Greatest
Thing in the
World
The
Programme of the
Society
By:
Henry Drummond
Hundreds
of years before Christ’s
Society was formed, its Programme
had been issued to the world. I
cannot think of any scene in
history more dramatic than when
Jesus entered the church in
Nazareth and read it to the
people. Not that when He
appropriated to Himself that
venerable fragment from Isaiah He
was uttering a manifesto or
announcing His formal Programme.
Christ
never did things formally. We
think of the words, as He
probably thought of them, not in
their old-world historical
significance, nor as a full
expression of His future aims,
but as a summary of great moral
facts now and always to be
realized in the world since he
appeared.
Remember as
you read the words to what grim
reality they refer. Recall what
Christ’s problem really was,
what His Society was founded for.
This
Programme deals with a real
world. Think of it as you
read—not of the
surface-world, but of the world
as it is, as it sins and weeps,
and curses and suffers and sends
up its long cry to God.
Limit it if
you like to the world around your
door, but think of it— of
the city and the hospital and the
dungeon and the graveyard, of the
sweating-shop and the pawn-shop
and the drink-shop; think of the
cold, the cruelty, the fever, the
famine, the ugliness, the
loneliness, the pain.
And then
try to keep down the lump in your
throat as you take up His
Programme and
read—
TO BIND
UP THE
BROKEN-HEARTED:
TO
PROCLAIM LIBERTY TO THE
CAPTIVES:
TO
COMFORT ALL THAT
MOURN:
TO GIVE
UNTO THEM—
BEAUTY
FOR ASHES,
THE OIL
OF JOY FOR
MOURNING,
THE
GARMENT OF PRAISE FOR THE SPIRIT
OF HEAVINESS.
What an
exchange—Beauty for Ashes,
Joy for Mourning, Liberty for
Chains! No marvel “the eyes
of all them that were in the
synagogue were fastened on
Him” as He read; or that
they “wondered at the
gracious words which proceeded
out of His lips.” Only one
man in that congregation, only
one man in the world to-day could
hear these accents with
dismay—the man, the culprit,
who has said hard words of
Christ.
We are all
familiar with the protest
“Of course”—as if
there were no other alternative
to a person of
culture—”Of course I am
not a Christian, but I always
speak respectfully of
Christianity.”
Respectfully of
Christianity! No remark fills
one’s soul with such
sadness. One can understand a man
as he reads these words being
stricken speechless; one can see
the soul within him rise to a
white heat as each fresh
benediction falls upon his ear
and drive him, a half-mad
enthusiast, to bear them to the
world. But in what school has he
learned of Christ who offers the
Saviour of the world his
respect?
Men
repudiate Christ’s religion
because they think it a small and
limited thing, a scheme with no
large human interests to commend
it to this great social age. I
ask you to note that there is not
one burning interest of the human
race which is not represented
here.
What are
the great words of Christianity
according to this Programme? Take
as specimens these:
LIBERTY,
COMFORT,
BEAUTY,
JOY.
These are
among the greatest words of life.
Give them their due extension,
the significance which Christ
undoubtedly saw in them and which
Christianity undoubtedly yields,
and there is almost no great want
or interest of mankind which they
do not cover.
These are
not only the greatest words of
life but they are the best. This
Programme, to those who have
misread Christianity, is a series
of surprises.
Observe the
most prominent note in it. It is
gladness. Its first word is
“good-tidings,” its
last is “joy.” The
saddest words of life are also
there—but there as the
diseases which Christianity comes
to cure. No life that is occupied
with such an enterprise could be
other than radiant.
The
contribution of Christianity to
the joy of living, perhaps even
more to the joy of thinking, is
unspeakable. The joyful life is
the life of the larger mission,
the disinterested life, the life
of the overflow from self, the
“more abundant life”
which comes from following
Christ.
And the joy
of thinking is the larger
thinking, the thinking of the man
who holds in his hand some
Programme for Humanity. The
Christian is the only man who has
any Programme at all— any
Programme either for the world or
for himself. Goethe, Byron,
Carlyle taught Humanity much, but
they had no Programme for it.
Byron’s thinking was
suffering; Carlisle’s
despair. Christianity alone
exults. The belief in the
universe as moral, the
interpretation of history as
progress, the faith in good as
eternal, in evil as
self-consuming, in humanity as
evolving—these Christian
ideas have transformed the malady
of thought into a bounding hope.
It was no
sentiment but a conviction
matured amid calamity and
submitted to the tests of life
that inspired the great modern
poet of optimism to
proclaim:—
“Gladness
be with thee, Helper of the
world!
I think
this is the authentic sign and
seal
Of
Godship, that it ever waxes
glad,
And more
glad, until gladness blossoms,
bursts
Into a
rage to suffer for
mankind
And
recommence at
sorrow.”
But that is
not all. Man’s greatest
needs are often very homely. And
it is almost as much in its
fearless recognition of the
commonplace woes of life, and its
deliberate offerings to minor
needs, that the claims of
Christianity to be a religion for
Humanity stand. Look, for
instance, at the closing sentence
of this Programme.
Who would
have expected to find among the
special objects of Christ’s
solicitude the Spirit of
Heaviness? Supreme needs, many
and varied, had been already
dealt with on this Programme;
many applicants had been met; the
list is about to close.
Suddenly
the writer remembers the nameless
malady of the poor—that
mysterious disease which the rich
share but cannot alleviate, which
is too subtle for doctors, too
incurable for Parliaments, too
unpicturesque for philanthropy,
too common even for sympathy. Can
Christ meet that?
If
Christianity could even deal with
the world’s Depression,
could cure mere dull spirits, it
would be the Physician of
Humanity. But it can. It has the
secret, a hundred secrets, for
the lifting of the world’s
gloom.
It cannot
immediately remove the
physiological causes of
dulness— though obedience to
its principles can do an infinity
to prevent them, and its
inspirations can do even more to
lift the mind above them.
But where
the causes are moral or mental or
social the remedy is in every
Christian’s hand. Think of
any one at this moment whom the
Spirit of Heaviness haunts. You
think of a certain old woman.
But you
know for a fact that you can cure
her. You did so, perfectly, only
a week ago. A mere visit, and a
little present, or the visit
without any present, set her up
for seven long days, and seven
long nights.
The
machinery of the Kingdom is very
simple and very silent, and the
most silent parts do most, and we
all believe so little in the
medicines of Christ that we do
not know what ripples of healing
are set in motion when we simply
smile on one another.
Christianity
wants nothing so much in the
world as sunny people, and the
old are hungrier for love than
for bread, and the Oil of Joy is
very cheap, and if you can help
the poor on with a Garment of
Praise, it will be better for
them than blankets.
Or perhaps
you know someone else who is
dull—not an old woman this
time, but a very rich and
important man. But you also know
perfectly what makes him dull. It
is either his riches or his
importance.
Christianity
can cure either of these though
you may not be the person to
apply the cure—at a single
hearing.
Or here is
a third case, one of your own
servants. It is a case of
monotony. Prescribe more variety,
leisure, recreation—anything
to relieve the wearing strain.
A fourth
case—your most honoured
guest: Condition—leisure,
health, accomplishments, means;
Disease—Spiritual Obesity;
Treatment—talent to be put
out to usury. And so on down the
whole range of life’s
dejection and ennui.
Perhaps you
tell me this is not Christianity
at all; that everybody could do
that. The curious thing is that
everybody does not. Good-will to
men came into the world with
Christ, and wherever that is
found, in Christian or heathen
land, there Christ is, and there
His Spirit works.
And if you
say that the chief end of
Christianity is not the
world’s happiness, I agree;
it was never meant to be; but the
strange fact is that, without
making it its chief end, it
wholly and infallibly, and quite
universally, leads to it.
Hence the
note of Joy, though not the
highest on Christ’s
Programme, is a loud and ringing
note, and none who serve in His
Society can be long without its
music. Time was when a Christian
used to apologize for being
happy. But the day has always
been when he ought to apologize
for being miserable.
Christianity,
you will observe, really works.
And it succeeds not only because
it is divine, but because it is
so very human—because it is
common-sense.
Why should
the Garment of Praise destroy the
Spirit of Heaviness?
Because an
old woman cannot sing and cry at
the same moment. The Society of
Christ is a sane Society. Its
methods are rational. The
principle in the old woman’s
case is simply that one emotion
destroys another.
Christianity
works, as a railway man would
say, with points. It switches
souls from valley lines to
mountain lines, not stemming the
currents of life but diverting
them. In the rich man’s case
the principle of cure is
different, but it is again
principle, not necromancy. His
spirit of heaviness is caused,
like any other heaviness, by the
earth’s attraction.
Take away
the earth and you take away the
attraction. But if Christianity
can do anything it can take away
the earth. By the wider extension
of horizon which it gives, by the
new standard of values, by the
mere setting of life’s small
pomps and interests and
admirations in the light of the
Eternal, it dissipates the world
with a breath. All that tends to
abolish worldliness tends to
abolish unrest, and hence, in the
rush of modern life, one
far-reaching good of all even
commonplace Christian preaching,
all Christian literature, all
which holds the world doggedly to
the idea of a God and a future
life, and reminds mankind of
Infinity and Eternity.
Side by
side with these influences, yet
taking the world at a wholly
different angle, works another
great Christian force.
How many
opponents of religion are aware
that one of the specific objects
of Christ’s society is
Beauty?
The charge
of vulgarity against Christianity
is an old one. If it means that
Christianity deals with the ruder
elements in human nature, it is
true, and that is its glory. But
if it means that it has no
respect for the finer qualities,
the charge is baseless.
For
Christianity not only encourages
whatsoever things are lovely, but
wars against that whole theory of
life which would exclude them. It
prescribes aestheticism. It
proscribes asceticism. And for
those who preach to Christians
that in these enlightened days
they must raise the masses by
giving them noble sculptures and
beautiful paintings and music and
public parks, the answer is that
these things are all already
being given, and given daily, and
with an increasing sense of their
importance, by the Society of
Christ.
Take away
from the world the beautiful
things which have not come from
Christ and you will make it
poorer scarcely at all. Take away
from modern cities the paintings,
the monuments, the music for the
people, the museums and the parks
which are not the gifts of
Christian men and Christian
municipalities, and in ninety
cases out of a hundred you will
leave them unbereft of so much as
a well-shaped
lamp-post
It is
impossible to doubt that the
Decorator of the World shall not
continue to serve to His later
children, and in ever finer
forms, the inspirations of
beautiful things. More fearlessly
than he has ever done, the
Christian of modern life will use
the noble spiritual leverages of
Art.
That this
world, the people’s world,
is a bleak and ugly world, we do
not forget; it is ever with us.
But we esteem too little the
mission of beautiful things in
haunting the mind with higher
thoughts and begetting the mood
which leads to God.
Physical
beauty makes moral beauty.
Loveliness does more than destroy
ugliness; it destroys matter. A
mere touch of it in a room, in a
street, even on a door knocker,
is a spiritual force. Ask the
working-man’s wife, and she
will tell you there is a moral
effect even in a clean
table-cloth. If a barrel-organ in
a slum can but drown a curse, let
no Christian silence it. The mere
light and colour of the
wall-advertisements are a gift of
God to the poor man’s sombre
world.
One
Christmas-time a poor drunkard
told me that he had gone out the
night before to take his usual
chance of the temptations of the
street. Close to his door, at a
shop window, an angel—so he
said—arrested him. It was a
large Christmas-card, a glorious
white thing with tinsel wings,
and as it glittered in the
gas-light it flashed into his
soul a sudden thought of Heaven.
It recalled the earlier heaven of
his infancy, and he thought of
his mother in the distant glen,
and how it would please her if
she got this Christmas angel from
her prodigal.
With money
already pledged to the devil he
bought the angel, and with it a
new soul and future for himself.
That was a real angel. For that
day as I saw its tinsel pinions
shine in his squalid room I knew
what Christ’s angels were.
They are all beautiful things,
which daily in common homes are
bearing up heavy souls to
God.
But do not
misunderstand me. This angel was
made of pasteboard: a pasteboard
angel can never save a soul.
Tinsel reflects the sun, but
warms nothing. Our Programme must
go deeper. Beauty may arrest the
drunkard, but it cannot cure
him.
It is here
that Christianity asserts itself
with a supreme individuality. It
is here that it parts company
with Civilization, with Politics,
with all secular schemes of
Social Reform. In its diagnosis
of human nature it finds that
which most other systems ignore;
which, if they see, they cannot
cure; which, left undestroyed,
makes every reform futile, and
every inspiration vain. That
thing is Sin.
Christianity,
of all other philanthropies,
recognizes that man’s
devouring need is
Liberty—liberty to stop
sinning; to leave the prison of
his passions, and shake off the
fetters of his past. To surround
Captives with statues and
pictures, to offer
Them-that-are-Bound a higher wage
or a cleaner street or a few more
cubic feet of air per head, is
solemn trifling. It is a cleaner
soul they want; a purer air, or
any air at all, for their higher
selves.
And where
the cleaner soul is to come from
apart from Christ I cannot tell.
“By no political
alchemy,” Herbert Spencer
tells us, “can you get
golden conduct out of leaden
instincts.” The power to set
the heart right, to renew the
springs of action, comes from
Christ.
The sense
of the infinite worth of the
single soul, and the
recoverableness of man at his
worst, are the gifts of Christ.
The freedom from guilt, the
forgiveness of sins, come from
Christ’s Cross; the hope of
immortality springs from
Christ’s grave. We believe
in the gospel of better laws and
an improved environment; we hold
the religion of Christ to be a
social religion; we magnify and
call Christian the work of
reformers, statesmen,
philanthropists, educators,
inventors, sanitary officers, and
all who directly or remotely aid,
abet, or further the higher
progress of mankind; but in Him
alone, in the fulness of that
word, do we see the Saviour of
the world.
There are
earnest and gifted lives to-day
at work among the poor whose lips
at least will not name the name
of Christ.
I speak of
them with respect; their
shoe-latchets many of us are not
worthy to unloose. But because
the creed of the neighbouring
mission-hall is a travesty of
religion they refuse to
acknowledge the power of the
living Christ to stop man’s
sin, of the dying Christ to
forgive it.
O,
narrowness of breadth! Because
there are ignorant doctors do I
yet rail at medicine or start an
hospital of my own? Because the
poor raw evangelist, or the
narrow ecclesiastic, offer their
little all to the poor, shall I
repudiate all they do not know of
Christ because of the little that
they do know? Of gospels for the
poor which have not some theory,
state it how you will, of
personal conversion one cannot
have much hope. Personal
conversion means for life a
personal religion, a personal
trust in God, a personal debt to
Christ, a personal dedication to
His cause.
These,
brought about how you will, are
supreme things to aim at, supreme
losses if they are missed.
Sanctification will come to
masses only as it comes to
individual men; and to work with
Christ’s Programme and
ignore Christ is to utilize the
sun’s light without its
energy.
But this is
not the only point at which the
uniqueness of this Society
appears. There is yet another
depth in humanity which no other
system even attempts to sound. We
live in a world not only of sin
but of sorrow—
“There
is no flock, however watched and
tended,
But one
dead lamb is
there;
There is
no home, howe’er
defended,
But has
one vacant
chair.”
When the
flock thins, and the chair
empties, who is to be near to
heal? At that moment the gospels
of the world are on trial. In the
presence of death how will they
act?
Act! They
are blotted out of existence.
Philosophy, Politics, Reforms,
are no more. The Picture
Galleries close. The sculptures
hide. The Committees disperse.
There is crape on the door; the
world withdraws. Observe, it
withdraws. It has no
mission.
So awful in
its loneliness was this hour that
the Romans paid a professional
class; to step in with its
mummeries and try to fill it. But
that is Christ’s own hour.
Next to Righteousness the
greatest word of Christianity is
Comfort.
Christianity
has almost a monopoly of Comfort
Renan was never nearer the mark
than when he spoke of the Bible
as “the great Book of the
Consolation of Humanity.”
Christ’s Programme is full
of Comfort, studded with Comfort:
“to bind up the
Broken-Hearted, to Comfort all
that mourn, to Give unto them
that mourn in Zion.” Even
the “good tidings” to
the “meek” are, in the
Hebrew, a message to the
“afflicted” or
“the poor.”
The word
Gospel itself comes down through
the Greek from this very passage,
so that whatever else
Christ’s Gospel means it is
first an Evangel for suffering
men.
One note in
this Programme jars with all the
rest. When Christ read from
Isaiah that day He never finished
the passage. A terrible word,
Vengeance, yawned like a
precipice across His path; and in
the middle of a sentence “He
closed the Book, and gave it
again to the minister, and sat
down”. A Day of Vengeance
from our God—these were the
words before which Christ paused.
When the
prophet proclaimed it some great
historical fulfilment was in his
mind. Had the people to whom
Christ read been able to
understand its ethical
equivalents He would probably
have read on. For, so understood,
instead of filling the mind with
fear, the thought of this dread
Day inspires it with a solemn
gratitude. The work of the
Avenger is a necessity. It is
part of God’s
philanthropy.
For I have
but touched the surface in
speaking of the sorrow of the
world as if it came from people
dying. It comes from people
living.
Before ever
the Broken-Hearted can be healed
a hundred greater causes of
suffering than death must be
destroyed. Before the Captive can
be free a vaster prison than his
own sins must be demolished.
There are
hells on earth into which no
breath of heaven can ever come;
these must be swept away. There
are social soils in which only
unrighteousness can flourish;
these must be broken
up.
And that is
the work of the Day of Vengeance.
When is that day? It is now. Who
is the Avenger? Law. What Law?
Criminal Law, Sanitary Law,
Social Law, Natural Law. Wherever
the poor are trodden upon or
tread upon one another; wherever
the air is poison and the water
foul; wherever want stares, and
vice reigns, and rags
rot—there the Avenger takes
his stand.
Whatever
makes it more difficult for the
drunkard to reform, for the
children to be pure, for the
widow to earn a wage, for any of
the wheels of progress to
revolve—with these he deals.
Delay him not. He is the
messenger of Christ. Despair of
him not, distrust him not. His
Day dawns slowly, but his work is
sure.
Though evil
stalks the world, it is on the
way to execution; though wrong
reigns, it must end in
self-combustion. The very nature
of things is God’s Avenger;
the very story of civilization is
the history of Christ’s
Throne.
Anything
that prepares the way for a
better social state is the fit
work of the followers of Christ.
Those who
work on the more spiritual levels
leave too much unhonoured the
slow toil of multitudes of
unchurched souls who prepare the
material or moral environments
without which these higher
labours are in vain.
Prevention
is Christian as well as cure; and
Christianity travels sometimes by
the most circuitous paths. It is
given to some to work for
immediate results, and from year
to year they are privileged to
reckon up a balance of success.
But these are not always the
greatest in the Kingdom of God.
The men who
get no stimulus from any visible
reward, whose lives pass while
the objects for which they toil
are still too far away to comfort
them; the men who hold aloof from
dazzling schemes and earn the
misunderstanding of the crowd
because they foresee remoter
issues, who even oppose a seeming
good because a deeper evil lurks
beyond—these are the
statesmen of the Kingdom of
God.
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