast. “The thief cometh to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that ye may have life.” On the one side is our Lord. Him we know. But who is this thief on the other side who has come, not to give life, but to reduce it, contract it, dilute it—destroy it altogether? Well, we know well enough that sin is such a thief, that wherever sin is allowed to come into our lives it abridges those lives, draws in the walls of their expansion, cuts down and impoverishes their joys. And there are many things short of sin, less coarse and evil, which, nevertheless, draw in the boundaries of life, narrow and stifle it, and do the work of the thief who came to kill, and to destroy, and to steal. Over against all these He stands Who said: “I came to give life, to give it abundantly.”

Now we know very well what men and women say when you bring them this offer of Christ’s about His life. “Oh,” they say, “it all depends upon what you mean by life. I have my own idea of life. The life I am living is rich and satisfying to me, and I am not drawn to this life that your tepid religion offers me in exchange.” But are those who answer so fully satisfied? Are they really satisfied at all with any part of their life except such of it as consists of the kind of life that Jesus Christ our Lord Himself came to bring, with which alone the hearts of men can be content?

What do we mean when we speak of life that really satisfies us? I asked some boys a little while ago what they meant when they spoke about life, real life that would satisfy men. Four were boys at the Hill School, Pottstown, Pa. They sat down and collaborated for a while as to what real life meant to them, and when they got through it came to this: Purity, integrity, the principle of Christian service, unselfishness, and the desire to be perfect. I asked another man at Princeton what life meant to him, real life. He was one of the best athletes in the college, and this was the answer he gave: Humility, charitableness, bravery, strength of conviction, honesty, sincerity, truthfulness and the power to forgive. I asked a man at Yale what he thought life was. He was the most popular man in the senior class at that time. This was what he wrote down: “Service after the manner of Jesus, honesty carried all the way through, sympathy, capacity for work, patience in holding to principle, as well as fidelity in actual duty.”

Now if we were to define life better than these boys, and yet in the way they were feeling after, not in any concrete expressions, but in its central principle, we should borrow the words which Professor Drummond borrowed from Herbert Spencer. Spencer said that the perfect correspondence of any organism with its environment would be perfect life. Professor Drummond modified this by adding just one word: the perfect correspondence of any organism with a perfect environment would be perfect life. Or, to put it as it is stated in one of our best dictionaries: life is that state in any animal or plant in which its different functions are all occupied in active healthy expression. Now that is just what those boys were feeling after. Life is the free and fearless completion of ourselves. Life is our utter unfolding in the direction of that of which we are capable. Life is the pushing out of the rim of our world into the great and boundless riches of God. Life is the opening up of the gates of our prison house that we may go after Him Whose word to men was: “If ye abide in my word, then are ye truly my disciples; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Life is what Jesus Christ came to give, for His mission was this: “The thief came to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I am come that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.”

One great purpose of the Incarnation was to show what we are in our deepest being in the purpose of God, and what we are capable of. Our Lord did not come to parade before men the exceptional life to which they could never attain. He came, as He Himself said, to show them what it had been His Father’s will that they should all be. “As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” “I go unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.” What Jesus Christ was in the fullness of His unlimited life was the revealing of what God has in His will for every one of us. The amplitudes that we see in Him, the subsidence of all the petty boundaries, the unhampered outgoing of His free spirit in the area of His Father, God,—all that is just a picture of what God meant the life of each one of us to be. That is why they called Him the Son of Man, because He was the picture of what God had meant that His son, man, might be.

And Christ came, not only to show the possibilities of such being, of what men could do and what they could be made, but to be Himself that expression of power in them competent to effect such a result, the tide of the boundless life flowing through all the channels that they could offer to Him. He came to be in mankind the deep, flowing stream of a new life. One regrets to find in some churches to-day in the repetition of the Apostles’ Creed the omission of the sentence: “He descended into hell.” There is no word in the Creed which expresses more fully the uttermost reach of the purpose of our Lord and the scope and boundlessness of His love. Down even into hell He went in the utterance of His love for mankind. How much this means! But to say no more, it means this, that deep into the dark of our human life He came, that there, below all sight, below all thought, He might release the vital streams that have been flowing from the fountain of Calvary ever since, and which have no other fountain.

We know what would happen in our bodies, to put it simply, if some great artery that fed our life were tied. Atrophy and palsy would creep at once over our unnourished frames. Precisely the same thing is true in the deeper life of our souls, if the arteries, those channels through which Christ would pour His energy and strength and power, are tied. To put the same thing still more simply: Suppose the Mississippi River instead of running into the Gulf ran out of the Gulf deep into the land. Suppose all of the rivers poured into the land instead of into the seas. As a matter of fact, that is in one sense what they do. We have got long past looking at rivers as drains for the land. We know that they are arteries through which the life-blood of the seas flows upon the land by way of the skies. And suppose there were no Mississippi River. Suppose it were stopped at the gate. What a chill and death would fall upon the land! And how often that life of Christ which comes up to the gates of men’s lives is stifled, the stream that would pour in kept out, the power that would control and remake blocked at the door through which it would enter. “The thief is come,” He says, “and you let him in, to kill, and to steal, and to destroy; I am come, and you keep Me out. And I am come that you may have life, and that you may have it in all the abundance of God.”