There is no death! For year on year reborn,
I wake to larger life, to joy more great.
So many times have I been crucified,
So often seen the resurrection morn,
I go triumphant, though new Calvaries wait.”
And this freedom and victory are waiting only for those lives that have been broken beneath the cross of an absolute restraint of God, and have so mastered themselves under God’s name by the help of Christ that control has been given over in trust into their own hands.
And we all know that power is to be won here in this school where men are trained both to feel and to wield dominion. There is no power in the world that is not power cabined, power held in some way. Loose power is imperceptible and utterly useless. The only power we know is power walled in, shut down, confined and beating against its barriers and its walls. We know this in the athletic life of our colleges to-day. No athletic trainer in any college ever followed David’s method with Adonijah. The trainer is there to say: “Why did you do it that way?” “Why did you not do it this way? You have no right to waste your energy in that way. You must do it so.” There is one scene in Quo Vadis that redeems much else in the book. It is the scene in the Coliseum, when the giant Gothic slave is shown saving the life of his mistress, whom he loved. The great bull has come out with the girl’s form tied to his horns, and there is dead silence as the bull stands angrily facing the man. You remember the picture. As Ursus lays one hand on each horn of the auroch the struggle begins. There is not a sound. The great multitude watches the man’s muscles rise and harden and the sweat come out and drop from every pore. They see his feet sinking down in the arena, until the sand is above his ankles. Suddenly the great head of the bull begins to twist under that awful strength. Then the neck breaks and the giant lifts the limp form from the beast’s neck and stands with the burden in his hands before the Emperor. One likes to read such a picture of power secured by self-discipline. Do we want to go out limp and beaten and ineffective in our lives against the great mass of work in the world that waits to be done? Or do we want to go in the strength of Him Who, having bent beneath His Father’s will, was able to carry on the Cross the whole burden of human sin?
And we must learn in this school the things we value and desire most: purity and delicacy and refinement of character, for they cannot be acquired elsewhere. So much social standing nowadays is uttered in terms of self-assertion and indulgence and the ability to have any whim or caprice gratified. This sort of self-assertion, this caprice, is regarded by many of us as the highest mark of social authority, whereas we know it is precisely the opposite, that it is self-restraint and self-control and self-surrender that mark the finest lives.
There is a beautiful story in the life of Goldwin Smith that illustrates what I mean. In the early sixties, when he was one of the keenest liberal minds of England, he was associated with Cobden and Bright in the Manchester School. Again and again he found himself the mark of the bitterest criticism from Disraeli. Later Goldwin Smith, resigning his professorship at Oxford, came to Canada. At that time Disraeli’s novel, “Lothair,” appeared in which he attacked Smith—of course, without using his name—as a social parasite. It stung Smith to the depths of his soul, but as it was an anonymous book there was nothing he could do but sit down and write this note personally to Disraeli:
“You well know that if you had ventured openly to accuse me of any social baseness, you would have had to answer for your words; but when sheltering yourself under the literary forms of a work of fiction, you seek to traduce with impunity the social character of a political opponent, your expressions can touch no man’s honour—they are the stingless insults of a coward.”