Quiet Talks on Personal Problems

Life is a school. There are hard sums to do; new words to learn, and new meanings of words; knotty problems to tug at and solve, solve partly and then a little more. Knowing some gives zest for more; and always there is more, and never an end. Dear Doctor Babcock sang,

“Some day the bell will sound,
‘Some day my heart will bound,
As, with a shout
That school is out
And lessons done,
I homeward rim.”

Yet the day he thought of, while it brought rare .delight in knowing and resting, was simply his entering upon an after-course in the Teacher’s own room.

These talks are about some of the problems of life. They touch only personal problems, and only a few of them, and only some parts of these. They touch only problems and the phases of them that have come up in my own schoolroom work. That has seemed best. The men who have helped me most have been those who let me draw near, and peer in, and see something of their own struggles and victories, the moist brow as they tugged, the hard breathing under stress, and the glory-light that came afterwards. All truth must go through the testing fire of one’s own experience before it catches fire in others.

I am still working at these problems; still in the laboratory. At times a wondrous quiet light steals in to make it clear where it was dark and bothersome. Always there is a sense of the great Teacher’s presence, and the restful thought that He knows by contact with things down here. That light gives great joy, and that presence great peace.

THE PROBLEM OF SIN

The Law of Sin.

Six Sides of Sin.

Seven Facts about Sin.

Unloosing the Demons of Sin.

The Logical Result of Sin.

The Sinless Man.

The Open Life-door.

Sln Needs Double Treatment.

The ugly face of sin pushes in everywhere. It has to be reckoned with by everybody. Sin is so ingrained in life that it is constantly being considered. It is one of the most practical of all problems, and one of the most personal, too. If a banker is engaging a new teller to be trusted with the bank’s funds he is obliged to think of certain phases of the sin question. If the manager of a great railroad is studydng how to operate the vast system to the best advantage of his directors, and for the pubHc’s safety and convenience, he is forced to study carefully the sin question, even though not from a moral standpoint.

If a mother and father are eager for their child to be strong and pure and intelligent they need to know something about the law of life, and the results of disobeying it. If a man would live long and hold his vigor; if a maiden would retain her beauty and gentleness of spirit; above all, if one would live a life pure and strong, pleasing to God and helpful to his generation, the problem of sin must be thought about and grasped, at least in part. And the earlier and more thorough the thinking the better.

In the English translation of an old Greek classic there occurs a remarkable sentence about sin. It is a strange little sentence of just six words, peculiar in its makeup and packed full of condensed vitality: “The wages of sin is death.” There are no adjectives, nor adverbs, nor other such qualifying words. There are just three hard, knotty, disagreeable nouns, “wages,” “sin,” “death”; with only enough other parts of speech to hold these securely together.

These nouns are the bones of the sentence; the other words the ligaments that hold the bones in place. There is no soft padding and rounding of flesh. The intensity of suppressed feeling underneath comes out in the very shortness and sharpness of both the sentence and each of its chief words. There is not even enough stopping on the way to give any coloring to these three rugged, sharp-edged words. Each comes blurting out, goes straight to the bull’s-eye of the target, and hits it with a sharp ringing noise — “The wages of sin is death.”

That is not true because it is written in this old Book of God. It is in the book because it is true. It had been written down in many other books before it found Paul’s pen here. Any breaking of the natural order of life brings a penalty; and the penalty is always a death penalty.

It has been written in the book of nature as with sharp chisel edge in flinty rock. In the State of Kentucky is a great cave. In the cave is a river flowing. In the river are fish. They are like other fish essentially with one exception, they have no eyes. There is an eye socket. But where the eyeball should be there is instead the withered-up carcass of an eyeball, or none at all. It is a law of life that what we do not use we lose. All of nature’s gifts are held by use. These fish did not use their eyes. In the absence of light they could not. And through lack of use persisted in for an untold length of time, they lost both the power of use and the organ of use. The wages of sin is death. Any breakage oi a law of life carries with it a penalty, and that penalty is always a death penalty.

That sentence has been written down very big with indelible ink in the book of nations. Years ago Spain was at the head of the great powers of the world. Her ships swept the seas victoriously and defiantly. But Spain as a nation broke one of the great laws of human life. It is a law of life written in the spirit of man that every man shall be free to worship God as he thinks to be right. Spain ruthlessly, with iron-clad fist, broke that law. She said to her sons, ‘’You shall worship not as you think best but as I decree.” Her sons showed the inherent greatness of the nation by refusing. And Spain stained her soil with the blood of thousands of her best sons. And Spain died as a first-class power, a second-class, a thirdclass, and more yet. Her proud position of leadership was lost. Her death was by suicide. The wages of sin is death. Failure to obey the great simple laws of life contains in itseK a sure penalty, a death penalty.

It has been written, and still is being written, in the lives of men, with letters many times traced in a living red. The Wizard of the North in Great Britain, splendid Walter Scott, felt keenly the sharp edge of debt and financial disgrace. He said imperiously to his great brain, “You shall pay these debts,” and greatly it responded to his whip. And the law of the body that sets limits to the work that may be done was broken, badly broken. And that great man began dying early, and that remarkable brain knew the death of its powers, before the last ebb of life had slipped from his body. The wages of sin is death. Disobedience of the law of life carries with it a knotted whip, whose cut and slash and sting always means a death of some sort.

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