What a Busy Man Can Do
Do you know what a busy man can do if he be determined to do it? ‘Take the instance of Samuel. “Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life.” He had then a lofty occupation, and a position of extreme responsibility. Samuel was a travelling judge; “he went from year to year in circuit” — a legal term to-day — “to Bethel, and Gilgal, and Mizpeh, and judged Israel in all those places.” Then he came to Ramah, and there also he judged Israel. Samuel had enough to do; he could find no time for religion, So we should say, reading his record in our own journals. Nevertheless, our emphasis would be no proof, for in the record may be found this sentence: “And there in Ramah he built an altar unto the Lord.” You can find time for religion if you want to. You can find time if your hearts be really in quest for God. Let us have no talk about want of time. There is time for everything, and that time always occurs in the morning. That is where we waste ourselves. If a man does not rise until eight
o’clock, I do not wonder that he complains that he has not much time. He should have been up at five: that is the time when the strength comes; that is the time when the eyes are keen and penetrating as fire; that is the time when the angels sing. Some of us finish work by eight o’clock, and then people say, However do you manage to get through your work? There is no difficulty about it. If you choose to waste your morning, and say, Nobody else is up, why should I get up? then you will end in failure; and when I hear of your poverty and distress, I shall say, God be praised! You should be first on the ground. You have no idea what a wicked world it seems to a man who has been out from five to six o’clock, and then returns to find everybody’s window-shutters closed; there is then no difficulty in believing in the depravation and the utter wickedness of the human family.
The man who has to travel round this circuit, Bethel and Gilgal and Mizpeh and Ramah, will have no time to build the altar. Samuel is the contradiction to that statement. He not only worshipped at the altar — he built it. Men who have done nothing for themselves can have no idea what a delight it is to enjoy something that their own very hands have done. A child will walk round his father’s garden with you, and take but little delight in all the parterres and terraces and all the greenhouses; but when he turns round a certain corner, and comes upon what he calls his “own garden,” then it is that his little breast swells with honest pride. It is a poor thing to look at if you bring a stranger’s eyes to bear upon that scene, but quite a paradise if you look at it through the eyes of your love. You should build your own house; you should make your own garden. Why go into a house which your father built? You do not know how sweet it is to have a home that you yourself roofed in by honest labour and by honest industry.
Samuel was a busy man, and yet he prayed. “I can do all things through Christ, which strengtheneth me.” Let me receive the gift of the day as I bend before the altar, and I will make its little twenty-four hours into forty-eight; the sun shall stand still, and the moon over Ajalon till I do my task. A man who begins late in the day, and who begins other- — where than at the altar, what can he do? He will be busy enough, but the busier a man seems to be, the less he is often doing. The greatest men of business I have ever known have been men who were apparently doing nothing. What heads they had! what invention, what foresight, what penetration! How much there was in one little simple order! Such men cut the verb right down to one mood, and that mood was enough for them, Other people have to conjugate the verb up to that point. Never plead your business as a reason why you cannot visit the sick, speak gently to the comfortless, and cut a crust and butter it for those who are hunger-bitten. There is no loss of time in such holy exercises; the hours wait for you; you rise from prayer, if it be of the right healthy sort, to find that you have been mistaken one full half-hour in your calculation. Such miracles will God work for those who begin at the altar, and return to it at the time of the setting of the sun.
Samuel was a great man, and yet he found time for prayer. Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life; Samuel went on circuit asa judge. Samuel was looked up to by the community within whose confines he lived. He was a great man, and yet he found time to go to church. He lived at the altar; that was his permanent address.- You might make an appointment to meet him there. Pray without ceasing. He is no great man who has no time for eternity; he is a vain, conceited man, full of abortive labours, making more or less of splash and noise, but there is no greatness in him. He may be great in a minor sense, There is a greatness that is informational, managerial, executive. It is not to that kind of greatness I refer; the true greatness is spiritual; it is so great that it is restful. The earth
HOUSE AND ALTAR. ts 38)
is going at such a speed that it seems to be standing still. Spiritual genius is greatness, and spiritual genius is impossible if we cut the cords and bands which connect us with the perennial fountains. How rebuked some of us feel in the presence of a man like Samuel! He does ten times our work, and yet he has time to build an altar; he overshadows us all by his greatness, and yet he bends down like a little child at the altar, that he may talk to his Father, and tell Him everything that happened through the day, and ask Him in the morning to direct the whole business of the day that is coming. Oh, these people that have no time! the people who write to their friends in great haste. There is no need for you to write in haste; better not write at all. Why did you put off until ‘ the post was going to close, and then seize your pen and write violent nonsense? You should have — written it at six o’clock in the morning; then it would have been calm, dewy, sweet, lovely. There seems to be a disease amongst some people to begin their work at the very time when they ought to be ending it.
Why did Samuel build this altar at Ramah? Because his house was there. The house and the altar went together. All the loveliest things ought to be at the house, and the loveliest thing in any house is the altar. The library is the soul of the house. The drawing-room and the- dining-room, and the various other state chambers, are the mere corpus; the library is the soul. Some men have no books; they might be described by their negations; or if they have a few books, they are so far down that to stoop to them is great pain, and so they never do stoop to them. You should have a book before you have a table. It is not necessary for you to dine, but it is necessary for you to feed your soul. Do not starve the divinity within you. That soul wants ideas, intellectual contact with other souls, companionship, stimulus, Lie down on the bare floor rather than not have a book to read,
Why did Samuel build his house in Ramah? There he judged Israel, as well as at Bethel, and Gilgal, and Mizpeh. He was the judge in his own town; and as a townsman observed by his fellow-citizens, he had an altar. Neither the family nor the bench of justice would be complete without the altar. Blessed is the country whose judges worship the living God! blessed is the country whose merchants have a conscience! prosperous must that country be whose jurisprudence and commerce and general life go back to religious foundations and inspirations. Do not have a formal altar only. When you pray, be true. You may sometimes pray
CONSECRATED PLACES. TA]
in silence. Wherever you pray your altar is. Yet do not allow the general to overrule and extinguish the particular. Many men say that all their money ought to be God’s, and therefore they will not give a proportion of it. Do they in very deed give God all? Some persons say, “All our time ought to be God’s — why have one day in the week?” I answer, If you cannot give one day in the week, you will never give seven. We know what you are going to do with the whole when we know what you are doing with the part. He that is faithful in little will be faithful also in much. There is such a way of keeping the Sabbath day that the influence will go down all the valley of the week and fertilise it as with streams that come from heaven. There are those who say, The whole earth is consecrated, then why have your places of worship? Precisely for the same reason: He that is faithful in little will be faithful in much. If a man cannot have religion in his own house, he will never have it in the church; if he cannot have it in the church, he will never have it in the whole vastness of the world. We must be tested where we can be measured; we cannot be acquitted at the bar of vague generalities; we must tell what we do in detail. God judges actions one by one.
A beautiful idea is this, that places are known by their altars. Ramah and altar seem to be terms inseparable in the thought and expression of Samuel. In some places we have memorials we would not obliterate; we look for them whenever we go back to the well-known place. As a boy, I had a little declivity in a green field where I used to pray between the mid-day breaking-up of the school and its reassembling. I know exactly where it is: a little hollow in a field, and a high green hedge round about it; and I can see the boy now, going in blossoming time between twelve and one, and bending down behind all the April snow, that he might get hold of heaven. Have your holy places; have your sacred corners in the house. ‘Thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” None shall be able to stand against thee; they shail rush upon thee like violent oxen, but their horns shall be broken, their heads shall fall down in pitiable weakness, Live in God. “Commit thy way unto the Lord, and He shall bring it to pass.” Not to-day or to-morrow, but on the third day thou shalt be crowned with triumphs. “Gad, a troop shall overcome him: but he shall overcome at the last.” Until “the last,” judge no man,
Periods, as well as places, ought to be known by altars. Think of beginning your business with prayer. The shop you open is a very small place, but you could not open it with any good to your own soul, with any hope of getting on in the world, unless you first have an interview with God. You will remember that little shop all the days of your life. You had not yet begun business; you had made all arrangements; the business proper was begun in the morning, but you said in your dear young heart, Before opening the door, I will talk a few moments with God. When you did so, it was impossible for you to keep false weights; the God of justice and the scale of iniquity could not live or exist, or be in any fashion or form under the same roof. When you consecrated your place of business, you drove out of it the evil spirit of injustice, oppression, and sharp practice. There is a cleverness that can only commit suicide; it is sharpness, not genius, Avoid it as you would avoid an enemy. And others remember their beginning of housekeeping, and how the first guest they had in the house was God ° Himself. The house was not much to look at; you will think of it with smiles some day. You thought it was a fine-looking door, and you measured for every little piece of furniture as if you were doing the most dainty work in the world; when you got everything put into its place, you thought there never was such a house on the face of the whole earth. Nor was there, to you. To you, it was your house. And woe betide the man who thinks evil of his own home. When you get on in the world, and get up to two thousand pounds a year, you will be ashamed of the poor carpet. You persuaded yourself at the time that if it was not Brussels, it was very like it, and many persons wouldn’t know that it was not. And the poor little pieces of furniture you will, I hope, not sell, but give away to some. other boy who is going to begin his tent-life in the world. But you consecrated the house, and it shone again. Hverything about the house, bird and cat and dog, was the better for that prayer; and the fire crackled with a merrier noise after that homage rendered to the Father. Remember all these altars, places of consecration, hours of aspiration, so that when you come to be an old man, you will have pictures on which the eyes will rest with satisfaction, thankfulness, and delight. What are we building? Every man is building something. Are you building a fool’s house on the fool’s foundations? or are you building the wise man’s house on the wise man’s rock? These are the questions with which a man should perforate his very heart, and he should insist upon that heart telling him the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.