A Greylock Pulpit.

MANHOOD THE END OF LIFE.

Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Ephesians 4:13.

The thought to which I would especially call your attention this morning, is found in the words "unto a perfect man," or as the Revised Version has it, "unto a full grown man."

Last Sunday morning we made a study of righteousness as it was suggested to us by the prophet Micah. It was stated in simple and broad terms that no other obligation rests upon mankind than the single yoke put upon all, “to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God." The term righteousness is, perhaps, the most common word in the Bible which stands for duty done. But since even the same language changes with time and the habits of the people, it is all-important that every man should receive the truth in his own best vernacular. To be sure, what we most need is not a word, but the thing for which the word stands: nevertheless the meaning of the best thought and life, the message of God speaking through his people, has found successful welcome through accurate modern speech. What word then in our language best conveys the end to be sought in life? Holiness has been offered as a word which might express what we are seeking, but there is objection to it. It does not express enough. The great truths it emphasizes are veneration, devotion and purity, but these are only a part of any true ideal. The word righteousness is a good word, but its flavor is too strong of conduct, which also is only a part of our Christian standard. The word virtue has been offered, but this has been used too exclusively by the schools and too readily suggests a single grace. Certainly the word Christian covers the ground, but we need not hastily use that word till we ascertain what is the Christian life, what is the aim of the founder of Christianity and his first representatives. All terms employed to describe a special experience are insufficient

because narrow. They may designate a genuine experience in a given Christian life, a revolution in the development of some soul, a real epoch to an individual, but one not to be confounded with the "flying goal" of revelation, not to be made into a definition of either the end or the beginning of mankind's great pursuit. Whatever it is, religion is on the level of every man's understanding. No mist must overhang its threshold. Nothing should suggest the cloister. It is natural, not artificial. It must not over-do an element of life which belongs to a subordinate place; for example, the element of veneration, which it is possible to distort by simply the trick of a darkened room. We must recognize that the earth is the place where we are to work out our salvation and that this world must be emphatic in any word we select to describe that salvation. We must be conscious that we are in a world of matter, mind, and spirit; that whatever we do, we are to honor this world as a school room, its furniture and appliances as designed to bring us to our true nature and therefore to the highest exhibition of that nature in Jesus Christ, our Lord. Manhood is the best word yet coined to express the end of life. The duty, the privilege, the end of life, is character, or ideal manhood and womanhood in human life. To be a man is to be a Christian. You will surely tell me that you know of a man, who is quite manly, who has never made a profession of religion, but this only proves that he has not yet attained that degree of gratitude and recognition of the true source of his manhood which he ought to reach, and presumably will. This fault does not make his good qualities un-christian. Christianity is not one of ten religions. It is comprehensive of all the good there is in the world, or ever has been, or ever will be. As brought to light two thousand years ago in a human personality, it gave man no new faculties, no new philosophy, no new science; but it brought a revelation of God as power to inspire men to a higher justice, to a broader life, to a full-grown character. Revelation of what man is to be, as the result of the use of this power, was also brought. And this is the state to which science, art, literature, government, schools, preaching and all beside, are so many contributors and servants. We shall therefore honor God when we recognize this earthly opportunity as not only a probation, but a place to grow, to develop, "till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." The problem is somehow to ever hold fast together two things, the ideal and the real, the earth and the skies, the vision and obedience to the vision, that which is, and that which is to be, the present and the future. There are those who walk upon the earth and forget the sky. There are those who seem to be dreaming in the skies and forget the earth; but the problem of life is, to harness the two together and to realize a freedom from that certain despair which dwells with ideals, and from that certain materalistic, sensuous life which comes by walking upon the earth. There is, in this connection, an element in the character of God which we have overlooked. It is a comfort to talk about it. It is an inspiration to think of it. It is a prescription for the hard worker who wants the kingdom to come with more observation and to come quickly. Many are discouraged by ideals. The truth is so

lofty, so transcendent, so beautiful, that they look at it with blank expression and say, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, it is high, I cannot attain unto it." This element is God's waiting power. I know all too well that some lazy man will say "that is my doctrine." I do not say this for his benefit. Such an one never does anything else but wait and rest. But there are those who cherish lofty ambitions, who see the vision of a love grown rich, strong and bright, and seeing it, fall into despair. They are utterly discouraged because of the great gap between what they would be and what they are. For such there is a gospel, there is a privilege, there is a delight. Remember that God has eternity as a factor in all His problems, and that therefore we also ought to have it; that God has taken millions of years to make of this planet a physical basis for the mind and soul of man, and that therefore we ought to take a little time to adjust ourselves to the problems of the globe. Remember that God has allowed men to grow up like Topsy in Mrs. Stowe's book, that He has had great faith in nature as well as revelation, that He has revealed Himself in two books, both nature and life as seen in the Scripture, that He has great faith in man as he is to be, that He has given mankind self-government from the start. This government was first no government but instinct, no control save the sway of passion. Then came the government of the strong, and it was a better government than no government, an improvement on the other. Finally came the government of and by the people learning of their higher nature the beginnings of moral character in law and society. Manhood received, in due time, its definition and vindication, enlarging itself on the model of the greatest man, Jesus Christ. To believe in self is to believe in Him, and to believe in Him is to believe in His qualities, and to believe in His qualities is to appropriate Him and reproduce them. It is the work of eternity, as well as time, to further this best choice. It is no easy victory of five minutes. It is "the victory which,” slowly but surely, “overcometh the world." You can quickly overcome that element of the world which lies between you and a very necessary and successful beginning of the Christian life, but you have only begun. Nothing is so practical then as the ideal, if you put into that ideal the longsuffering patience, and wisdom, and waiting power of God. We are to begin where we are. There is no great, dangerous and impossible task required of anyone to begin the study and practice of manhood, to matriculate for a spiritual and normal education. This is only to start the complete life, to be a beginning man, or, in exactly synonomous terms, a beginning Christian. To do our present duty, real, divine, emphatic, to every conscience in this presence, is no hard or great thing. It has in store all the good there is. We all, at the best, have to unlearn a great many notions, and the longer a man delays the beginning of the Christian life, the more he will have to unlearn, the slower will the learning be when he begins to study. The masses of men still worship force. There are a great many people who want to go to the prize ring and to see the prize fight, and above all things, read the account of it, who never actually attend. Their sympathies go with that kind of thing. There are a great many who would like to read the "Police Gazette" who do not do it simply

because there are

those, whose opinions they respect, who would disapprove their act. They may keep conventionally free from evil, but, as yet, do not love the good. This simply proves how slowly we come up from the things which are vulgar, animal and base. It is a great source of gratitude that such men as the President of the United States, and the President-elect, and those with them in prominence, the presidents of our colleges, men of standing who shape the education of the youth, who command the respect of the people who have chosen them to these positions, that these men are never, as the leaders of the old civilization were, present in any coliseum where they are daily entertained with sights of wholesale brutality and crime. But there is still a very large under-stratum of society that feeds upon these things, and the imagination doors are open wide to receive the suggestions of everything vulgar and beastly. The mere professional athlete rarely thinks of his soul. There is a real good in physical culture, a very great deal of good in the development of the body, considered in its relation to the mind and spirit, and “kept under,” as Paul would say.

There are others, never sensual, who neither attend the prize ring or desire to do so, who are nevertheless sensuous. They may even have the artist nature partly developed, but they are after all dealing with sounds, sights, things, with substance, with forms, with affairs that appeal to the eye and to the sense, and they feel the necessity of chief support from things that touch them and that they touch.

Others are supremely intellectual. A man certainly cannot be too wise. Ignorance of a true object of knowledge is never bliss, but the man who lives on old musty books, and who does not study men and life, is a dead man while he lives, and is not on the New Testament track of character.

Again a man may starve his moral sense, leaving it without the food of truth. He does not educate it. He does not develop it. He does not attend to it. He may ignore all such things as prayer meetings and good literature. He may become indifferent to moral things or a hobby rider, a pessimistic exhorter. He may even attend a prayer meeting and become a crank, a fanatic, or a fool. What the awakened moral sense needs, wherever we get it, is culture, development, intellect. The manly life then,

is not a life that we can derive from any single side of the soul, society or organized religion. It is the symmetrical development of everything that God has given us, the body, the mind, the taste, the spirit, the conscience. all mingled in one grand ideal under the mastery of the love of God. These several sides of our life are at first only germinal in us. Man is in the seed form, and the problem is, to develop quality, harmony, and power, as they open to the influences which are above and are sensitive to intelligent and vital ideals.

The first thing every one ought to do is to cherish honor, guilelessness, frankness, openness, hostility to duplicity. This is fundamental. Such a man has the beginnings of that faith which removes mountains. We are to be teachable, responsive to spiritual truth, catching its suggestions in the soul as prizes. We are called to freedom from that critical habit and captious spirit so common, which knows so much and yet, alas, knows so little.

The appetites, passions and desires are to be trained to obey the reason. The normal man is what we seek, and he is to be found by influences more natural because divine. He is benevolent in his outlook upon life. He is to be increasingly large minded toward the race, free from everything like a class spirit. Oh, if there is anything I despise, it is this animal tendency of the rich to mass themselves against the poor and the same tendency of the poor to mass themselves against the rich. The idle rich man is not a whit better than the idle poor man. The idle poor man is no better than the idle rich. They ought to be in the same organization. The thing the rich man ought to do is to seek out his true poor brother. What the poor man ought to do is to seek out his true rich brother, and to make that alliance which alone is in manhood and in the kingdom. This is the only final remedy both for the tyranny of trusts and that of labor unions.

The full grown man is to be large hearted as well as large minded. His fervor is a natural, honest thing. All insincerity and cant are lacking. The affections move from the center of the soul outward into every crevice of life, domestic, social, civil, spiritual, ever saturating society, ever redeeming it from its evil, ever lifting it to good. All things are under its sway. Therefore we cultivate attention to detail, courage for the little things which constitute so much of life. Observe how we are tested, not when we are being looked at, but when in the obscurity of commonplace events, we are choosing the good for its own worth. Here is our opportunity. Stand up then like men both in private and in public for the unpopular, for the hard, for the difficult duty, and stand with right and "right the day will win." You stand with God who is Himself, Victory. When any question like this question of arbitration with England arises, instead of playing to the galleries, as a clown upon life's stage, instead of saying something which will be echoed by the brute side of humanity, and by that which loves to fight and to set the child against the mother and the mother country against her child, let the press, let the pulpit, let the pew, let every honest man, rise up and say, "Oh God, may this be but the dawn of the time when swords shall be beaten into ploughshares, and spears into pruninghooks, and when men shall learn war no more." And when it comes to the temperance question, let not men rise up and say, “See how the clergymen are doing it,” but let every citizen say "By the help of God, let me be of some service to my town, let me have the privilege of some little share in reducing the temptations, the beastiality and crime and pauperism and insanity and the depravity of the earth." The Christian must be of a larger type than that of which we have as yet begun to dream. He must have hope for the future. He must not over-estimate the difficulties in the way. John Bunyan disclosed the right thought to us when he said that he believed the lions which he saw ahead of him were going to eat him up, but upon approaching them he discovered that they were so chained that they had no power to bite one who kept in the middle of the path. Not all apparent dangers are real. There is a type of man who, in the name of counting the cost, in which I firmly believe, will invent a thousand imaginary difficulties, and by dwelling upon them, he will paralyze all effort and hope. Faith has a courageous quality which adjusts itself to the person of Jesus Christ as the