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Page 45
Love--the prisoned God in man--
Shows his face glorious, shakes his banner free,
Cries like a captain for eternity.
Again, Christ gives men an ideal for themselves which in their
threescore years and ten, more or less, they cannot hope to achieve: "Be
ye perfect as your Father." Jesus Himself, in whom we see the Father, is
for us that which we feel we must be, yet which we never are.
Immortality becomes a necessity to any man who seriously sets himself to
become like Jesus. Our mistakes and follies, the false starts we make,
the tasks we attempt for which we discover ourselves unfit, the waste of
time and energy we cannot repair, the tangled snarls into which we wind
ourselves and which require years to straighten out, render this life
absurd, if it be final. It cannot be more than a series of tentative
beginnings, and if there be no continuation, the scheme of things is a
gigantic blunder. If Jesus does no more than supply us with an ideal
hopelessly beyond our attainment and inspire us irresistibly to set out
on its quest, He is no Saviour but a Tormentor.
The fiend that man harries
Is love of the best.
We are doomed to a few score years of tantalizing failure, and victory
is forever impossible for sheer want of time.
Further, Jesus gives men a vision of a new social order--the Kingdom of
God--a vision so alluring that, once seen, they cannot but live for its
accomplishment. We are fascinated with the prospect of a world where
hideous war is unthinkable; where none waste and none want, for
brotherhood governs industry and commerce; where nations are animated by
a ministering patriotism; and where every contact of life with life is
redemptive. But the more fervently we long for this golden age, the more
heartily and indignantly we protest against present stupidities and
brutalities and injustices, the more passionately we devote ourselves to
realize the Kingdom, the more titanic this creation of a new order
appears. Nothing we know can remain unaltered; but the smallest
improvement takes an unconscionably long while to execute. Haste means
folly, and we have to tell ourselves to go slowly. Things as they are
have a fixity which demands moral dynamite to unsettle. We ache with
curiosity to see how our plans and purposes will work out; we would give
anything to be in at the finish. But there is death. We just begin, and
then--!
Mr. Huxley, a thorough Christian so far as his social hope went, though
without a Christian's faith, wrote to John Morley, as age approached,
"The great thing one has to wish for as time goes on is vigor as long as
one lives, and death as soon as vigor flags." But the allusion to death
set his mind on a painful train of thought, and he continued: "It is a
curious thing that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction
increasing as I get older and nearer the goal. It flashes across me at
all sorts of times with a horror that in 1900 I shall probably know no
more of what is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner be in hell a
good deal--at any rate in one of the upper circles, where the climate
and company are not too trying. I wonder if you are plagued in this
way." He was repeating the experience of the old Greeks as it is
expressed in Pindar's _Fourth Pythian_: "Now this, they say, is of all
griefs the sorest, that one knowing good should of necessity abide
without lot therein." It is glorious to hold up before ourselves the
splendors of the age that is to be, to dream of our cities made over in
ideals, of our land as a world-wide servant of righteousness and peace,
of a whole earth filled with truth and beauty and goodwill; and glorious
to give ourselves unremittingly to bring this consummation nearer. But
can we be content with no personal share in it? Are our lives merely
fertilizer for generations yet unborn?
Oh, dreadful thought, if all our sires and we
Are but foundations of a race to be,--
Stones which one thrusts in earth, and builds thereon
A white delight, a Parian Parthenon,
And thither, long thereafter, youth and maid
Seek with glad brows the alabaster shade,
And in processions' pomp together bent
Still interchange their sweet words innocent,--
Not caring that those mighty columns rest
Each on the ruin of a human breast,--
That to the shrine the victor's chariot rolls
Across the anguish of ten thousand souls!
Tennyson once said to Professor Tyndall that, if he believed he were
here simply to usher in something higher than himself in which he could
have no personal part or lot, he should feel that a liberty had been
taken with him. And when that something higher is the Kingdom Jesus
proclaimed, its devotees cannot forego their longing to share in its
perfected life.
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