LV.
In these days when our wise generation, weighed down with wealth and its handmaid vices on the one hand, and exhilarated by some tiny steps it has managed to make on the threshold of physical knowledge of various kinds on the other, would seem to be bent on ignoring its Creator and God altogether—or at least of utterly denying that he has revealed, or is revealing himself, unless it be through the laws of nature—one of the commonest demurrers to Christianity has been, that it is no faith for fighters, for the men who have had to do the roughest and hardest work for the world. I fear that some sections of Christians have been too ready to allow this demurrer, and fall back on the Quaker doctrines; admitting thereby that such “Gospel of the kingdom of heaven” as they can for their part heartily believe in, and live up to, is after all only a poor cash-gospel, and cannot bear the dust and dirt, the glare and horror of battle-fields. Those of us who hold that man was sent into this earth for the express purpose of fighting—of uncompromising and unending fighting with body, intellect, spirit, against whomsoever and whatsoever causeth or maketh a lie, and therefore, alas! too often against his brother-man—would, of course, have to give up Christianity if this were true; nay, if they did not believe that precisely the contrary of this is true, that Christ can call them as plainly in the drum beating to battle, as in the bell calling to prayer, can and will be as surely with them in the shock of angry hosts as in the gathering before the altar. But without entering further into the great controversy here, I would ask readers fairly and calmly to consider whether all the greatest fighting that has been done in the world has not been done by men who believed, and showed by their lives that they believed, they had a direct call from God to do it, and that He was present with them in their work. And further (as I cheerfully own that this test would tell as much in favor of Mahommet as of Cromwell, Gustavus Adolphus, John Brown) whether, on the whole, Christian nations have not proved stronger in battle than any others? I would not press the point unfairly, or overlook such facts as the rooting out of the British by the West Saxons when the latter were Pagans; all I maintain is, that faith in the constant presence of God in and around them has been the support of those who have shown the strongest hearts, the least love of ease and life, the least fear of death and pain.
LVI.
Supposing the whole Bible, every trace of Christendom to disappear to-morrow, we should each of us be conscious of a presence, which we are quite sure is not ourself, in the deepest recesses of our own heart, communing with us there and calling us to take up our two-fold birthright as man—the mastery over visible things, and above all the mastery over our own bodies, actions, thoughts—and the power, always growing, of a mysterious communion with the invisible.
LVII.
“Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? Even by ruling himself after Thy word.” The question of questions this, at the most critical time in his life for every child of Adam who ever grew to manhood on the face of our planet; and so far as human experience has yet gone, the answer of answers. Other answers have been, indeed, forthcoming at all times, and never surely in greater number or stranger guise than at the present time: “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?” Even by ruling himself in the faith “that human life will become more beautiful and more noble in the future than in the past.” This will be found enough “to stimulate the forces of the will, and purify the soul from base passion” urge, with a zeal and ability of which every Christian must desire to speak with deep respect, more than one school of our nineteenth century moralists.