Go into the City

“Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.” — ACTS ix. 6.

IT was the critical day of St. Paul’s life. The miracle which made him a servant of Christ was just complete. He had been thrown down from his horse by the splendor that outshone the noonday, and in answer to the voice that proclaimed Who it was that thus had arrested him, he had just asked the humble question, “What wilt thou have me to do?” The stunned senses had recovered them selves; and Paul, the man who always had a purpose and a destination, was asking for the destination and purpose of the new life which he felt had begun. The promptitude of all Paul’s thought and action in his conversion was remarkable. His direct, straightforward mind laid hold immediately of the new conditions. We stop to play about our great experiences. We coax them and watch over them; we hesitate and analyze. But Paul went directly to the point. “I am a new man. Now what shall I do with my new life.” The fact once there it is not something to be mused and pondered over, but to be used. And God replies, “Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou shalt do.”

The city was Damascus. Paul was just within sight of its shining walls. It was the city for which he had set out three days ago. He was on his way thither, when the miracle arrested him, going to seize the disciples of Jesus wherever he could; find them. And now God says: “Still go into the city where you meant to go. Your route shall not be altered. Your new life must walk over the same road where the old life was walking. Still go into the city, and there it shall be told thee what thou must do.” And so Paul started out on the old road again, a new man; and, with another spirit from that which he had expected, passed through the gate of Damascus, for which through all the hours of the long forenoon his eyes had been impatiently searching in the distance.

A new spirit always seems to demand new circumstances. It is one of the profoundest instincts of our nature. There seems to you to be something* wrong when you go out full of some great experience which has changed all your inner life, and find all your outer life the same that it was yesterday. You could not help fancying that it must have altered, too, and there seems to be something almost insulting in its unchanged persistency. You carry out with you a new love, a great joy, a terrible sorrow, and can it be that this new stream, so overfull, must flow between the same old banks wherein the life, hitherto so meagre, was content to run! Can it be that with this other heart you must still meet men as you met them yesterday, talk with them of the same old things, still do the same business in the same shop, or, with the joy or sorrow burdening your heart, take up the tools of household drudgery and run the family life just as you did before the joy or sorrow came! Sometimes it even seems as if the permanence of nature were an insult. When we are absorbed in our own pain or pleasure, the hills and stars seem to mock us with their indifference. The poet cries out, petulantly, “How can ye chaunt, ye little birds, and I so weary, full of care!” We find that nature and life will not honor any such demand of ours, and we know that it is best that they should not, but it is natural for us to ask it. It is a sort of witness of our sense of the supremacy that properly belongs to spirit over circumstances. Spirit is the king, and circumstances only ought to be the robe he wears, suiting themselves to his figure and changing with his changes. We believe that some day this will come. In the new heavens and new earth wherein righteousness is to dwell, circumstances will suit themselves, freely and fluently, to the conditions of the spiritual life. They will be to the stiffer and grosser circumstances of this earth what Paul’s “spiritual body” is to the “natural body” of which he tells the Corinthians. But now we come to see that only by long, slow changes and in most general ways do circumstances adapt themselves to spirit; and we learn to understand that spirit must triumph over circumstances, not by casting them away and making new ones, but by overpowering them as they are, compelling forth their richer capacities and making them serve greater ends than they have dreamed of. When the artistic spirit has filled us, we may not fling the carpenter’s chisel aside — we must work with it still and make it carve our statue.

Of all the new spirits that thus enter into human life and take possession of it, the strongest and most positive beyond all comparison is Christianity. There is nothing which can happen to a man’s inner life which can be so much to that life as for the man to become a Christian, for him to find and own the Saviourship and Mastership of the Lord Jesus Christ. His gentle dominion occupies a nature, and what then? One of the common phenomena of Christian experiences is this — that the new Christian, sensible of such a new life within him, looks for and expects a new lie outside himself, and is surprised (if he is not almost disappointed) when he discovers that this new experience, so wonderful and inspiring, settles into the midst of old familiar circumstances. This is the feeling that has always broken out in the disposition to make a special and technical religious life. The world, with all its intercourses, seems too worldly. Its musics jar upon the new, exalted soul. Its sights seem sordid to eyes quickened by gazing into the near face of God. Let us open the gates and go away. Let us carry our new life into a new world. Let us go where the eyes and ears shall see and hear nothing but their own sacred sights and sounds. Who has not felt the impulse? And everywhere we see it taking shape. The devout Romanist covets and seeks his monastery, and so leaves the world. The devout Protestant withdraws into the little circle of the religious public and devotes his life to certain technical religious practices, and avoids the world’s people among whom he used to live.

But God will not allow that impulse to find perfect satisfaction. He is always forcing the new religious life into contact with the world. The new man must still mix with the old men, and touch them closely in all the pressures of our ever-shifting life. The circumstances will not be entirely altered with the alteration of the spirit. With everything that is inherently wicked in the old occupation once thoroughly cast away, the soul then finds that it is to keep the rest and grow, not out of them, but in them, and enlarge them as it grows, and make them fit for the new work they have to do in ministering to an ever-enlarging soul.

Thus it is with the converted merchant. The mercantile life may be very large or very little. You know both kinds of it. It grows with the growing of a merchant’s soul. The young man, struggling just for his own ambition and advancement, makes one thing out of business; and that same man, when his life is enlarged by the dependency of others, when he has his home with wife and children to provide for, finds the capacity of business to be something much larger. It can put on new sacredness when it is consecrated to such sacred needs. And let that same man be a Christian. Let the needs of his own nature and the claims of charity grow real to him, and then again the business life opens its new capacity, and lo! it can become so holy that the spiritual life may eat of it as of a sacrament, and charity may strike the richest water out of its rugged rocks. You may take the same truth and see how it is true of your own occupation, whatever it may be. Every occupation lifts itself with the enlarging life of him who practises it. The occupation that will not do that no man really has a right to occupy himself about. It is bad even for his smaller life if it is not capable of enlarging itself to contain his life as it grows larger.

There is, no doubt, a prevalent and very dangerous conception of the separateness of the religious life. Does it seem strange to say that? Can the religious life be too separate from the world? you ask. And the answer is easy. Certainly not in spirit. To come out and to be separate from every worldliness is the absolute duty of the Christian’s life; and this separateness of spirit will of itself dictate and create certain marked separations of external life. Let all Christians once be really devout in heart, and soon enough and clear enough we shall see the marks in their external life, dividing them from the people who care nothing for what is to them supremely dear. But it is very dangerous to begin at the other end. It 13 very dangerous to begin by looking for external differences to denote the Christian life. It may do very great harm if we start by feeling that the sign by which we shall know that a man has be come a Christian will be a change of the occupations in which we have always seen him engaged. I want to point out several of these dangers which come, as lOXD GO INTO THE CITY

it seems to me, from all attempts to make anything like a conventional type of external religious life separate from the healthy life into which the natural dispositions of men lead them to enter.

i. In the first place it is bad for the world. It throws a mystery and unreality about the whole idea of religion, which keeps people from entering into it, or feeling that it belongs to them. One often wonders, as, after some week-day service, he goes out into the streets and finds them thronged with men full of life and intent upon their work, or as he lays down in his study some book of religious speculation and goes out into the eager and interested world, what it is really that these people think, when they give it a moment’s thought at all, of this religion in which his whole life is bound up, of the Church with all her offices and exhortations. There is a great deal which makes him think that the greater number of these men and women have come to regard the Church and her religion as something apart from and almost inconsistent with the daily duties and daily life in which they find themselves engaged. The Christian acts to which they hear religious people urged are acts wholly apart from their ordinary work. The Christian people whom they hear most praised are those whose time is most occupied in certain technical religious tasks. It is not strange that they should come to think that there are two worlds, namely, — one irreligious, the world of business and of social life, the world where homes are bright and warm, where stores are busy and active along the crowded streets; and the other a religious world, where the churches are, where the church goers go, where psalms are sung, where life is dim and more subdued, where charity and almsgiving are the work of men and women different from them selves; and to think, too, that he who, from being an irreligious man, becomes a religious man, passes over from one of these worlds into the other, gives up the old and takes the new, so that they are surprised if afterward they meet him where they used to see him, where the glow of social joy is bright and ruddy, or where the clatter of tumultuous trade is loud. Many men’s ideas about religion are all colored with this sort of strangeness. It is to pack up everything and move away. It is to cut adrift from all that makes life dear and real, and go out into a world that is really dim, however bright it may be painted.

Suppose that you could get the true idea into those men, — would it not make a difference? Suppose that you could make them see that the newness of the new life must be not in new circumstances, but in a new spirit. As I read really thoughtful men, I see them discontented not so much with the things that they are doing as with the way in which they are doing them. They feel that the things are really worth doing, if only they could be done up to the full measure of their capacity. The scholar believes more and more in the nobility of Learning, but grows very discontented with the miserable, superficial way in which he just skims the surface of her treasures. The thoughtful trader believes that Trade in its ideal is generous and beautiful. It is the reality that he makes of it by the way in which he does it that seems to him sordid. What shall Religion say? If she says, “Come away from those things. Take away your interest in your books, your interest in your store, and give them to some thing else,” they may not scoff, they may not be contemptuous, but they are puzzled and lost. You offer them a world they cannot comprehend. It is all unreal. Can you not say — is it not all right to say: “This is the very thing religion has to do for you, to make your books and your store, your studying and money-getting, attain their full ideal, to fill them out to their complete capacity, to take their sordidness out of them and fill them with their true spirit. It is with you in your occupation that religion has to do, to make you in the highest sense a scholar, a trader worthy of the name.”

Tell me, would not such an appeal of religion, made genuinely, made not for the sake of catching men, but genuinely, — would it not give reality to what is to men now so terribly unreal? If we could go to a man and say, “Come, love God and fear Him. Be penitent, be obedient”; and when he said, “What for?” if we would only answer — not “So that you may be something new and wholly different from what you are” (he shakes his head and is all puzzled when you say that) — but, “So that you may be perfectly what you are now so wretchedly — a true father, a true citizen, a true man”; — then we should start a real ambition; and then, perhaps, by and by, having mounted up to the higher levels of these characters, he would be ready for the revelation of some higher things to be. Having been thoroughly a man by his religion here, he should be able to become a saint of some untried quality in some future life. I think of the great Hebrew people. There never was a people to whom religion was so real, and, also, there never was a people to whom religion was so little an art, and therefore mixed itself with all their life, flowed freely into all the structure of their state, and ran through all the family existence, and found natural embodiment in the slightest and most prosaic acts.

2. It is bad for the outsider, then, for religion to be a technicality, and to seem to belong only to cer tain actions. But it is no less bad for the religious man himself. Here is a Christian man who has been taught to think that Christian life consists in doing certain special things, not in doing all things in a certain spirit. He is a Christian when he goes to church. He is not a Christian when he lives among his friends in common intercourse. But a large proportion of his life must be spent in just such intercourse. The special religious actions can take up only a little part of every day. And what is the result? Why, that the larger part of every day is counted out of the Christian’s Christian life.

Do I seem to make a merely theoretical difficulty? Ask yourself, I beg you. My Christian friend, is it not so? Do you not often live along, with the great part of your life just the same as it would be if you had never taken Jesus for your Master, with a few moments or an hour every day standing out

apart in which you are different from what you would have been unconverted, because then you are at your public worship or your private prayers? And if some one should question you about it you would say: “I cannot be at worship all the time; I must earn my bread,” — as if being at worship were religious and earning one’s bread necessarily were not!

Some one not long ago characterized “modern Christianity” as a “civilized heathenism”; and the phrase took, and people repeated it to one another. What the phrase means seems to be simply this: that here we are, eighteen hundred years after Christ, still living the same life that the heathen lived before Christ came — the same external life. The Church has not broken from the world. Men are not anchorites and hermits. They are still fathers of families, heads of households, doers of business, masters or servants, rich or poor. And these they always will be. Christianity never meant and never tried to break those first instincts which go out inevitably into those fundamental institutions which are older than the Gospel, because they are older than the sin that made the Gospel. But if the power of Christ, in all these years, has entered into these eternal relations and filled out at all their shrunk and meagre forms, if fathers are more fatherly, and citizens come nearer to the true ideal of citizenship, and masters are more full of mercy, and servants are more full of faithfulness than in the days before the Great Light shone, then the real change has come, however imperfectly, however far yet from what it ought to be. And our modern life is not a “civilized heathenism,” but is coming nearer to what some day it is to be, — a Christianized humanity; a world-wide expression of that of which the Incarnation of Christ was the first great utterance — the dwelling of God in man, of the Divine Spirit in human circumstances, in human flesh.

Is it not good for us to learn that not on any sacred ground where God first speaks to us, nor on ground like that, sacred, serene, apart, unworldly, is where our Christian lives are to be lived? “Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee there what thou must do.” Where men are thickest, and these duties which come of men’s relationships to one another grow most complicated and multitudinous, where experiences grow most plentifully in the hard-paved, much-trodden street, — there is the place for the Christian to feed and use his Christianity.

Oh, how one comes to love the city! With all its wickedness and misery, it is the home of life. With all its artificialness and deafening roar, with all its selfishness and meanness and brutality, how a man comes year after year to love the great city more and more, because here are men — men with their ever-crowding life making duties and chances for each other as the ever-crowding and unresting sea throws up its sparkles into the sunlight and its white crests of foam. It is a joy and privilege to live in a great city, — only the city Christian, above all others, needs to know that his Religion must not submit to be shut in to technicalities, but must insist on claiming all his life for her own; otherwise, so crowding is this world about him, if she consents to share at all, she will be cheated terribly and put off with very little. Her only assurance of getting anything is to claim the whole.

3. There is one way of talking about our Church activities which is far too narrow, and may do a good deal of harm. There is much talk nowadays about “Church-work.” The development of Church schools and charities is manifold. The zeal of the good people who carry them on is excellent to see, — we wish that there were more of them of the best kind. But the danger, I sometimes think, is that the great number of a congregation such as this, for whom it is impossible for various reasons that they should be personally engaged in these works of the parish, should think that therefore there is no Church-work for them. Church-work has become a sort of technicality. Church-workers have become a sort of caste. The true Church-work is wider — wide as the whole activity which the Church inspires. ‘Wherever any man of this congregation is doing anything honest or merciful out of any impulse that he has gathered here, he is about Church-work. Whenever any woman puts the spirit of the Sunday collect or the week-day meeting into her household, and does her little to purify and Christianize society, she is a Churchworker.

The Church of God we make so narrow! Some limit it by lines of ordination and some limit it by stone walls, but where does Christ see it? Wherever any of His baptized children are doing any of His work. You think that you can be of no service in the Church. Perhaps you are sorry for it and feel almost ashamed of it. But certainly you can, even the children of you. There is none too young and none too weak. Take any word that we have said or sung to-day, and carry it with you like the bread of life to some hungry heart this week; take the Christ who has manifested Himself to you to-day, and in His power do some helpful thing for some of His brothers or sisters to-morrow, and that is Church-work. The Church grows by it and Christ delights in it; and some day He will own it with these words which are the crown of all the prizes of the universe: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” The Church of God in its complete perfection at the last will be the City of God, — so says the Bible always, and there is meaning in the figure, — the manifoldness of life all uttering the in dwelling God in the city which is the Church.

Let me take time to say one last word about what we must have before the partial and technical Christian life which we live now can pass into the full and universal life which I have tried to describe.

We must have, first, a deeper meditativeness in what we do. Our life so learns to lack the habit, that we almost fear lest it should come to lack the power of meditation. There is so little rest! There is such an unreasoning passion for activity! And so we skim the surface of all things; we never look down into their depths and see the power of help and culture which they might contain. We know no more of the real depth of our own lives than a child who crosses a frozen lake knows how deep the lake is. He does not even know that it has a depth. It seems all surface. But before our life can get depth into it, it must get God into it. God is the only power that deepens lives. A life with no intention of God in it must be shallow. And there is no life so hard and crusted that, if God does enter into it, He will not break its crust through and deepen it to untold richness.

But the only way that brings God into our lives is first to have Him in our hearts. The soul that has Him finds Him. “To him that hath shall be given.” The new man takes the old circumstances, and, bringing God into them, makes of them the new life.

Arise, then, and go into the city. It is a word for each new Sunday which makes as it were for us a new beginning of our lives, — Arise and go into the city. You will find it the old city with the old streets and houses. You will find the new weeks what the old weeks were in all their outward circumstances. But they need not be the same old hopeless, meagre, thriftless things that other weeks have been. If you will only carry into them a new light, they will be new. If you will only take some new resolution, some bolder faith, best of all, — nay, only good of all, — if you will take Christ into them, how new and ever-renewing they will be — the beginning of the new heavens and new earth for you, fresh already with the everlasting freshness of eternity.