The Need of Self-Respect

A Thanksgiving Sermon

“And He said unto me: Son of Man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee.” — EZEK. ii. 1.

THERE are many passages in the Bible which describe the servants of God, as their Lord’s messages came to them, falling upon their faces on the earth, and in that attitude of most profound humiliation listening to what God had to say. Moses, Joshua, David, Daniel, they are all seen at one time or another prostrate, and signifying their readiness to receive what God should tell them by the complete disowning of anything like worth or dignity in themselves. There is a great truth set forth in all such pictures. It is that only to human humility can God speak intelligibly. Only when a man is humble can he hear and understand the words of God. But in the passage which I have taken for my text this morning, there is another picture with another truth. When God was going to give a message to Ezekiel, He said to him, “Son of man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak unto thee.” Not on his face but on his feet; not in the attitude of humiliation but in the attitude of self-respect; not stripped of all strength, and lying like a dead man waiting for life to be given him, but strong in the intelligent consciousness of privilege, and standing alive, ready to co-operate with the living God who spoke to him; so the man now is to receive the word of God. I hope that we shall be able to comprehend this idea largely and truly enough to see that it is not contradictory to the other, but certainly it is different from it. When God raised Ezekiel and set him on his feet before He spoke to him, was it not a declaration of the truth that man might lose the words of God because of a low and grovelling estimate of himself, as well as because of a conceited one? The best understanding of God could come to man only when man was upright and self-reverent in his privilege as the child of God.

If this be true, is it not a great truth? Is it not a truth well worthy of being set out in one of these graphic Bible-pictures, and one that needs continually to be preached? The other truth is often urged upon us; that if we are proud we shall be ignorant; if we do not listen humbly we shall listen in vain to hear the Divine voice of which the world is full. We are pointed continually to men on every side who have evidently no wisdom but their own, because they have never deeply felt that they needed any other, and who, therefore, are filling the land with their foolishness. But this other truth is not so often preached, nor, I think, so generally felt; unless you honor your life you cannot get God’s best and fullest wisdom; unless you stand upon your feet you will not hear God speak to you.

There is much to-day of thoughtless and foolish depreciation of man and his condition. I want upon Thanks giving Day, in the light of the Thanksgiving truth, to enter a quiet, earnest and profoundly sincere protest against it. I want to claim that it is blind to facts. I want to assert that it is not truly humble. I want to denounce it as the very spirit of ignorance, shutting men’s ears hopelessly against the hearing of all the highest truth. The question comes to us most pressingly to-day. Shall we, can we, thank God for His mercies, standing upon our feet and rejoicing that we are men, thoroughly grateful for the real joy of life? Back of all the special causes for thanksgiving which our hearts recognize, is there a thankfulness for that on which they all rest and in which they are sewn like jewels in a cloth of gold; for the mere fact of human life, for the mere privilege and honor of being men and women? If there is not this, no gratitude is possible; or only such a gratitude as the poor wretch in his dungeon, for whom life has been robbed of every charm, feels to his jailor who thrusts through the window to him the crust of bread and jug of water which are to prolong his miserable life. It may seem like an awful and unreasonable question; but indeed it is not so. The latest, and in many quarters the favorite, philosophy of the day, — that which boasts itself as being the supreme achievement of the nineteenth century, the perfect flower of the wisdom of mankind, — is that which under its fantastic name of Pessimism, declares deliberately that human life is a woe and a curse, and that the “will to live” is the fiend which persecutes humanity, which must be utterly destroyed before man can be happy. So speaks philosophy; and when we talk with unphilosophical men who have no theory, I think we are astonished to see how their view of life is essentially what this philosophy would give them. Either in the soft way or the hard way, either in sentimental whimperings or in dogged, rude defiance, men are saying that life is miserable. Either in large or little view, either looking at the great course of history or at the petty course of their own lives, men say the world is growing worse from day to day. The calm pessimism of the schools becomes the querulous discontent of the street philosopher, or the bitter cynicism of the newspaper satirist, or, what is far more significant than either, the silent distress and bewilderment of the man who sees no bright hope for himself or fellow-man. I am sure you know whereof I speak. In large circles of life (and they are just those circles in which a great many of us live) there is an habitual disparagement of human life, its joys and its prospects. Man is on his face. It seems to me that he must hear God’s voice calling him to another attitude, or he is hopeless. “Son of man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak unto thee.”

What shall we say then of this prevalent depression as to the character and hopes of our human life, which is, I think, one of the symptoms of our time? .Some times it is very sweeping and talks despairingly of man in general. Sometimes it is special and merely believes that our own age or our own land is given up to moral corruption and decay. As to its general character, I think it may be said that it comes from an inspection of human life which is neither the shallowest nor the deepest. It has got below the surface facts and first appearances of things, but it has not got down to their essential and central truth. The surface of the earth is warm with the direct rays of the sun. The centre of the earth, perhaps, is warm with its own essential and quenchless fire. But between the two, after you get below the warm surface, and before you approach the warm heart of the globe, it is all cold and damp and dark and dreary. And so there is the surface sight of life, which is bright and enthusiastic. There is the sight of life which is deeper than this, which is sad and puzzled. There is the deepest sight of all, which is bright again with a truer light, and enthusiastic again with a soberer but a more genuine happiness. The character of the first sight, the most simple and super ficial, very few people will be inclined to dispute. There are not many misanthropes who will deny that the first aspect of things which meets the eye of man is tempting and exhilarating. The external world is too manifestly beautiful; the sun is too bright, the fields too green, the sea too blue, the breeze too fresh, the luxuries of taste and sound and smell too manifold and sweet; the human frame is strung too thickly with the faculties ol pleasure; the first and universal relationships of men, friendship and childhood and fatherhood, are too spontaneous sources of delight for any reasonable man to say that the first and simplest aspect of human life is not a happy thing. The charm may be only apparent, but at least there is an apparent charm. These men may be very foolish to find such joy in life, but certainly the men whom we see do find joy in it. To the child it is all joyous. Sometimes the» light foot breaks through the thin crust for a moment, but the spring of the young walker sets him the next instant on the crust again, with only sufficient sense of danger to exhilarate, not to depress. And many men who never cease to be children keep the first sight of life all through, and never see below its bright surface nor hear another sound behind the music of its most palpable delights. So that the first aspect of life makes the bright optimist which every live and healthy boy ought to be and is. But this is only on the surface, as most men soon find out. It is real but superficial. By and by the exceptions and the contradictions and the limitations begin to show themselves. This first happiness of life is spotted with unhappiness; and it is not enough, even if it were unspotted, to satisfy the man who tries to find his satisfaction in it. Then comes the danger of misanthropy. There, just below the surface, lie the abject or defiant misanthropes; the men who count the sick people till they say there is no health, who count the dull days till they say there is no sunshine, who count the failures till they say there is no success, who count the frauds till they declare there is no honesty, and the fools till they laugh at the idea of wisdom. You see they have crawled down out of the sunlight. They have left the surface and its simple presumptions to burrow just under them among the exceptions and contradictions. They keep the same idea of what the purpose of life is and what sort of happiness it ought to have; only, while the boy in his optimism

cried, as he saw the bird flash up in the sunlight, “Here it is,” the middle-aged pessimist creeps with the mole underground and says, “It is not anywhere.” Now what comes deeper still? What is there more profound than the lamentations over the sin and misery of life, which have succeeded to the first enthusiastic praise of everything, which came first of all? What is the next step if a man can take it? I answer, certainly a new idea of what life is for, of what happiness a man really needs; that is what must come. The notion of education and of character as the end of life, of something which a man is to be made, and by the power to make which all of life’s experiences are to be judged, that opens to a man; and as he passes into that he finds the heat beginning to glow once more around him. He is coming in to the warm centre of the world. There come forth adaptations for the higher work in things which have seemed wholly unfitted to produce the lower. Things which never could have made a man happy, develop a power to make him strong. Strength and not happiness, or rather only that happiness which comes by strength, is recognized as the end of human living. And with that test and standard the lost order and beauty reappear. The world is man’s servant and friend; and man, full of the deeper self-respect, is ready to hear deeper and diviner messages of God.

This is the order. This is the way in which we pass to deeper knowledge, which is always tending to the happiest knowledge of our own life. First, life is a success because the skies are bright and the whole world is beautiful. Then life is a failure because every joy is in danger of disappointment, and every confidence may prove untrue. Then life is a success again because through disappointment and deceit it still has power to make a man pure and strong. He who has delighted in the outside pleasures and then bowed down in misery because they disappeared, rises up at last and stands upon his feet when he discovers that God has a far deeper purpose about him than to keep him gay and cheerful, and that is to make him good; and with that deepest intention no accidents can interfere; with that discovery all his despair disappears, and a self-respect, which is full of hope and ready for intelligence, comes in its place.

This is the way in which a man’s despair or contempt about himself is thoroughly undermined, by his getting a truer view of what the world and all its treatments of man’s life are for. But now, I think, another fact comes in. Many men own the possibility of good which is open to them, while still they are despairing or cynical about the world itself, about the course of human life in general. There are many good people, I believe, who devoutly recognize the chance of character, of spiritual culture, which is offered to them by living in the midst of a world of sin and sorrow; but the sinful and sorrowful world itself seems to them desperate. They may be purified, but the fire that purifies them is the burning up of a miserable world. This is the strange hopelessness about the world, joined to a strong hope for themselves, which we see in many good religious people. It is what really lies at the heart of all the exclusive and seemingly selfish systems of religion, what makes it possible for good men to believe in election. In their own hearts they recognize indubitably that God is saving them, while the aspect of the world around them seems to show them that the world is going to perdition. That is a common enough condition of mind; but I think it may be surely said that it is not a good, nor can it be a permanent, condition. God has mercifully made us so that no man can constantly and purely believe in any great privilege for himself unless he believes in at least the possibility of the same privilege for other men. A man’s hold on his own privilege either disappears or grows impure the moment that he gives the rest of the world up in despair. Under this principle, no man who believes that the world at large is growing hopelessly worse, can keep a lively and effectual hope that he himself is growing better. Indeed this is the danger of that current habit of depreciating man, and especially of depreciating our own times and surroundings, which is very common among us. It is not merely a speculative opinion. It is an influence which must reach a man’s character. A man can have no high respect for himself unless he has a high respect for his human kind. He can have no strong hope for himself unless he has a strong hope for his human kind. And so, whatever be his pure tastes and lofty principles, one trembles for any man whom he hears hopelessly decrying human life in general, or the special condition of his own time.

It is time, perhaps, that we looked a little more closely at this, which is no doubt a notable and alarming characteristic of our time; the number of intelligent men who think and talk despairingly of human nature and of human life. You meet them everywhere. Their books are on your tables. Their talk is in your ears at every corner of the streets. Where has this fact, then, come from if it is, as we believe, the growingly prominent characteristic of our generation? It is not hard to point out some of its sources. Sometimes, with some men, it is a deliberate philosophy. Some of our brightest men have, as I said, really reasoned about the world, and have come to the conclusion that it is bad and not good, and that it is growing worse and not better. It is the issue of all the fatalistic philosophies, and we all know how the strong interest of men in the working of second causes, and in the uniformity of law, has aroused a tendency to fatalism in almost all departments of thinking. Make all life a machine, and the individual is lost; with individual life, goes responsibility; with responsibility, go hope and chance. This is the way in which the philosophical pessimism of our time is made. It begins by the denial of the individual and his free will; and then, with the only power capable of moral goodness taken out, the universe is left un moral, and an unmoral universe becomes immoral. Its salt is gone and its corruption comes.

But the number of speculative pessimists is small; the number of believers in the badness of the world is large. Where do the rest of them come from? In large part, I believe, from another characteristic of our time, from the strong feeling of interest in, and responsibility for, the world’s condition, which comes from the increased activity of mind and conscience, and which begets often narrowness of view about the world’s condition. A thousand men to-day care whether the state is pure, for one who cared in the last century. A thou sand eyes are anxiously watching the church, for one that looked to see whether she did her work a hundred years ago. A thousand hearts sink at a catastrophe in the purity of social life, where once only one felt the disgrace. Out of all this watchfulness has come a sensitiveness and a narrowness. Because our own age has its vices which distress us, we forget the vices of other times, and we let ourselves judge the world by that bit of the world which is just under our own eyes. When one thing is being done here in New England, just the opposite thing may be coming to pass on the Ganges or the Nile. Almost every day you hear men assuming that, because America happens to have grown from a very poor country to a very rich one within the last century, and has developed, of course, the vices that be long to wealth, therefore the world is worse to-day than it was a century ago. It is vastly unreasonable, but it is very natural for a conscientious American to think so. Only when he lifts up his eyes and finds it simply im possible to let them fall on any century in all the world’s history which was better than this; any century when government was purer, thought or action freer, society sweeter, the word of man more sacred than it is to-day, only then does he come back and recognize how he has been allowing the nearness and pressingness of his own circumstances to delude him.

But yet, again, this time of ours, these men of ours, are marked by a singular depth of personal experience. The personal emotions, the anxieties with regard to personal conditions, are very intense. It is a time of much morbidness, and so I think that the danger under which men always labor, of letting the universe take the color of the windows of their own life through which they look at it, was never so dangerous as to-day. More men to day think the world is wretched because they are sad and bewildered, than would have transferred their own conditions to the outside universe in less introspective and self-conscious times. The simplest men in the simplest ages, when they were in sorrow, opened their windows inward to let the world’s sunlight in. The elaborate and subtle men in the elaborate and subtle ages, in their sorrow, open their windows outward and darken the bright world with their darkness. And among such men, in such an age, we live.

And one point more. When all these causes, in a time like ours, have set a few earnest, serious, sad men to the hard task of depreciating human life, then it be comes the fashion, and all the light, flippant tongues catch up their cry and repeat it. A few strong men go wrapt in melancholy because they so intensely feel the evil of the world, and straightway every weakling who wants to be thought wise must twist his cloak about his head too, and go stalking tragically among his fellow-men, — blind in his mock misery, stumbling over them and making them stumble over him. This was the Byronism of the generation of our fathers, and this is a large part of the pessimism of ours. Sometimes it scowls and frowns and scolds; sometimes it smiles and bows as it declares that religion and politics and social life arid personal character are hurrying to ruin; but it is an affectation and a fashion, and is to be discriminated carefully, and set aside in contempt, when we are trying to estimate what there is really respectable and significant in the present defamation of humanity.

Such is a statement of some of the reasons, the principal ones I think, why men have come to talk of their race and its hopes as we very often hear them talk to-day. They are connected, as you see, with much that is noblest in our age. All together they produce this condition of distrust and fear and wonder about what is coming, with a certain preference for believing that something veiy bad is coming, with which we are all of us familiar. Men are off their feet, as it were. They are demoralized. There is less readiness to assert the essential nobleness and lofty destiny of man. A state of things like this seems to rne to be significant as to where we stand in the world’s moral history. We have passed out of the first light-heartedness of youth. We are preparing, by disappointment and bewilderment, for the more serious and earnest satisfactions of middle life. If you recall what I said about the degrees or stages in men’s conception of the world’s character and prospects, you can apply it now to what I have just been saying. The light and airy optimism which believed that everything was right because the sun shone in the sky, is past for thoughtful mortals. You cannot persuade men to-day that the world is good because there are many pleasant things in it. They probably never will believe that in the old easy way again. Once having come to see that a pleasant world which is all full of sin and pain, is all the more dreadful because of its outside pleasantness, there is no return to the first easy satisfaction. The only two things that are still open to man are these: a blank despair, which gives itself up to inevitable deterioration; or a new thought of the world as a place of moral training where happiness or unhappiness are accidents, but where, by both happiness and unhappiness, men and nations must be made and can be made just and pure and good.

Which of these two are we bound for? Surely the second, not the first. But to that second we can come only as we keep, in all our bewilderment over the world’s misery and sin, the sense, the certainty of God. There is the point of all. If a man dwells upon the misery of human life and does not believe in God, he is dragged down among the brutes. If a man believes in the misery of human life and does believe in God, he is carried up to higher notions of God’s government, which have loftier purposes than mere happiness or pain. The one great question about all the kind of temper of which I have spoken is whether it still believes in God. If it does, it must come out in light through whatever darkness it may have first to pass. If it does not, however wise it grows, it certainly must end in folly and despair. Whether our philosophy is theistic or atheistic; whether you, as you look at the snarl of life with all its misery and sin, know for a surety that God is within it all; these are the questions, the answer to which decides whether our philosophy and our observation of life are on their face or on their feet, are full of the curse of despair or full of the blessing of hope.

For all belief in God is, must be, belief in ultimate good. No view of the universe can be despairing which keeps Him still in sight. “Ah,” but you say, “do we not all believe in God? Is there one of us that denies His existence?” Probably not; only remember that there is an atheism which still repeats the creed. There is a belief in God which does not bring Him, nay, rather say which does not let Him come, into close contact with our daily life. The very reverence with which we honor God may make us shut Him out from the hard tasks and puzzling problems with which we have to do. Many of us who call ourselves theists are like the savages who, in the desire to honor the wonderful sun-dial which had been given them, built a roof over it. Break down the roof; let God in on your life. And then, however your first light optimism may be broken up, and the evil of the world may be made known to you, you never can be crushed by it. You will stand strong on your feet and hear God when He comes to teach you the lessons of the higher, soberer, spiritual optimism to which they come who are able to believe that all things work together for good to the man or the people that serve Him.

That was the optimism of Jesus. There was no blindness in His eyes, no foolish indiscriminate praise of humanity upon His lips. He saw the sin of that first century and of Jerusalem a thousand times more keenly than you see the sins of this nineteenth century and of America. But He believed in God. Therefore He saw beyond the sin, salvation. He never upbraided the sin except to save men from it. He never beat the chains except to set the captive free; never, as our cynics do, for the mere pleasure of their clanking. “Not to condemn the world, but to save the world,” was His story of His mission. And at His cross the shame and hope of humankind joined hands.

O that the truth of our Thanksgiving Day might be His truth; the truth that all the sin we see, all the woe that is around us, are pledges dark and dreadful, but still certain pledges, of man’s possible higher life. May I not beg you now to think whether you have been doing wholly right about the matter of which I have spoken to you to-day? If you have been dwelling solely on the evil that is in man, or on the special evil which you think is in your church, your nation, or your age, see whether that habit has not blinded your intelligence and weakened your strength. It has cast you down upon your face. Stand up, on this Thanksgiving Day, stand up upon your feet! Believe in man! Soberly and with clear eyes believe in your own time and place. There is not, and there has never been, a better time or a better place to live in. Only with this belief can you believe in hope and believe in work. Only to a self-respect which stands erect in conscious privilege, erect for expected duty, can God speak His great and blessed messages and be completely understood.