Self-Consciousness and Self-Forgetfulness

“He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” — MATTHEW x. 39.

THERE are some words of Jesus Christ that seem to mean one special thing; and when we have found that meaning in them we seem to have grasped them entirely. There are others which are so large that we are sure they must mean many things; and any one meaning of them that we find is only one of many, one of the multitude of points at which such great words must touch human life. I think this word of Christ must mean much beside the truth that I shall try to draw out from it. I am sure it does. To “find one’s life,” To “lose one’s life,” — “life” has so many stages or layers of meaning, as it were, that those expressions may well refer to many different experiences corresponding to the kind or depth of the life which is described as being found or lost. On its very surface it reveals itself as a law of physical health, and it has in it the soundest principle for the treatment of the life of the body. In its profoundest sense, it is the standard of the everlasting judgment of souls. They are words that may stand written at the head of every page in the awful book which is to be opened for the settlement of the eternal destiny of every one of us, as we gather before the throne of Christ the Judge. You will understand, then, that I do not try to exhaust the meaning of a text so inexhaustible. I only want to tell you of one meaning of it which, I am sure, if we can take it in, will not fail to commend itself to our own experiences and needs.

4 ‘He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” The words might suggest several figures, but perhaps all this talk about finding and losing most naturally suggests the thought of that whose finding and whose loss is, in our mercenary world, the subject of our most continual anxiety. It make us think of money. Life is treated like money. And certain things are true of money, which all who have anything to do with it understand. Its value is not in itself. It gets its value from the things it can accomplish. What it will buy is what makes it so precious. The moment you separate money from the power of purchase that belongs to it, that moment all its worth is gone. The most entirely worthless thing that Robinson Crusoe saved out of the wreck, and carried on shore, was the bag of gold. It could not buy anything, could not be traded away, and so it was good for nothing. And so if any man wilfully separates money from its uses, he really destroys its value, no matter how much he may seem to be setting a special value on it. The miser who shuts his money up, and will not spend it, thereby makes it a worthless 18o SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

thing. There is nothing so valueless in all his dingy hovel as his chest of gold. The rags in which he clothes himself, the candle-end that he lights to make the darkness visible, are worth more than all his heavy chest contains. His attempt to value money for itself has made his money valueless.

.Now, the text suggests that just the same things are true of human life. Life is a means for certain purposes. Freely given to secure those purposes, it is inestimable. The instinctive delight of men as they watch a life freely given for a noble end — a “well -spent life” as they love to call it — bears witness how inestimable it is. But a life withheld from its purposes loses its value. It is like the miser’s gold, made worthless, and so lost, by the very care that is taken not to lose it. Of both money and life, can we not see how it is true that he who saves them loses them? but he who loses them for a worthy purpose gets their worth — “finds” them in the real possession of their value.

There is no difference between men that is more striking. One man is always thinking about his life, how pleasant and how beautiful it is. He is always trying to make it more pleasant. He is always comparing his days with one another to see which was the pleasantest. He is like the miser whose joy is to dip his arms into the yellow gold, and feel it ripple over his delighted hands; who delights in counting over and over the treasures the amount of which he knows by heart. Another man never impresses you as thinking much about life in itself. He never seems to be pondering whether life is pleasant or unpleasant, — nay, scarcely whether life be good or bad, so earnestly, so eagerly his soul is set on something that he has to do in life, some thing that must be done before death comes to stop him. He is like the merchant who scarcely looks at the coin or bill he gives away, so intent is he on what he is to buy with it, upon the new form in which it is to come back to him. The first man cannot bear to be distracted from the contemplation of him self. He wants to be saying to himself always, “I am happy! How happy I am!” The other man does not want to think about himself at all; he wants to see his work going on. The first is always finding his life, and yet losing its best result. The other is always losing his life, and yet living with an intensity that the first never knows.

There are, then, these three kinds of men: the spendthrifts of life, or those who value neither life nor its purposes; the misers of life, or those who value life for itself, apart from all its purposes, and so lose the real value out of life itself; and the merchants of life, who value life for what it will do, and so get the best out of life without ever seeking it.

Perhaps we can understand it better if we change our figure. Think of life as a voyage. The truest liver of the truest life is like a voyager who, as he sails, is not indifferent to all the beauty of the sea around him. The morning and the evening sun, the moonlight and the starlight, the endless change of the vast water that he floats on, the passing back and forth of other ships between him and the sky, the incidents and company on his own vessel, — all these are pleasant to him; but their pleasure is borne up by and woven in with his interest in the purpose for which he undertook the voyage. That lies beyond and that lies under the voyage all the while. He is not sailing just for the sake of sailing. He never would have undertaken the voyage for its own sake. Another man, who has no purpose beyond the voyage, is vexed and uneasy. He is so afraid of not getting the best out of it that he loses its best. The spots and imperfections in its pleasure worry him. Those are the differences of the ways in which men live. One man forgets his own life in the purposes for which his life is lived, and he is the man whose life grows richest and brightest. Another man is always thinking about himself, and so never gets beyond himself into those purposes of living out of which all the fulness of personal life may flow back to him.

It is just as true in separate regions of life as in the whole. In every occupation it is true. A clerk in a store does his work well and benefits himself the most when he thinks about his work, and not about himself. If he is always asking questions about himself: “Am I as happy as I ought to be? Am I appreciated? Am I getting on as fast as I deserve?” — if he does that you know how continually his work is hampered. If his work interests him thoroughly, and he throws himself into it with his whole soul, simply anxious to see it done as well as he can do it; then the work grows, and he grows, and both to their best.

So it is also with the scholar at his books. If he asks whether he is growing learned, he never really gets the soul of the learning that he seeks. If he can forget himself and study for the pure love of truth, or to bring up some pearl of usefulness out of the deep sea of knowledge, then his learning ripens and mellows day by day. This is the real difference between the mere pedant and dilettante and the true scholar always.

But perhaps we see it clearest of all when we think of man merely as a physical creature, man in his bodily conditions. Certainly the best use of the body is not got by the most anxious care of the body. There is a miserliness of health which is mere invalidism. There are people so careful of their physical force, so afraid of exposing it or wasting it, so afraid of catching cold or getting tired, that they never in all their lives use their physical force for one brave outburst of action. If you could make such people just forget their health entirely, and eagerly plunge into some of the multitudinous work that is waiting to be done, you are sure, not merely that more work would be accomplished, but that their health would be stronger than it is now.

Everywhere, then, self-forgetfulness is necessary for a man to get the best advantage of himself. If we require a name for that continual remembrance of one’s self which is a hindrance to every effort, we must take that word which people are rather fond of using nowadays — self-consciousness. It is almost one of the cant words of our time among certain classes of people. Many people talk about it who have very little idea of what self-consciousness really is; but, if it is really what I have been trying to describe, if it be such a thinking about one’s self, in living one’s life or doing one’s work, that the life is not lived nor the work done at its best, — if this is self-consciousness, then it certainly is not a mere fancy, it is a real thing, really hamper ing and injuring very many people, and really needing to be got rid of if it possibly can be. It is not to be spoken of with contempt, but seriously.

We sometimes fancy that the hindrance of self-consciousness must be most common in times like ours, times of elaborate civilization and of a great deal that encourages subjective life and the pondering over one’s self. We fancy some ruder age and country, where the life should be all fresh and external, where the new-born sons of the soil should live their bright, objective life, too busy in doing the tasks that an unploughed and unplanted earth held out to them to stop to think about themselves, and so getting the best out of life unconsciously. There is certainly some truth in such a fancy. The disease of self-consciousness does especially haunt the places and periods of elaborate culture, where there is more of necessary idleness, and where the work that is done is less immediately and manifestly connected with its results than in more primitive circumstances; but still it is so human that it must have prevailed wherever men have lived to suffer from it. Every where some souls must have been hindered and made unhappy by it.

When we look at self-consciousness, it is evident that it has certain traceable stages or degrees. It busies itself with the question of happiness, or the question of reputation, or the question of goodness. One man is hindered in doing the work that the Lord has given him by continually asking himself, “Am I getting the happiness that I ought to have out of the doing of my work?” Another is impeded by always asking, “Am I doing myself credit in this work of mine?” And yet another is always inquiring for the evidence of growing goodness and holiness, with a minuteness of self-inspection that prevents the very fruits from growing which he is always trying to discover. This last is a far nobler self-consciousness than the others. It cannot grow so morbid that there shall not be something noble in it. It always will be sublime to see any man, in however strange and fruitless fashion, anxious over his own inner life, and eager to know whether the activities in which he is engaged are making him better. That will always be sublime, and never will be very common. But sublime and rare as it may be, still it is evident enough that it very soon reaches a degree in which it is not good. Sure it is that those deeds which have been done in this world, the deeds which most blessed at once the world and the doer, have been those that were done under such a supreme compulsion of the deeds themselves as left no room for any self-questioning of the men who did them. David, St. Paul, Luther, they did not ask whether what they were going to do would help them, even in their best and highest natures. It was the righteousness of the thing itself, the fascination and compulsion of its righteousness, that made them do it; and then the blessing fell on them almost as much to their surprise as to that of others.

And does not your own experience miniature and confirm David’s and St. Paul’s? Must not you, too, say, “The things that have made me better have not been the things that I did by any set purpose of self-culture, but the things which attracted me and commanded me? I have always found the richest gold, not when I was hunting for it, but when I was ploughing the field for the harvest it was made to bear.”

We can have no idea how much the real effectiveness of our life is hindered by our self-consciousness, by our considering, that is, the effect of our acts upon ourselves, as well as their accomplishment of their own purposes. If we could get rid of self-consciousness, we could do our work so much more easily. With one thing, and only one, to think of — “How can I do this task as well as it is possible for me to do it?” — not asking anything about our being happy in doing it, or about what people will think of the way we do it, or even about whether we shall be made better by doing it, — with such sim plicity everywhere, how easy all our work would be! And then again, how much more work we should do! How often our hand is held back from something that evidently ought to be done, — the first healthy impulse to go and do it being restrained and checked by some question that rises about our happiness, or credit, or culture. All the men who have done enormous amounts of work have been characterized by this, — that they forgot themselves in their work.

And yet again, how much more telling our work would be upon other people! There is nothing that so destroys the influence of any act or speech as to feel that the actor or speaker is thinking about himself. There is nothing that puts such force into each, as to know that the actor or speaker has for gotten himself in what he is doing and saying. It seems so simple, and it is so hard. God comes and puts a tool into our hand and says, “Go, do that work; go, dig that ditch, or build that wall”; and we cannot go frankly and do it, and let our happiness, our credit, and our character take care of themselves, or, rather, be taken care of by Him who knew what He was about when He gave us the work. But how truly it is the noblest way, is seen by the admiration with which men look upon one who really accomplishes it, upon a brave man full of love for his work and free from self-consciousness — a servant of God forgetful of himself.

The life of Jesus Christ is the pattern of this lofty self-forgetfulness. Yet even in that pattern humanity, it seems to me, we can sometimes see the first slight movement of those dispositions which, in almost all of us, grow into morbid self-consciousness. When He talks about the foxes having holes and the birds of the air having nests, while He has nowhere to lay His head, He is certainly aware that what He is doing is cutting Him off from the ordinary comforts and happinesses of mankind. When He asks His disciples what the world says about Him, and then what they, His most confidential friends, believe about Him, there is an evident yearning of the human spirit for that appreciation which it always covets for its highest works. And when, in those unalterably sweet and sacred words at the last supper, He tells His Father that He has finished the work that had been given Him, and, like a tired child begging to be taken home, prays that He may be ‘’glorified “back again into the glory which He had “before the world was,” surely His mind was on that development of His own marvellous nature which had been going on along with His work, and which He now felt just on the brink of its completion. All this there certainly was in His life. And these are just the elements that, in our lives, grow into hindering self-consciousness. But who that reads Jesus Christ’s story thinks for a single moment that He lived in order to be happy, or in order to be appreciated, or even in order that His own nature might ripen to its fullest? No! that work of His — that work which He loved so, and before which He seemed to stand sometimes so touchingly in awe, that work which He began to do even in His babyhood, which haunted his boyhood, which filled every moment of His working years, to finish which He died at last, — that was the thing He lived for. That was His meat and drink. In His doing of that everything else came to Him; — happiness such as our hearts have never dreamed of; appreciation which has bent all the world’s knees at His name; and growth which it bewilders us to think about. He sought the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and so all other things were added to Him. So it shall be to us if we can really forget ourselves, and live and die as He did in doing the work of God.

I have said enough to show you where, I think, lies the true secret of escape from the power of self-consciousness that cripples and enfeebles us. Evidently we must have some great purpose in life, strong enough to command us out of ourselves. We must have some great work to do, so imperative and important that we shall not have time to think of ourselves in doing it. We see this wherever any great work does claim a man. The citizen who is wondering whether he is happy enough, whether he is appreciated enough, whether he is getting culture enough, suddenly hears the blast of the trumpet that tells him his country is in danger, and leaps to his feet and rushes to the field, and forgets them all in the devoted doing of a soldier’s duty; and happiness, credit, culture, come to him there as they would not come while he sat at home and called them. He gave up seeking them and they flew to him. He lost his life, and then he found it. The multitude followed Jesus from Bethsaida, and left their dinners on the other side of the lake; and by and by they were sitting on the grass by fifties, eating to the fill of bread and fish which His hands had blessed and multiplied.

I know the answer that will come at once: “There is precisely my trouble. If some great task would call me, I could leave myself and follow it. I do not think it strange that Jesus Christ, with a world to save, could forget Himself. But I, with this 19o SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

small life; I, with these petty cares, — what can I do to shake myself free from myself? what is there left for me but self-consciousness? The ship that has its freight to carry to the Indies may well hurry on its way, and think only of the harbor it is bound to; but the little boat tied to the wharf, and only rising and falling with the sluggish tide, what can it do but keep account of the decay of its slowly rotting planks, and listen to its own sides rubbing and wearing against the piers?”

This is all natural. But the man who says it has lost the whole spirit of his Christianity. He is not talking like a Christian. The Christian is the man redeemed by Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ died for him, that he might have eternal life. My dear friends, that means something so much deeper than you think. Jesus Christ died for you, to show you that you were a child of God, and that God loved you. He claimed you by His death out of all low slaveries into His service. He showed you that you were capable of serving Him, and that He wanted you. If you can mount up to that idea, and believe that God wants you to do something for Him, will not that be your salvation from self-consciousness? Will you not easily forget yourself, as you stand in His ranks, waiting and listening to hear what He wants you to do? Will not that set you free? Oh, how St. Paul felt this! “You are not your own,” he said; “not your own masters, nor your own slaves. You are not your own, you are bought with a price!*’ And again, “He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him who died for them and rose again.” That is the Salvation.

And when, to a soul thus waiting, God comes and gives just the familiar homely duties that belong to all of us — the house to keep, the bread to earn, the school to teach — is it not enough? When will we Christians learn that not new and strange tasks, but new and strange solemnity and holiness in our old tasks, is what we are to expect by our conversion! I do not see how any servant in the King’s House can think his labor menial or poor, since he ministers in some way to that life by which the kingdom lives. And there is no task of God’s giving that is too slight and low for a man to fling his whole soul into it, and by it escape the dangers of self-consciousness, if only he really believes that the task was really given him by God.

The great transcendent truth of man’s redemption, and the petty duties of our daily life, stand in a very true and beautiful relationship to one another. They belong together. The truth of redemption would grow too vague and shadowy, if it were not fastened to familiar duties. The duties would grow mean and sordid, if they might not be glorified by being done in thankfulness for the redemption. Our daily duties are like the nails that hold the golden plates upon the walls of the temple. The golden plates would fall but for the nails that hold them; and the nails would only worry and break and blot the wall if it were not for the golden plates they hold.

And so, as the cure of all morbid self-consciousness, I preach to you the power of faithful and devoted work: Do your duty and forget yourself. But I do not preach the dreary gospel of mere Busyness. Not simply by being busy do men escape from their own haunting selves; but by being God’s servants men cease to be their own slaves. By a deep experience of sin and pardon you must learn how Christ bought you with His blood; and then, overrunning with gratitude and longing to do any thing for Him, nothing that you can do for Him will seem small. Any duty will be strong enough to break your chains and set you free.

It is possible for a man to be so taken up with serving God, whether in great or little tasks, that he never stops to ask for his own happiness or credit or culture; but as he goes on he is happy, though he never thinks of it; and men give him thanks which are more sweet than praises; and Christ is slowly formed within him day by day. So, as he forgets himself, his true self prospers. So, as he loses his life, he finds it where it is hid with Christ in God.

With such a life possible, is it not strange that we can live the lives we do?