Greatest
Thing in the
World
The
Changed Life
By:
Henry Drummond
“I
protest that if some great power
would agree to make me always
think what is true and do what is
right, on condition of being
turned into a sort of clock and
wound up every morning, I should
instantly close with the
offer.”
These are
the words of Mr. Huxley. The
infinite desirability, the
infinite difficulty of being
good—the theme is as old as
humanity. The man does not live
from whose deeper being the same
confession has not risen, or who
would not give his all tomorrow,
if he could “close with the
offer” of becoming a better
man.
I propose
to make that offer now. In all
seriousness, without being
“turned into a sort of
clock,” the end can be
attained. Under the right
conditions it is as natural for
character to become beautiful as
for a flower; and if on
God’s earth, there is not
some machinery for effecting it,
the supreme gift to the world has
been forgotten. This is simply
what man was made for. With
Browning: “I say that Man
was made to grow, not stop.”
Or in the deeper words of an
older Book: “Whom He did
foreknow, He also did
predestinate . . . to be
conformed to the Image of his
Son.”
Let me
begin by naming, and in part
discarding, some processes in
vogue already, for producing
better lives. These processes are
far from wrong; in their place
they may even be essential. One
ventures to disparage them only
because they do not turn out the
most perfect possible
work.
The first
imperfect method is to rely on
Resolution. In willpower, in mere
spasms of earnestness there is no
salvation. Struggle, effort, even
agony, have their place in
Christianity as we shall see; but
this is not where they come in.
In mid-Atlantic the other day,
the Etruria in which I was
sailing, suddenly stopped.
Something had gone wrong with the
engines. There were five hundred
able-bodied men on board the
ship. Do you think if we had
gathered together and pushed
against the masts we could have
pushed it on?
When one
attempts to sanctify himself by
effort, he is trying to make his
boat go by pushing against the
mast. He is like a drowning man
trying to lift himself out of the
water by pulling at the hair of
his own head. Christ held up this
method almost to ridicule when He
said, “Which of you by
taking thought can add a cubit to
his stature?” The one
redeeming feature of the
self-sufficient method is
this—that those who try it
find out almost at once that it
will not gain the
goal.
Another
experimenter says:—”But
that is not my method. I have
seen the folly of a mere wild
struggle in the dark. I work on a
principle. My plan is not to
waste power on random effort, but
to concentrate on a single sin.
By taking one at a time and
crucifying it steadily, I hope in
the end to extirpate all.”
To this, unfortunately, there are
four objections.
For one
thing life is too short; the name
of sin is Legion. For another
thing, to deal with individual
sins is to leave the rest of the
nature for the time untouched. In
the third place, a single combat
with a special sin does not
affect the root and spring of the
disease. If one only of the
channels of sin be obstructed,
experience points to an almost
certain overflow through some
other part of the nature. Partial
conversion is almost always
accompanied by such moral
leakage, for the pent-up energies
accumulate to the bursting point,
and the last state of that soul
may be worse than the first.
In the last
place, religion does not consist
in negatives, in stopping this
sin and stopping that. The
perfect character can never be
produced with a pruning
knife.
But a Third
protests:— “So be it I
make no attempt to stop sins one
by one. My method is just the
opposite. I copy the virtues one
by one.” The difficulty
about the copying method is that
it is apt to be mechanical. One
can always tell an engraving from
a picture, an artificial flower
from a real flower.
To copy
virtues one by one has somewhat
the same effect as eradicating
the vices one by one; the
temporary result is an
overbalanced and incongruous
character. Someone defines a prig
as “a creature that is
overfed for its size.” One
sometimes finds Christians of
this species— overfed on one
side of their nature, but
dismally thin and starved-looking
on the other. The result, for
instance, of copying Humility,
and adding it on to an otherwise
worldly life, is simply
grotesque.
A rabid
Temperance advocate, for the same
reason, is often the poorest of
creatures, flourishing on a
single virtue, and quite
oblivious that his Temperance is
making a worse man of him and not
a better. These are examples of
fine virtues spoiled by
association with mean companions.
Character is a unity, and all the
virtues must advance together to
make the perfect man.
This method
of sanctification, nevertheless,
is in the true direction. It is
only in the details of execution
that it fails.
A fourth
method I need scarcely mention,
for it is a variation on those
already named. It is the very
young man’s method; and the
pure earnestness of it makes it
almost desecration to touch it.
It is to
keep a private notebook with
columns for the days of the week,
and a list of virtues with spaces
against each for marks. This,
with many stern rules for
preface, is stored away in a
secret place, and from time to
time, at nightfall, the soul is
arraigned before it as before a
private judgment bar.
This living
by code was Franklin’s
method; and I suppose thousands
more could tell how they had hung
up in their bedrooms, or hid in
lock-fast drawers, the rules
which one solemn day they drew up
to shape their lives.
This method
is not erroneous, only somehow
its success is poor. You bear me
witness that it fails? And it
fails generally for very
matter-of-fact reasons—most
likely because one day we forget
the rules.
All these
methods that have been named
—the self-sufficient method,
the self-crucifixion method, the
mimetic method, and the diary
method—are perfectly human,
perfectly natural, perfectly
ignorant, and, as they stand,
perfectly inadequate.
It is not
argued, I repeat, that they must
be abandoned. Their harm is
rather that they distract
attention from the true working
method, and secure a fair result
at the expense of the perfect
one. What that perfect method is
we shall now go on to
ask.
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