The Symmetry of Life

“Tke Length and the Breadth and the Height of it are equal.” — REV. xxi. 16.

ST. JOHN in his great vision sees the mystic city, “the holy Jerusalem,” descending out of heaven from God. It is the picture of glorified humanity, of humanity as it shall be when it is brought to its completeness by being thoroughly filled with God. And one of the glories of the city which he saw was its symmetry. Our cities, our developments and presentations of human life, are partial and one-sided. This city out of heaven was symmetrical. In all its three dimensions it was complete. Neither was sacrificed to the other. “The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal.”

No man can say what mysteries of the yet unopened future are hidden in the picture of the mystic city; but if that city represents, as I have said, the glorified humanity, then there is much of it that we can understand already. It declares that the perfect life of man will be perfect on every side. One token of its perfectness will be its symmetry. In each of its three dimensions it will be complete.

So much of the noblest life which the world has seen dissatisfies us with its partialness; so many of the

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greatest men we see are great only upon certain sides, and have their other sides all shrunken, flat, and small, that it may be well for us to dwell upon the picture, which these words suggest, of a humanity rich and full and strong all round, complete on every side, the perfect cube of human life which comes down out of heaven from God.

As I speak I should like to keep before my mind and before yours, that picture which I think is the most interesting that the world has to show, the picture of a young man, brave and strong and generous, just starting out into life, and meaning with all his might to be the very best and most perfect man he can; meaning to make life the fullest and most genuine success. Let us see him before us as I speak. We shall see how natural his dangers and temptations are; we shall see how his very strength tends to partialness; we shall see how every power that is in him will grow doubly strong if he can buttress and steady it with strength upon the other sides, if in his growing character he can attain the symmetry and completeness of the new Jerusalem.

There are, then, three directions or dimensions of human life to which we may fitly give these three names, Length and Breadth and Height. The Length of a life, in this meaning of it, is, of course, not its duration. It is rather the reaching on and out of a man, in the line of activity and thought and self-development, which is indicated and prophesied by the character which is natural within him, by the special ambitions which spring up out of his special powers. It is the push of a life forward to its own personal ends and ambitions. The Breadth of a life, on the other hand, is its outreach laterally, if we may say so. It is the constantly diffusive tendency which is always drawing a man outward into sympathy with other men. And the Height of a life is its reach upward towards God; its sense of childhood; its consciousness of the Divine Life over it with which it tries to live in love, communion, and obedience. These are the three dimensions of a life, — its length and breadth and height, — without the due development of all of which no life becomes complete.

Think first about the Length of life in this understanding of the word. Here is a man who, as he comes to self-consciousness, recognizes in himself a certain nature. He cannot be mistaken. Other men have their special powers and dispositions. As this young man studies himself he finds that he has his. That nature which he has discovered in himself decides for him his career. He says to himself “Whatever I am to do in the world must be done in this direction.” It is a fascinating discovery. It is an ever-memorable time for a man when he first makes it. It is almost as if a star woke to some subtle knowledge of itself, and felt within its shining frame the forces which decided what its orbit was to be. Because it is the star it is, that track through space must be its track. Out on that track it looks; along that line which sweeps through the great host of stars it sends out all its hopes; and all the rest of space is merely the field through which that track is flung; all the great host of stars is but the audience which wait to hear it as it goes singing on its way. So starts the young life which has come to self-discovery and found out what it is to do by finding out what it is. It starts to do that destined thing; to run out that appointed course. Nay, the man when he arrives at this self-discovery finds that his nature has not waited for him to recognize himself. What he is, even before he knows it, has decided what he does. It may be late in life before he learns to say of himself “This is what I am.” But then he looks back and discerns that, even without his knowing himself enough to have found it out, his life has run out in a line which had the promise and potency of its direction in the nature which his birth and education gave him. But if he does know it, the course is yet more definite and clear. Every act that he does is a new section of that line which runs between his nature and his appointed work. Just in proportion to the definiteness with which he has measured and understood himself, is the sharpness of that line which every thought and act and word is projecting a little farther, through the host of human lives, towards the purpose of his living, towards the thing which he believes that he is set into the world to do.

Your own experience will tell you what I mean. Have you known any young man who early found out what his nature was; found out, for instance, that he had a legal mind and character? He said to himself “I am made to be a lawyer.” Instantly with that discovery it was as if two points stood out clearly to him; he with his legal nature here; the full, completed lawyer’s work and fame afar off there. Two unconnected points they seemed at first, which simply beckoned to each other across the great distance, and knew that, however unconnected they might be, they had to do with one another and must ultimately meet. Then that man’s life became one long extension of his nature and his powers and his will along a line which should at last attain that distant goal. All his self-culture strove that way. He read no book, he sought no friend, he gave himself no recreation, which was not somehow going to help him to his end and make him a better lawyer. Through the confusion and whirl of human lives, his life ran in one sharp, narrow line, almost as straight and clear as the railroad track across a continent, from what he knew he was, to what he meant to be and do. As the railroad track sweeps through the towns which string themselves along it, climbs mountains and plunges into valleys, hides itself in forests and flashes out again into broad plains and along the sunny sides of happy lakes, and evidently cares nothing for them all except as they just give it ground on which to roll out its length towards its end by the shore of the Pacific, — so this man’s life pierces right on through all the tempting and perplexing complications of our human living, and will not rest until it has attained the mastery of legal power. That clear, straight line of its unswerving intention, that struggle and push right onward to the end, — that is the length of this man’s life.

And if you recognize this, as of course you do, then you know also how necessary an element or dimension of any useful and successful life this is. To have an end and seek it eagerly, no man does anything in the world without that. If we let our thoughts leap at once to the summit of human living, and think of Jesus, we see it in perfection. The onward reach, the struggle to an apprehended purpose, the straight clear line right from His own self-knowledge to His work, was perfect in the Lord. “For this cause was I born,” He cried. His life pierced like an arrow through the cloud of aimless lives, never for a moment losing its direction, hurrying on with a haste and assurance which were divine. And this which He illustrates perfectly is, in our own fashion, one of the favorite thoughts of our own time. No man finds less tolerance to-day than the aimless man, the man whose life lies and swings like a pool, instead of flowing straight onward like a river. We revel in the making of specialists. Often it seems as if the more narrow and straight we could make the line which runs between the nature and its work, the more beautiful we thought it. We make our boys choose their electives when they go to college, decide at once on what they mean to do, and pour all the stream of knowledge down the sluiceway which leads to that one wheel. Perhaps we overdo it, but no thinking man dreams of saying that the thing itself is wrong. This movement of a man’s whole life along some clearly apprehended line of self-development and self-accomplishment, this reaching of a life out forward to its own best attainment, no man can live as a man ought to live without it. The men who have no pur pose, the men in whose life this first dimension of length is wanting or is very weak, are good for nothing. They lie in the world like mere pulpy masses, giving it no strength or interest or character.

Set yourself earnestly to see what you were made to do, and then set yourself earnestly to do it. That is the first thing that we want to say to our young man in the building of whose life we feel an interest. As we say it we feel almost a hesitation, it may be, because the exhortation sounds so selfish. Self-study and self-culture, surely that makes a very selfish life. Indeed it does. But he has thought very little who has not discovered two things concerning selfishness. First, that there is a lofty selfishness, a high care for our own culture, which is a duty, and not a fault. And secondly, that he who in this highest way cares for himself and seeks for himself his own best good, must, whether he thinks of doing it or not, help other men’s development as well as his own. It is only the line which is seeking something that is low, that can pierce through the live mass of men’s lives and interests and be as wholly independent of them all as I pictured just now. Even the railroad track, hurrying to the Pacific, must leave some thing of civilizing influence on the prairies which it crosses. In the highest and purest sense of the word there certainly was selfishness in Jesus. No man might tempt or force Him from the resolute determination to unfold His appointed life and be His perfect self. The world is right when it follows its blind instinct and stands, with some kind of gratitude though not a gratitude of the most loving sort, beside the grave of some man who in life has been loftily possessed with the passion for self-culture, and has never thought of benefiting the world; for if his passion for self- culture has really been of the most lofty kind, the world must be the better for it.

Therefore we may freely say to any young man, Find your purpose and fling your life out to it; and the loftier your purpose is, the more sure you will be to make the world richer with every enrichment of yourself. And this, you see, comes to the same thing as saying that this first dimension of life, which we call Length, the more loftily it is sought, has always a tendency to produce the second dimension of life, which we called Breadth. Of that second dimension let us go on now to speak. I have ventured to call this quality of breadth in a man’s life its outreach laterally. When that tendency of which I have just been talking, the tendency of a man’s career, the more loftily it is pursued, to bring him into sympathy and relationship with other men, - when that tendency, I say, is consciously and deliberately acknowledged, and a man comes to value his own personal career because of the way in which it relates him to his brethren and the help which it permits him to offer them, then his life has distinctly begun to open in this new direction, and to its length it has added breadth. There are men enough with whom no such opening seems to take place. You know them well; men eager, earnest, and intense, reaching forward toward their prize, living straight onward in their clearly apprehended line of life; but to all appearance, so far as you and I can see, living exactly as they would live if they were the only living beings on the surface of the earth, or as if all the other beings with whom they came in contact were only like the wooden rounds upon the ladder by which they climbed to their own personal ambition. Such men you have all known; men who could not conceive of any other life as valuable, happy, or respectable, except their own; men “wrapped up in themselves,” as we say, — an envelope as thick as leather, through which no pressure of any other life or character could reach them. And the one feeling that you have about such perfect specialists is the wonder that so great intelligence can be compressed into such narrowness. They are as bright and sharp as needles, and as hard and narrow.

But when a man has length and breadth of life together, we feel at once how the two help each other. Length without breadth is hard and narrow. Breadth without length, — sympathy with others in a man who has no intense and clear direction for himself, — is soft and weak. You see this in the instinctive and strong dislike which all men have for the professional reformer and philanthropist. The world dislikes a man who, with no definite occupation of his own, not trying to be anything particular himself, devotes himself to telling other people what they ought to be. It may allow his good intentions, but it will not feel his influence. The man whom the world delights to feel is the man who has evidently conceived some strong and distinct pur pose for himself, from which he will allow nothing to turn his feet aside, who means to be something with all his soul; and yet who finds, in his own earnest effort to fill out his own career, the interpretation of the careers of other men; and also finds, in sympathy with other men, the transfiguration and sustainment of his own appointed struggle.

Indeed these are the two ways in which the relation between the length and breadth of a man’s life, between his energy in his own career and his sympathy with the careers of other men, comes out and shows itself. First, the man’s own career becomes to him the interpretation of the careers of other men; and secondly, by his sym pathy with other men, his own life displays to him its best capacity. The first of these is very beautiful to watch. Imagine the reformer, whom I spoke of, suddenly called to forget the work of helping other men, and to plunge into some work of his own. With what surprise at his own increase of wisdom he would come back, by and by, to the help of his brethren! What far wiser and more reverent hands he would lay upon their lives; with what tones of deepened understanding he would speak to their needs and sins and temptations, after he had himself tried to live a true life of his own! This is the reason, I suppose, why, in the Bible, the ministry of angels to mankind, while it is clearly intimated, is made so little of. It is because, however real it is, it could not be brought very close to the intelligence and gratitude of men, so long as the personal lives of the angels are hidden in mystery. Only he who lives a life of his own can help the lives of other men. Surely there is here one of the simplest and strongest views which a man possibly can take of his own life. “Let me live,” he may say, “as fully as I can, in order that in this life of mine I may learn what life really is, and so be fit to understand and help the lives of men about me. Let me make my own career as vivid and successful as possible, that in it I may get at the secret of life, which, when I have once found it, will surely be the key to other lives besides my own.” He who should talk and think so of his own career would evidently have gone far towards solving the problem of the apparent incompatibility between intense devotion to one’s own pursuit and cordial sympathy with other men. He would find, in the very heart of his own work, the clew to the works of other men. He would be no mere specialist, and yet he would toil hardest of all men in the special task in which he was engaged. But his task would be always glorified and kept from narrowness by his perpetual demand upon it, that it should give him such a broad understanding of human life in general as should make him fit to read and touch and help all other kinds of life.

And if thus the special life does much to make the sympathy with other lives intelligent and strong, the debt is yet not wholly on one side. There is a wonder ful power in sympathy to open and display the hidden richness of a man’s own seemingly narrow life. You think that God has been training you in one sort of discipline, but when you let yourself go out in sympathy with other men whose disciplines have been completely different from your own, you find that in your discipline the power of theirs was hidden. This is the power which sympathy has to multiply life and make out of one experience the substance and value of a hundred. The well man sympathizes with the sick man, and thereby exchanges, as it were, some of the superfluous riches of his health into the other coin of sickness, gets something of the culture which would have come to him if he had himself been sick. The sick man, in return, gets something, even in all his pain and weakness, of the discipline of health and strength. The same is true about the sympathy of the rich with the poor, of the believer with the doubter, of the hopeful with the despondent, of the liberal with the bigoted; aye, even of the saint with the sinner. The holiest soul, pitying the brother-soul which has fallen into vilest vice, gains, while it keeps its own purity unsoiled, something of tho sight of that other side of God, the side where justice and forgiveness blend in the opal mystery of grace, which it would seem as if only the soul that looked up out of the depths of guilt could see. All this is perfect in the vicariousness of Christ; and what was perfect there, is echoed imperfectly in the way in which every man’s special life becomes enlarged and multiplied as he looks abroad from it in sympathy with other men.

So much I say about the length and breadth of life. One other dimension still remains. The length and breadth and height of it are equal. The Height of life is its reach upward toward something distinctly greater than humanity. Evidently all that I have yet described, all the length and breadth of life, might exist, and yet man be a creature wholly of the earth. He might move on straight forward in his own career. He might even enter into living sympathy with his brother-men; and yet never look up, never seem to have anything to do with anything above this flat and level plain of human life. A world without a sky! How near any one man’s life here and there may come to that, I dare not undertake to say. Some men will earnestly insist that that is just their life; that there is no divine appetite, no reaching Godward in them anywhere. But to a man who thoroughly believes in God, I think that it will always seem that such a life, however any man may think that he is living it, must always be impossible for every man. There cannot be a God and yet any one of His creatures live exactly and entirely as if there was no God.

The reaching of mankind towards God! Evidently, in order that that may become a true dimension of a man’s life, it must not be a special action. It must be something which pervades all that he is and does. It must not be a solitary column set on one holy spot of the nature. It must be a movement of the whole nature upward. Here has been one of the great hinderances of the power of religion in the world. Religion has been treated as if it were a special exercise of a special power, not as if it were the possible loftiness of everything that a man could think or be or do. The result has been that certain men and certain parts of men have stood forth as distinctively religious, and that the possible religiousness of all life has been but very imperfectly felt and acknowledged. This has made religion weak. Man’s strongest powers, man’s intensest passions, have been involved in the working out of his career, and in the development of his relations with his fellow-men. What has been left over for religion has been the weakest part of him, his sentiments and fears; and so religion, very often, has come to seem a thing of mystic moods and frightened superstitions. This picture from the city of the Revelation seems to me to make the matter very clear. The height of life, its reach to ward God, must be coextensive with, must be part of the one same symmetrical whole with, the length of life or its reach towards its personal ambition, and the breadth of life or its reach towards the sympathy of brother-lives. It is when a man begins to know the ambition of his life not simply as the choice of his own will but as the wise assignment of God’s love; and to know his relations to his brethren not simply as the result of his own impulsive affections but as the seeking of his soul for these souls because they all belong to the great Father-soul; it is then that life for that man begins to lift itself all over and to grow towards completion upward through all its length and breadth. That is a noble time, a bewildering and exalting time in any of our lives, when into everything that we are doing enters the spirit of God, and thenceforth moving ever up toward the God to whom it belongs, that Spirit, dwelling in our life, carries our life up with it; not separating our life from the earth, but making every part of it while it still keeps its hold on earth, soar up and have to do with heaven; so completing life in its height, by making it divine.

To any man in whom that uplifting of life has genuinely begun, all life without it must seem very flat and poor. My dear friends, this is Advent Sunday. Once more wrought into all our service, pressed into all our hearts, has come to-day the rich, wonderful truth that God once came into our world. And that one coming of God we know gets its great value from being the type and promise of the truth that God is always coming. And for God to come into the world means for Him to come into our lives. On Advent Sunday, then, let us get close hold of this truth. These lives of ours, hurrying on in their ambitions, spreading out in their loves, they are capable of being filled with God, possessed by His love, eager after His communion; and, if they can be, if they are, then, without losing their eager pursuit of their appointed task, without losing their cordial reaching after the lives around them, they shall be quietly, steadily, nobly lifted into something of the peace and dignity of the God whom they aspire to. The fret and restlessness shall fade out of their ambitions; the jealousy shall disappear out of their loves, Love for themselves and love for their brethren, robed and enfolded into the love for God, shall be purified and cleared of all meanness, shall be filled with a strength as calm as it is strong. O, my dear friends, there is room for that new dimension over the lives that all of you are living. Above the head of the most earthly of you heaven is open. You may aspire into it and complete yourself upward if you will. All that you are now imperfectly, as an energetic, sympathetic man, you may be perfectly as the child of God, knowing your Father and living in consecrated obedience to Him.

These are the three dimensions then of a full human life, its length, its breadth, its height. The life which has only length, only intensity of ambition, is narrow. The life that has length and breadth, intense ambition and broad humanity, is thin. It is like a great, flat plain, of which one wearies, and which sooner or later wearies of itself. The life which to its length and breadth adds height, which to its personal ambition and sympathy with man, adds the love and obedience of God, completes itself into the cube of the eternal city and is the life complete.

Think for a moment of the life of the great apostle, the manly, many-sided Paul. “I press toward the mark for the prize of my high calling;” he writes to the Philippians. That is the length of life for him. “I will gladly spend and be spent for you;” he writes to the Corinthians. There is the breadth of life for him. “God hath raised us up and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus;” he writes to the Ephesians. There is the height of life for him. You can add nothing to these three dimensions when you try to account to yourself for the impression of completeness which conies to you out of his simple, lofty story.

We need not stop with him. Look at the Lord of Paul. See how in Christ the same symmetrical manhood shines yet more complete. See what intense ambition to complete His work, what tender sympathy with every struggling brother by His side, and at the same time what a perpetual dependence on His Father is in Him. “For this cause came I into the world.” “For their sakes I sanctify myself.” “Now, 0 Father, glorify Thou me.” Leave either of those out and you have not the perfect Christ, not the entire symmetry of manhood.

If we try to gather into shape some picture of what the perfect man of heaven is to be, still we must keep the symmetry of these his three dimensions. It must be that forever before each glorified spirit in the other life there shall be set one goal of peculiar ambition, his goal, after which he is peculiarly to strive, the struggle after which is to make his eternal life to be forever different from every other among all the hosts of heaven. And yet it must be that as each soul strives towards his own attainment he shall be knit forever into closer and closer union with all the other countless souls which are striving after theirs. And the inspiring power of it all, the source of all the energy and all the love, must then be clear beyond all doubt; the ceaseless flood of light forever pouring forth from the self-living God to fill and feed the open lives of His redeemed who live by Him. There is the symmetry of manhood perfect. There, in redeemed and glorified human, nature, is the true heavenly Jerusalem.

I hope that we are all striving and praying now that we may come to some such symmetrical completeness. This is the glory of a young man’s life. Do not dare to live without some clear intention toward which your living shall be bent. Mean to be something with all your might. Do not add act to act and day to day in perfect thoughtlessness, never asking yourself whither the growing line is leading. But at the same time do not dare to be so absorbed in your own life, so wrapped up in listening to the sound of your own hurrying wheels, that all this vast pathetic music, made up of the mingled joy and sorrow of your fellow-men, shall not find out your heart and claim it and make you rejoice to give yourself for them. And yet, all the while, keep the upward windows open. Do not dare to think that a child of God can worthily work out his career or worthily serve God’s other children unless he does both in the love and fear of God their Father. Be sure that ambition and charity will both grow mean unless they are both inspired and exalted by religion. Energy, love, and faith, those make the perfect man. And Christ, who is the perfectness of all of them, gives them all three to any young man who, at the very outset of his life, gives up himself to Him. If this morning there is any young man here who generously wants to live a whole life, wants to complete himself on every side, to him Christ, the Lord, stands ready to give these three, energy, love, and faith, and to train them in him all together, till they make in him the perfect man.