The Material and the Spiritual

“And as he went out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto him: Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here.” — MARK xiii. I.

IT was the last week of Christ’s life in Jerusalem. Every morning He walked in from Bethany and taught the people in the Temple, and went back again at night to the house of Lazarus and Martha and Mary. On the first evening, as they passed out of the temple between the great walls which supported its vast area, the disciples with their Jewish pride in their queenly city pointed out its massive structure to Him: “Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here.”

It is no wonder that they were impressed with admiration. To the simple fishermen from Gallilee this superb masonry, whose remains still testify its greatness, must have seemed almost superhuman. They look to see their Master impressed, too. But here they are wholly disappointed. Jesus was absorbed in something else. He was thinking about the moral and spiritual condition of the city whose material architecture was so superbly strong. With His eye set upon fbose things it was impossible that

He should be overcome by the mere size of stones and skill of mason’s work. “Seest thou these great buildings! “He exclaims. ‘There shall not be left one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down.” He looked beyond these mighty works. He saw the life that lay behind them. He saw a rottenness of character which was really undermining the deep masonry. He could not value it as the disciples did. He could not answer their summons to join their admiration. He had gone beyond them, and was dwelling on something vastly more interesting and impressive. We can almost think we hear a certain yearning tone in the voice of Jesus as He felt how His deep absorption in the spiritual interests of His people had made Him incapable of finding pleasure in the merely outward signs of their dignity and strength.

And is not this the penalty of all enlightenment, — indeed, of all deepening of life of every sort? It puts out of our power the pleasures and prides that we lived in while our lives were merely superficial. We give up admiring lower things as higher things absorb us more and more. You have a child for whom, for years, you have been desiring prosperity and popular regard. You have been proud that he has won them both. He has succeeded in business and he has made hosts of friends. But in the mean time, you have become more of a man. You have acquired larger thoughts. You have come to the religious value of character. That a man should be pure and devoted and godly seems to you now to be the one needful thing. No wonder that your

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child wonders and is puzzled when, bringing into your presence his money and his fame, which used to give you so much pleasure, he finds that they do not impress you as they used to do. You are looking beyond them for something else in him which perhaps you do not find.

Or, to take a case more similar to that of Christ and His disciples, you grow up with a strong, high pride in your country, — her vast extent, her lordly wealth, her noble buildings, her endless railways, all her prosperous life. But if, as you grow up, you come to know that the real prosperity of a land is not these things, if you come to ask for lofty ideas, for brave, true men, for domestic purity, for scrupulous regard for all men’s rights; and if, not finding these so plentifully as your patriotic soul desires, your enthusiasm flags over the signs of material success, will you not sometimes almost feel that you have lost something in reaching these higher desires for your country which have tarnished your satisfaction in her material success? Or, your friend waves the banner of his happiness before your eyes and cries, “Rejoice with me that I am happy.” And you have to answer him, “I cannot rejoice with you as you want me to rejoice, because I see, for such as you are, so much greater and truer a happiness that you ought to be enjoying.” Thus it is always. Every advance in the standards of living, while it brings a man higher satisfactions, shuts him out from some lower ones. He can no longer go on his way “like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains.” Christ cannot glory with

His disciples over the masonry of the temple as He cannot be terrified with them over the storm at sea. But all this introduces us to a question in answer to which I should like to offer you a few thoughts — the question of human impressibility. What ought a true man to be impressed by? What is there that is worthy of taking hold of our imaginations and really seeming to us great and wonderful? For men, as I have indicated to you already, are judged by their impressibilities; from the child who starts and leaps with pleasure when you flash a bit of colored glass in the sun before his eyes, all the way up to the philosopher who glows with joy as he perceives some new relation of idea to idea and so discovers a new truth. Find what any man is impressed by, and you have found what kind of man he is. You step into a shopful or earful of men all sitting indiscriminately together, and you tell some story of how money may be made, you repeat the story of some rich man’s way of growing rich, and almost all will listen and admire. You turn from that and repeat some item of the daily news, some thing that only requires common intelligence and a general interest in the doings of mankind to understand and care for, and a smaller number will look up and listen. You go on and tell some tale of heroism and self-devotion that only a generous heart can comprehend, and those in your audience who are impressed are fewer still. Finally, you speak about the spiritual nature, about the soul’s life in God, the blessedness of purity, the peace of trust, and only one or two or three look up and show with kindling eye and quiet, earnest face that they care for those sacred things of which you speak. The men are judged and sorted by their impressibilities. So nature impresses her own men; and Art lays her hand on hers; and both are judged by their impres sibilities.

And now it stands out clearly in our story that Jesus did not care for the Titanic stones on which the Jewish temple rested. It was a superb utterance of the skill and strength by which man can control the physical world. There they are still to-day, those giant stones. The traveller may go and look at them. They bear amazing witness of the prowess of power and patience by which they have been wrought out of the mountain-side and piled into their places. They tell of man’s dominion over matter as hardly any ancient sight can tell. They were crying out to the disciples of man’s power over matter, and the disciples were full of wonder at it, but Jesus did not care for it. There was a higher, fuller power of man, another conquest of the world which these men had missed, and, because of their missing that, this mere material triumph did not interest or move Him. He prophesied how transitory it was all to prove, and so passed on and left it.

Now, we need to know, in the first place, that that is always true. It is something which we who call ourselves the servants of Jesus Christ have no right ever to forget, — that He never is impressed by merely material success or power any more than He was when He saw them in Jerusalem. You take the things for which men praise you, — your success in business, the discovery that you have made, the house that you have built, — nay, as one proud, exalted person of this nineteenth century in which we live, you take all our material civilization in its grandeur and superbness, and you hold it up before Christ; and what you need to know is that of and for itself Christ does not care for it. It was not what He came into the world to bring to pass. It is conceivable that all of it might exist to-day, and yet Christ’s work be a profound and total failure. We see, indeed, that all the spring of marvellous energy, all the vitalizing power which made our civilization, has come in connection with the Gospel; and so we are apt to think that what the Gospel set itself to do was to give man this power over the material world; but when we undertake to search for it we find that not one word ever fell from Jesus’ lips which told that this was what He sought. If material civilization, — that is, the accumulation of wealth, the multiplication of physical comforts, the conquering of force to man’s will so that it leaps the ocean almost with a bound and speaks his messages around the globe, — if it literally could stop short there and go no farther, leave literally no impress upon character, it would make no impression upon Christ. He would care nothing for it.

And what comes next? Does it not follow that if we are Christians, servants of Christ, we too are to care nothing for material success in and for itself? We yield to it in a servile way. We let it rule us and oppress us. In our own lives it keeps us struggling and working all our days, from our earliest to our latest years, heaping up money or providing comforts for ourselves. In our brethren’s lives around us we yield to its demands, and render our homage to the man who overpowers us with the bulky imposition of his wealth. If we were really, thoroughly, Christians, we could not be such slaves. We must rise up in protest and insist that these are not the true things for a spiritual being either to strive for or to admire. O my dear friends, we are not wholly Christ’s until some such freedom comes to us! Now and then we see a man who does resist and rebel. We see some mortal, made apparently just like ourselves, who boldly says that he will not live for the outside of things, and who with perfect satisfaction goes his way through life, disregarding those same things that are to us the lords and kings of everything. I think that there is some thing very strange in the mixture of pity and respect with which we regard such a man. We look up to him and we look down on him at once. It is the curious utterance of our double consciousness about material things, — the superficial consciousness which values them supremely, and the deep underconsciousness that in themselves they have no value. Every sight of such a man stirs in us strange questionings, sets us to asking whether the secret of his carelessness is an insensibility which is brutal and has not come up to the value of these things, or a higher sensibility which is Christlike, which has gone beyond the care for them and left them behind it in its care for better things.

If we ask this question about the indifference of

Jesus, it will not be hard to give it its true answer. Indeed, we have only stated a small part of the truth when we have said that Christ did not care, does not care ever, for merely material triumphs, or for the perfection of material things. In a true sense, no doubt, He does care for them; only for Him, with His perfect perception, the whole world is only one, and it is impossible for Him to do what we are always doing, to take the inferior part which is meant to work as a means and to give it a value aside from its connection with the superior part which is the end to which it has to minister. Christ does value the material, but always with an outlook beyond it to the spiritual. If we keep this in view, I think we may believe, with the profoundest reverence, that there is no work upon material things faithfully done by man which God does not look upon with pleasure. Thoroughness and beauty are the two excellent qualities of man’s work upon material things. Out of the hillside quarry are dug two blocks of stone, and one of them with patient labor is set into a wall, where for generations it holds a great tomxer in its place. The other is carved into a statue, which for centuries stands like a perfect flower, shedding the fragrance of its beauty around upon the lives of men. Does God have any pleasure in these two achievements? I cannot picture to myself the God entirely indifferent to them. Every being delights in seeing active anywhere the powers which embody its own best activity. Now, God is the Creator, and if in the creation we can read anything of the Creator, these two dispositions, thoroughness and beauty, must lie at the very centre of His Being; for they everywhere pervade the world that He has made. Thoroughness speaks from the lips of every compact adjustment of means to end, from every reserve of power which is revealed to us as the years go on. Beauty shines out of every flower and star and all the manifold variety of life that lies between. And when a man builds a strong bridge, or paints a glowing picture, when the constructive or the aesthetic power manifests itself in man the child, caught by direct inheritance from God the Father, the Father does not look on indifferently, but cares for what His child is doing, and proves His care by sending the forces of His creation to help the work which the child by his invention or his taste is doing. We feel sure of that concerning God, and there is no word of Jesus which implies the contrary of that. No man can read the Gospels and not catch the tone of such a sympathy as proves that wherever the eye of Christ fell upon any man in Palestine who in those days was doing thorough or beautiful work in any department of activity, the Man of men honored him for it and rejoiced in it. Oh, do not think of Him who brought our nature to its best as being totally estranged from those things which ninety-nine hundredths of our race are doing all the time. Think of Him as caring for it all, as caring for what they did and for what you are doing; but always as being preserved from the slavery of material things by two principles which were absolutely despotic and invariable with Him, — the principle that no material thing was entirely satisfactory unless it could reveal some spiritual usefulness, and the principle that if any material thing, however beautiful, hindered any spirituality, there should be no hesitation about sacrificing it. Look at those two principles. See if they did not both absolutely rule in Christ, and see if they are not just what we need to save us from the tyranny of material things.

The first principle was that no material thing was wholly satisfactory unless it could reveal some spiritual usefulness. That appears everywhere in Jesus. It was what lay at the root of His method of teaching by parables. No sentimentalist of form or color will dare say that he sees a beauty or tenderness in a lily or a sky that Jesus did not see there. No botanist will claim that he dissects an interest out of a flower which was hidden from Him who made the flower. And yet these evidently were not the things which made the sky or flower satisfactory to Jesus. Listen to Him: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a king that made a marriage for his son.” Then, a king making a marriage for his son must be like unto the Kingdom of Heaven; and if the marriage of a prince, then the marriage of a peasant, and all the relations of the humblest or the highest life. All was like the Kingdom of Heaven; all shone with spiritual meaning. When He had once seen that, how was it possible that He should think of them and leave that out, or that He should be satisfied with any other man’s thinking about them which should leave that out?

Or take another illustration. I do not doubt that l6o THE MATERIAL AND THE SPIRITUAL

Jesus loved the cities where He lived and worked, loved Jerusalem and Nazareth, loved their very streets, loved them as we love our Boston. But to Him a city was a sacred thing; a multitude of men gathered under the conditions most calculated to enrich and discipline life. What good they might do! How good they might grow! A city was the type of heaven to Him. If then he saw His be loved Jerusalem growing rich, but not growing good, beautiful, with sparkling palaces and domes, as it sat on its strange hilltop, but shining with no light of godliness, it was not strange that He was disappointed and poured out His whole soul in lamentation that was all the more bitter because she who had fallen was so beautiful. And the same must have been true of a man. Did Jesus care for bustling energy and enterprise? Indeed He did. Life, life was what He was forever calling out for. But a man full of energy who fought with every thing except his passions, and desired all good things but character, — that sort of man was all the sadder to the Saviour for the energy that he possessed. Man, to Jesus who had made man, meant spirituality; and man without spirituality was to Him man without that manhood by which the body and the mind and the impetuous will are made truly human.

Now, is it inconceivable that we should come to feel about material forces and triumphs just as Jesus did? A great commercial man is ruling in our town. Men are all singing his praises. His power of making money is immense. His power over other peopie’s destinies is awful. He can stretch out his hand and paralyze a village on the other side of the continent. Again, he can lift up his voice and bid a desert by the Rocky Mountains blossom into a city. All men are praising him. Shall you and I praise him? Let us ask ourselves what Jesus would say of him. If he is all selfish, not one word of praise would fall on him from those blessed lips. With a pity that would seal his condemnation, the Christ who saw what he might ipe would cry over him, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!” Shall you and I praise him then? Oh, for the grace and clearness to say that we will not! Oh, for the spiritual honesty which shall refuse to set such a man’s life as the model life before young men! Oh, for the decency which shall refrain from belauding him when he is dead for virtues which even he would have blushed to have heard mentioned in his presence when he was alive! The time must come when Christian men shall refuse to honor capitalists for mere wealth, or cities for mere size, or their age for its mere accumulation of physical comfort. When that time comes, when every material triumph is compelled to show some spiritual gain, some contribution to human character, then how much more life will mean!

The other principle that governed our Lord’s relation to the world, I said was this, — that if any material thing, however beautiful and perfect in it self, stood in the way of any spirituality, it should be sacrificed without a hesitation. We mark every where in the life of Jesus a perfect perception, not merely of the absolute, but of the comparative value of things, and so an easy and unquestioning postponement of the less important to the more important always. This led to a certain distinct character being stamped on the career of Jesus, which belonged to the special circumstances in which He lived and the purpose for which He had come to earth. Under these circumstances and with that purpose set before Him, He could not possibly do things which it was yet in His nature to do, and which it would have been His delight to do under other conditions.

We must guard ourselves against thinking that in the few acts which Christ did on the earth, we have specimens of all the acts which it was possible for Him to do, and so which it would be right for us to do. Some people seem to have such an idea, and it limits their notion of what it is right for a Christian to do very narrowly indeed. This applies very clearly to our Lord’s whole relation to what we call aesthetics, to the beautiful in human art. There is not one sign that He was ever touched by it in the least; and any child who understands Christ could give you the reason. He was too busy; He was too earnest; He was too set on higher things; He was here to save men. The sight of their sin, their folly, their misery, was before Him every day. Behind that glowed to His divine sight the other picture of their possibility. He saw what they were; He saw what they might be. He was so set on lifting them out of what they were and into what they might be that He had no time left to think of the beauty or the ugliness with which their life chanced to be surrounded. It was not because He hated art and beauty that He never dwelt upon them; it was that He loved righteousness with the intenser love. So His indifference was not from a negation, but the whole positiveness of His soul was in it.

And how conceivable this is! How familiar some illustrations of the same thing are! The intenser and higher wish bids the lower one stand aside and bide its time. He who goes into a burning house to save a child out of the flames will not stop in the rush on which his own life and the child’s depends to gaze upon the rarest or loveliest pictures that hang upon the burning walls. That seems to me to tell the story of one side of Christ’s indifference to the things that occupy our taste and attention. It does not prove any absence in Him of the faculties in us to which those things appeal. A man who is fighting for his life tramples the flowers under his feet, but it does not prove that he is a brute who cannot see their beauty. A soldier gives up his home for the field and camp, but it does not show that he is a savage with no family affection. The Puritans in their fear of idolatry cast away all art, and broke the painted windows and hewed statues to pieces; it certainly did not prove with all of them that they did not feel the beauty of what they destroyed. With all strong men this sense of proportion, which sacrifices the less to the greater, is an essential quality. And all strong times in the world’s history have compelled that same sacrifice of the aesthetic to the moral which characterized the life of Jesus. Severe and simple in His moral earnestness, nobody misses that which we yet all feel, as we compare His life with our own, to be absent, — the conscious pleasure in adornment and art, the seeking of the tastes for satisfaction.

How ought this feature in the life of Him whom we delight to call our Lord to affect our feeling about our own cultivation and gratification of the sense of beauty? Ought we to cast it aside as some thing wrong, and say that we will have no more to do with it than He had? Certainly not! We ought to be sure that, under different conditions from those terrible ones in which His Incarnate Life was cast, Jesus would have delighted in all true beauty that man had ever found or created, with an appreciation that no man has ever felt. We ought to rejoice in the cultivation of all beauty as the fit expression of man’s joy in that life which the redemption of Christ has made so deeply and truly joyous. So the Christian has the best right of any man to cultivate the aesthetic sense. But at the same time he is bound by his Christianity to cultivate it purely, and in continual subordination to the moral and spiritual needs. The Christian may delight in beauty, but he must catch from Christ the assurance that no beauty is really beautiful which in any way hinders righteousness or weakens spiritual life; and he must be ready to strip every beautiful thing away the moment that God calls him to intenser life and duty. Does not this cast a doubt over the way in which many of your houses are adorned? Does it not convict a great deal of the unreal, impure, dilUttantt affectation which calls itself a taste for beauty? Nothing can be more essentially ugly to a wise perception than the house crowded with trinkets of exquisite form and color, and inhabited by men and women of idle or impure or selfish or little lives. The beauty with which they have bedecked their bower makes only more unpleasant the lives of the insects who inhabit it.

Here is the simple rehearsal of the whole matter. There are four classes, as concerns the whole matter of delight in and cultivation of what is artistically beautiful. There is the man who is below it all, too stupid to feel its influence — he is the brute. There is the man who loves the beautiful, but loves it either out of imitation of other people or with his senses only, having no spiritual perceptions beyond — he is the connoisseur or pedant. There is the man who allows himself all joy in material beauty but holds it always subordinate to truth and duty — he is the Christian. And there is here and there the man who is above it all, called to such serious work, fighting so fierce a battle, that he has no time left for outward beauty, but lives in the unseen beauty of devotion. At the head of all such men is Christ.

These are the two principles, then. He who insists on looking through the material to the spiritual which lies below it and which it represents and educates, he who looks beyond the material to the spiritual which is so much more important — he is the man whom mere material success and magnificence cannot impose upon. Men come to him and say, “Behold what manner of stones and what buildings l66 THE MATERIAL AND THE SPIRITUAL

are here!” They say, “See how rich this man is!” “How strong this institution is!” “How beautiful this art is!” His answer rings out clear and strong: “So far as they all mean spirituality and make spiritual men, I do indeed value them all and thank God for them; and yet I value them always with a higher value for the things beyond. I will let any of them go at any moment, if so I can reach to higher spirituality myself, or make other men better men.” How free that man is! How he can walk the proudest streets and not cringe to the arrogant wealth which crowds them! How calm the judgment with which, looking at them through Christ, he dares to form his own brave, independent thoughts of men and things!

How shall one reach that freedom? I hope that I have made it clear that it is only by entering into the higher anxieties of Jesus that one is freed from the lower anxieties of men. You must care with all your soul that God should be glorified and that men should be saved. If you can do that, you are free. And you can do that only by letting God first glorify Himself in you by saving you. Let Christ be your Saviour. Then, tasting His salvation, your one great wish will be that all men may be saved, and, wishing that intensely, you will be free from every other wish that does not harmonize with that. That is St. Paul’s great idea when he speaks of the Christian as “Casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.”