The fact is that many Christians think that by bowing down in worship before Christ they are His followers, forgetting His own test for such: "Why call ye Me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?" We write of Him, it may be, as Our Lord with capital letters, when He is not our lord at all, nor the master and controller of our lives. [p.29] There is a great deal of false reverence about this lip-worship of phrase and form that actually keeps us from getting as near as we might to the true spirit of followers of Christ.
If we are lovers and followers of the truth as Jesus bids us be, we must recognise our kinship and comradeship with all others who sincerely seek the truth, even though they may attack us and fail for the moment to see all the light which may shine in our eyes so clearly: in the mere search after truth their souls are turned towards the light and unconsciously fed and aided by the Source of all truth! Nor must we think of them our blind brothers merely, for they may be fighting a far greater army of foes than we, placed as out-posts of the hosts of God, surrounded by the enemy and overborne themselves for a while, that afterwards the victorious ranks of their comrades may press on over their bodies to conquests of which we have not even dreamed.
And how far have we failed in unity with our Master and each other through our not having learnt His lesson of the way of service, of our true relationship to our fellows?
Yet here and there across the pages of history shines the light of a good life pointing us the true way, and how by losing ourselves we find ourselves.
The bearing of the Cross which Jesus enjoined upon His followers is far other than that asceticism which monk and nun and Puritan have wasted many a precious life to attain. We have not to give [p.30] up the pleasant thing because it is pleasant, or because it gives only a mundane and transitory joy. Joy is good, and not to be avoided, but welcomed. We have to give up the pleasant thing ourselves, others may take it in our stead; or give up a large measure of it that they may share it with us. We do not lose the joy, or pretend that it is unreal and transitory as the monk may. It is very real, and we feel it in a sense we could not do before, because our fellows share it or have it in place of us, and our life is their life. Gladness which they feel we must feel too.
This is the difference between the monk of the desert and Francis of Assisi, the apostle of the joy of Christ . The monk battles with himself to maintain his vow of poverty; he is constantly giving up in not possessing things for himself, or in renouncing pleasures which attract him. St. Francis in possessing nothing has all things, for all are God's and his fellows', and he is theirs. The wide world is his cloister, and everything which he can do to gladden his brother gives joy to himself. True Christianity like his is full of an infectious sense of the joy of life. Whenever such men go there comes to others some touch of their spirit, as crumbs drop from a full table.
This faith that joy in itself is good does not mean that there may not be needful for us all some form of true asceticism, training in withholding from things good in themselves and from pleasures we desire, quite apart from the surrendering [p.31] of them to others. But needful as this is, it is good only as training for an end beyond itself, and not for the mere sake of abstinence. We refrain that we may be masters of our wills, that we may keep control of habit, that our bodies may be the instrument of our spirits; such fasting as this only fits us more fully for the joy of service.
Deeper even than the sacrament of joy is that of sorrow, and we may learn something of it from John Woolman, the Quaker apostle of Christ's sufferings. Where men suffered he suffered too in spirit with them. When he came on his last journey to England he could not travel in the comfortable cabin because of the needless toil of the workmen that had gone to adorn it, but must share with the poor sailors the foul air and discomfort of the steerage. And when on the stormy passage across the Atlantic he lay there sick and in pain, his heart went up in thankfulness that he was permitted to share the experience which so many of his fellow-men had to go through, and be united thus to suffering humanity. "I was now desirous," he tells us, "to embrace every opportunity of being inwardly acquainted with the hardships and difficulties of my fellow-creatures, and to labour in His love for the spreading of pure righteousness on the earth." Then we shall remember, too, that beautiful passage near the close of his journal, where he recalls the vision that came to him in time of sickness of that mass of dull, gloomy colour, made up of [p.32] human beings in as great misery as they could be and live, and how he was told that he was mixed with them and henceforth might not consider himself a separate being. The angel's song, "John Woolman is dead," sounded to him more pure and lovely than any he had ever heard before, for in truth his old will was dead, and in him the spirit of Christ was alive.
Is it not here that the Church will find the way to reconcile the world of toilers and sufferers estranged from her to-day? — in that unity between her members which goes deeper even than membership, in a love to Christ which shows itself, as He calls for it, towards all who have need of Him, which identifies the Christian with his brothers, the doers and bearers of wrong?
As we look out upon a Christendom divided by sects and creeds into a score of different bodies, we may be saddened by the lament which many a devout lip has uttered over the schisms which rend the mystic robe of the Master. But it was only His outer garments which the soldiers rent asunder: the seamless robe is unsevered still. External separation does not touch the spirit of love and true communion which beneath countless outer differences unites together the lives of all who follow Him in deed and in truth. And as we each draw nearer to Him, and His life flows into our lives, we must draw nearer to each other and to all our fellow-men.