The Glory of Simplicity

“But let your communication be ‘Yea, yea; ‘Nay, nay’: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.” — Matthew v. 37.

This is the Quaker’s verse. It is associated always with the spirit and the habits of that interesting company of men and women who have devoted themselves to the cultivation of simplicity, and have enthroned quietude and peace as the gentle and mighty monarchs of their life. And yet it must not be their verse alone. No grace and no condition can be given up to any one group of men as if it belonged to them exclusively. No doubt, as Christendom divides itself at present, it is true that each of the groups or sects into which it is divided is notable for the preeminence of some one quality, or ambition, or form of Christian thought, but evidently it holds that special treasure by no exclusive charter. It holds it in trust and charge for all the rest. It is almost as if each of these groups were a peculiar garden into which each new plant that was to be acclimated and appropriated into the great kingdom of the Christian life were brought for special cultivation. There it is made much of, and surrounded by the best conditions, and guarded from the dangers which most easily beset it. The walls are built to keep away the winds which this plant dreads. The streams bring it the water which it most loves. The gardeners of that special garden studies its peculiar character and habits. In every way that garden devotes itself to that one plant, but it is not because the plant belongs to that one garden and to it alone. It is the property of all the kingdom; and by and by, when the nursery has done its work and the plant is thoroughly naturalized and acclimated, it is sent abroad and blooms on every hillside and in every valley through the land. So it is when a particular quality or a particular truth is committed to a certain church or to a certain age to cultivate. It belongs to universal life — to all the churches and to all the ages. It is but trusted to this special group for special cultivation. All the time that it is being specially cultivated there it is flourishing also as it may in all the larger world; and by and by the special cultivation sends it out into the larger world to be the property and portion of the whole. Therefore it is not for itself alone, but for all Christendom and all mankind, that Quakerism has made its assertion and cultivation of simplicity.

I want to speak this morning about the glory of simplicity. All life continually tends to complication. It is so with the individual life as it grows up from youth to manhood. It is so with the corporate life of men as it grows more and more highly civilized. Where is the man who does not look back to his youth and think how few were the things which he had then to do, how uncomplicated were the arrangements which he had then to make, compared with the intricate confusion which fills his life to-day? And where is the community which does not look back with longing to the primitive standards and natural habits in which history tells it that its fathers lived only a few short centuries ago? When Jesus came into Jerusalem He found this complication flourishing abundantly about Him. Elaborateness was everywhere. Great, tedious ceremonials occupied the temple service. Long lists of rules and arbitrary laws had overspread the simplicity of the ten commandments. Society was a most intricate system of castes and classes. Thought, as the Rabbis guided it, turned and twisted and retwisted on itself in endless subtleties. Every hair had to be split and split again. Every definition had to be defined and re-defined a thousand times. Now there are various indications in the Gospels that the Jews wanted Jesus to accept this system of things, and to come in among them and join in their hair-splitting, and be a Rabbi like themselves. But the glory of His conduct, the testimony of His divinity, was that He refused. He struck this whole mass of complication and elaboration aside, and set a few big, broad simple truths and laws in the place which they had occupied, and bade them reflect the broad sunshine of God; and so He saved the world.

What He did all the great teachers and saviours of the world have done. They have all been simplifiers. The second order of the world’s helpers has been largely made of those who brought in some new bit of helpfulness, and so added to the complication of which the world is full. But the first order of helpful men, to which but few of the greatest of mankind belong, has been made up of those who so asserted and illuminated and glorified and made powerful the eternal, elementary truths and forces that they stood out sufficient and alone, and burnt up, as it were, all the half-lights and pale reflections of themselves of which the sky had become full.

How passionate sometimes in the midst of the most beautiful and interesting of complicated life becomes this craving for simplicity! What strange forms of exhibition it assumes! The youth leaves impatiently the gilded and cushioned luxury where he was born and bred, and is found by and by in the depths of the prairies herding his cattle like a true son of Adam. - The man of many learnings casts his many books away and goes to some manual toil which seems to bring him back to the hard primitive things by whose touch he reclaims the earth and identifies himself as man. The king disappears from the throne, and his voice is heard chanting in the cloister. The woman turns from the complicated whirl of society and becomes the sister of charity The connoisseur sweeps all the accumulated bric-k-brac of a lifetime away and sits down to ponder on one single statue or to fathom the secret of a single picture, or takes refuge in the loveliness of nature which lies behind all the pictures. Everywhere this craving for simplicity is at the bottom of all complication. The barbarian is at the heart of every son of civilization. The fresh morning is within the hot bosom of every noon, filling it with dim aspirations and regrets and hopes.

But all is not said when we say this. Still, sing the praises of simplicity as loudly as we will, the question comes most urgently “What kind of simplicity is possible for a man or for a race which has once left the primary simplicity behind and developed into the elaborate conditions of ripened life?” It cannot be the old simplicity back again just as it used to be. The full-blown rose can never fold itself into a bud again. The world is never going to tear down its cities, and dress itself once more in bearskins, and take to the wigwams and the woods again. And if a man or two leaves the study for the workshop or the palace for the monastery, we are almost sure that they find they have carried within them the complication away from which they ran; and that while their hands are busy at the primary toils of man, their hearts are tossed and crossed with the old problems and contradictions which they brought with them out of the heart of their puzzled books or of the tumultuous world. No, it is not by any mere reversion to a long-past childhood that the man’s life or the world’s life is to be simplified again. That is all past and over. It never can return. And by the same token it cannot be by mere excision and exclusion till, interest after interest being lopped away, only one or two interests are left. That will not do. You do not truly make life simple by mak ing it meagre. It is as if you tried to simplify a tree by cutting off its branches. You either kill the tree and it is a tree no longer, or else, if it still lives, it instantly puts forth new branches and the old complication is there again before you know. Not so! Not so! It is not by excision and rejection that the simplicity of life is gained. The unity which comes by meagreness is far too dearly bought and is not really unity.

And how, then, can it come? Is not its method felt in those deep words of Jesus, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you?” Seek ye the centre and ye shall possess the sphere.

There is a great principle, a great truth, large enough, elementary, absolute, universal enough to enclose and enfold all the fragmentariness of living and make life one. “The kingdom of God and His righteousness,” so Jesus calls it. It is the fact of the power and the goodness of God, the fact that the good God is king, which is able thus to embrace all life and make it one. Take a king out of a kingdom and it falls to pieces. He is at once its centre and its envelope. By his force within it and his pressure round it he holds it into unity; and all its parts within it freely play without disturbing its simplicity.

What is the meaning of this religiously to us? If we believe in God, if God is a reality to us, our life is not distracted whatever be the multiplicity of its details. You are a score of things, and life seems to be pulled a score of ways by the conflicting claims of the score of things you are. Your family pulls you one way and your business another, and your ambition another, and by and by one fragment of you is working here and another there; and your self, that core and heart of you which cannot be torn apart by any distraction, is flying and rushing here and there, and trying to regulate and rule these tumultuous kingdoms, and failing always. What then? Can you believe in God? Do you know that He loves you? Do you know that you are His? If you do, the moment that you do, it is as if a great hand was put underneath and around all this complexity and distraction, and — without any .true part of your life being crowded out, all being kept complete — the whole was gently, strongly pressed into a whole, a unit. One motive fills all these parts of life, and they become harmonious. One love pervades them and they love each other. The simplicity of a system asserts itself — a simplicity like the God’s from whom it comes — so that as we declare of Him, in the same way the harmonized parts of us declare of us, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” Each man is a true universe, a cosmos, an order all the more simple for its complexity of parts.

Do you know what this means? Indeed you must know, or else you have got to do one or other of two things. Either you have got to strip piece after piece, interest after interest, of your life away until you attain the meagre simplicity of the unorganized atom; or else you have got to give up the hope and thought of all simplicity, and just lie loose and dejected — a score of pieces of a man, each running independently and spasmodically, but not one man at all. You cannot do either of these things, and so you must come to the simplicity of the child of God.

Thus I have tried to describe the only method of simplicity which lies open to the life of the busy and thoughtful man, the man who cannot starve his life into meagreness, and at the same time cannot be satisfied with mere multitudinousness of life which has no principle of unity.

And now let us see how such a simplicity as that, when it has entered into a man’s life, satisfies and fills and rules it. Here is a growing and expanding nature. It is always reaching forward, always desiring to be more and to do more to-morrow than to-day. Now the question of that nature’s activity will practically be this: whether it shall expand itself by leaving the old and going abroad to find new things for its possession, or by more and more complete possession of the things it has. The first is the method of ever-increasing complication. The second is the method of perpetual simplicity. The first is full of restlessness, the second is all calm.

Do we not know the difference? How many of our lives are feverish with the perpetual search after new things when the things which we have now have not begun to be exhausted. We are like children with our houses strewn with half-read books and half-played games and half-eaten fruit; who stand at the doorway crying out into the open world for more instead of giving ourselves to the richer uses of what we have already.

The reason of such a state of things must be either that what we already have is not large enough and

-/ rich enough, or that its largeness and richness have not been enough apprehended by us. We have not found our simplicity in God. If we had we should never dream of exhaustion.

The clear illustration of this I find in the New Testament. Christ comes and preaches, the new teacher, the great revealer of the truth of God to man. I think that all men have been surprised sometimes at what seemed the simplicity, almost the meagreness, of the teachings of Jesus. There are such multitudes of questions for which every philosopher has had his answer, but which Christ never touches. There are such wide regions of curious speculation where all our feet insist on wandering, but which He never enters. Think of what we should have expected. “He is coming to us direct from God. Now we shall know everything. He will tell us everything.” But, on the contrary, how was it? How calmly the old truths fell from His lips! What richness and novelty opened in them as He spoke them! How, to those who heard with ears worthy of the lips with which He spoke, the old truths — the truths of God and the soul and immortality — became enough, so deep they grew as He proclaimed them! What need was there for Him to go afield for far-fetched truths, when right here at His feet the old world was so rich? It is His simple “Yea, yea,” spoken of the eternal verities which the world has always seemed to know, that has flooded the world with new light and salvation.

Wonderful is he who takes us by the hand and leads us into regions of whose very existence we had not known before. This wonderfulness there is certainly in Jesus. More wonderful still is He who on the old ground where we stand bids the mine open and the diamond shine, bids the fountain burst and the waters flow; and it is this wonderfulness that makes Jesus truly and entirely the Saviour of the world.

Again, think how men use their Bibles. There are so many of the Bible students who are forever finding obscure, difficult, out-of-the-way passages, and treating them as if they had the marrow and substance of the Gospel in them. Some mystic verse in St. John’s revelation, some occult computation from the prophecy of Daniel, has often so taken possession of a man or of a sect that all the great remainder of the Bible seemed to fade back into insignificance. It was as if these readers had exhausted all that the great, simple, healthy Gospels had to say, and had nothing left to listen to except this enigmatical and dubious voice speaking out of the darkness in a language which no man could understand. Very often it has seemed as if “knowledge of the Bible” consisted in the possession of theories regarding such comet-like texts which shoot across the sky of Revelation, rather than devout intimacy with the majestic simplicity of the revelation of God and the revelation of man, which are the tranquil stars that burn always and lighten all the heavens.

Indeed, one of the strange things in the whole history of Christianity has been the way in which many souls have seemed not merely to miss but to prefer to miss its great simplicity. What an amount of reverent and devoted study has been given to strange doctrines, such as the doctrine of the historic fall of man, or the doctrine of the second advent of the Saviour, or the doctrine of the correspondence of the types of the Old Testament with the events of the New, or the doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christ. Men’s minds have hovered around them with a strange, unhealthy fascination. Theories have risen from them like mists out of dim fields, often very beautiful, as beautiful as they were thin and unsubstantial; while all the time the great solid truths, of man’s divine lineage and God’s much-manifested love and Christ’s redemption of the soul by sacrifice have lain, not denied, but unopened, unsounded for the depths of unfound richness that is in them. I am sure that much of the character of a Christian’s faith may be tested by its simplicity, by whether he finds abundant richness in the great, primary fundamental truths or whether his mind wanders among fantastic doctrines, and values ideas not for their naturalness but for their strangeness; not for the way in which they satisfy and feed, but for the way in which they startle and surprise the human soul.

There is no region in which all this is more true than in men’s speculation about the life which lies beyond the grave. Nowhere does the difference between the healthiness of simplicity and the unhealthiness of complicated and elaborate curiosity so visibly appear. People who hardly believe that there is such a thing as a future life at all will speculate on its details, will sit holding their breath while mediums who have no touch of common sympathy try to bring souls together in carnal manifestation, whose intimacy is too sacred for any but themselves to share. It is not this that brings comfort and peace. It is not this that lifts the souls on earth to live already the divine life which their kindred souls are living in the celestial world. No morbid dream of knowledge which is not for me, no fancied sight into the detailed occupations of the spiritual life — only the great, broad, simple certainty that the friend I love is in the perfect company and care, is held fast in the tender and majestic love of God — only this I want to satisfy my soul. The Bible tells us one thing — only one — about the dead who have passed out of our sight. They are with God. How simple that is! How sufficient it becomes! How cheap and tawdry, as we dwell in it, it makes the guesses and conceits with which men try to make real to themselves what the dead are doing! They are with God. Their occupations are ineffable. No tongue can tell their new, untasted joy. The scenery in the midst of which they live speaks to the spirit with voices which no words born of the senses can describe. But the companionship and care, — those are the precious, those are the intelligible things. The dead are with God. O you who miss even to-day the sound of the familiar voices, the sight of the dear, familiar faces, believe and be more than satisfied with that.

There is no sign of ripening life which is more gracious and more beautiful than the capacity and disposition to find richness in the simplest and healthiest associations. Have you never had an experience like this? Have you never had a friend whom you have long known, in whom you found much to enjoy and to be grateful for, but whom at last you seemed to have exhausted and outgrown? You went abroad to natures which fascinated you more. You felt the power of some man in whom there was some sort of one-sided and fantastic power, in whom there was more violence of light and shade, in whom the very manifestness of defect made certain promontories of possession peculiarly picturesque and attractive. You revelled in his strange unhealthy power. Something, it may be, almost weird came out in yourself to answer his romantic inspiration. But by and by he too failed you and did not satisfy. Some morning that which had been so dramatic looked only theatrical to you. His high lights and great gulfs of darkness wearied you. And then have you never turned back to the simplicity of your first friendship, and found to your amazement how unexhausted, how inexhaustible it was? There stood the deep, quiet nature on whose surface you had scratched and fumbled, but where profoundness lay yet all untouched. His healthiness refreshed you as if you came out of a torchlighted cavern into the sunlight and the breeze. His calm “Yea, yea; nay, nay,” truthful and strong, swept all the frantic extravagances and overstrained exaggerations out of your soul, and you rejoiced in a great cleanness and freshness. Giving yourself to him again you found him opening to you treasures which you never found before, — as men come back with the tools of civiHzation in their hands, and work great wealth of gold out of the mines which their barbarian ancestors thought they had exhausted ages ago.

Sometimes the truth about God and His relation to our human life seems to shape itself exactly into this, that He stands waiting, in infinite patience, till His children out of their restlessness and wanderings come back to find the satisfaction of their souls in Him. We just touch Him in our childhood; our first implicit faith gets just the surface blessings of His love, as the childish savages gather the grains of gold which lie shining on the surface of the ground. Then we go off, fascinated by some eccentric, tumultuous utterance of power, and we give ourselves up to some passion for the distorted or unreal. We make long journeys in search of bags of gold which spirits tells us that the genii have hidden in the holes of rocks across the seas; and all the while there lies the mine with its good, hidden gold. All the while there waits God with His great satisfaction for the soul of man; and some day we come to ourself and say “I will arise and go to my Father.” Some day the false lights fade, the partial shows its partialness. Out of the depth of the earth where the gold is hidden the call sounds, “Come unto me.” Out of the healthiness of the divine life our hearts recognize the summons as we come back to the God we thought we had exhausted, forsooth, when we left Him in our nursery, and find in humiliation and

ly in joy that He is the strength of our life and “our portion forever,” that which eternity itself cannot exhaust.

God is so healthy. That is indeed the meaning of His holiness. In Him no part or quahty grows tyrannical over the rest. In His timeless existence the present cannot be sacrificed to the future, nor the future to the present. The eternal necessities are in Him, so that He does not submit His will to them; they are His will. His Yea and Nay are the creations and distinctions of the world. When He says to your disturbed, distracted, restless soul, or mine, “Come unto me,” He is saying, come out of the strife and doubt and struggle of what is at the moment where you stand, into that which was and is and is to be, — the eternal, the essential, the absolute. Let go the fascination of the unhealthy and the exceptional, come to the everlasting health, the great natural and normal life which lies under the fretfulness of living as the great sea underlies the fretful waves, — “Come unto me.”

Even in regions which we do not call religious, we recognize this power of the absolute and simple to call souls to itself; and we see how the truest souls are they who answer to the call, and how the souls which answer to the call become the truest. The healthiness and simplicity of the highest genius is remarkable. Genius of the second rank may be fantastical, complicated, living in regions of its own, lighted by fitful stars of morbid fascinating brilliance; but genius of the first order, the few very highest souls — Shakespeare, Plato, and Homer — live in the universal light and air. They speak intelligently to their fellow-men. They shine with a true, colorless light. They move upon the world like the true air of heaven. Their “yea” and “nay” are inexhaustible because they are the essential affirmations and denials of the universe; they are the positives and negatives of the eternal truth. Therefore it is that we come back to them for peace and highest inspiration out of the turmoil of excited literature which eddies and foams about us, and tosses us to distraction. Therefore it is that men of their quality, however small they may be, have always life-giving and peace-giving power; and men turn back to the man who is simple, broad, healthy, and true, as the sailor who has rejoiced in the contortions and distractions of the sea, turns, when the twilight comes, to the peace of the deep-rooted shore and the rest of the meadows where the flowers grow out of the unmeasured depth of fruitful earth.

Thus we talk of the simplicity of God, thus we talk of the simplicity of the profoundest and truest men. It is the exhibition of both of these simplicities which we behold in Jesus, and which makes His healthiness, His holiness. One of the noblest signs of how true our human nature is at the bottom is the way in which, notwithstanding all the fascination which the unhealthy forms of power have had for men, the strongest hold that ever has been laid upon the human heart has been laid there by the simple, healthy Christ. It is not His miracles, it is His nature which holds the world and will not let it go. Men are shouting and screaming all about Him with their partial truths, their temporary standards, their intoxicated joys, their frantic and galvanic shows of power. You are wondering to which fanaticism you shall give up your life, which form of unhealthy thought or action you shall make your own, since it seems as if only in unhealthiness was power or joy to be attained; and just then, when you are all ready to throw yourself into the fire of some frenzy, Jesus steps before you and says, “Give yourself to Me “; and then, looking into His face, you see that there is your true master. For look, what it will be to serve Him. He never will ask you to distort a truth even for the very highest purpose. He never will ask you to do wrong to-day that you or other men may do right to-morrow. He not merely will not tempt you. He will not allow you to bring the high standards of living down to what seem the powers of your life. He will bid you trust your fellow-men and not suspect them; assuring you that it is better to be cheated a hundred times and to be imposed upon continually than to fail to help one soul which you might help, or to shut the door of the better life in the face of any child of God who is trying to come in. Above all, He will open to you the great simple sources of truth and power, and make them the exhaustless feeders of your soul. These things He has done wherever souls have got genuinely and thoroughly at Him. Sometimes His church has not done these things for men. Sometimes she has done just the opposite of these things. But wherever His church has really brought Him and men together, and wherever He and men have ever really met, this has been always the result. He has done for them all these things, and the great outcome of it all has been that their lives have grown healthy and grown natural. The fantastic has been cast out. They have felt and known themselves in as true relations to the earth they lived on as its mountains or its trees. And so peace has come to them, and with peace, power.

My friends, the world we live in, the time and town we live in, are full of unhealthiness. There are exaggerations, affectations, complications, thin frenzies, theatrical excitement, fashions of passions, conventionalities of unconventionalities, till our souls grow sick and tired of it all. Where is the escape from it? Only in what St. Paul calls “The simplicity which is in Christ.” Go up into the mountain of His love and service, and you shall leave all these mists and fogs below. Drink of the water that He shall give you, and “it shall be in you a fountain of living water, springing up to everlasting life.” That is the true health of the soul. May we all come to it by Him!

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