The Effect of Environment

“The Man’s Mad.”

“THE man’s mad,” of course, when he sees things that I do not see, and uses words which I have never heard before; there can be no doubt that “the man’s mad.” We first despise commonplace, then we make an idol of it. So long as a man is commonplace we are impatient with him; the moment he becomes original we distrust him. How mad a man I must be when I lay down the proposition that it ought to be possible for men and nations so to act as never to make any mistake in conducting the practical affairs of life! The proposition must be taken with an obvious context. What that context is I shall try to explain.

There are certain domains of inquiry that are forbidden to believers in the Bible, and to such believers only will my argument be addressed. We must be limited by practical necessity; in other words, not our speculation, but our judgment must

fix the boundaries. For example, is it good for us 17t that we should know this thing? Is it for the general advantage of the world? Will the knowledge of it minister to utility or only to vanity? All mere prying, all light-minded inquisitiveness, must be condemned or mortified.

This reservation creates a clear space for our real necessities; how many and urgent they are we all know. To such necessities alone does my proposition apply. Respecting them I reaffirm that we may be so guided as never to make a mistake as to their useful and happy treatment. We should be careful lest we have a large Bible for quotation, and a.very small one for practice. We profess to believe the text, ‘In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct thy paths,” but as a matter of fact do we believe it? Do we consult God in any but a very general way? Do we not often go to Him after we have made up our mind? If this one text is true, no other is needed. Here isa text which can be proved or disproved — a text that need not remain among the uncertainties. With my whole heart I believe this text, and I have never known it fail. I have acted upon it when the answer has gone absolutely against my inclination, when the way seemed clear in the other direction, and when I have had to give up the most tempting prospects. Yet the text has vindicated itself. My loss has been my gain. If we do not test the text in this spirit, we cannot test it at all. The text is everything, or it is nothing. It is not to be trifled with, taken up and laid down, partly believed and partly distrusted, admired as poetry and neglected as discipline. “Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.”

We can only test the doctrine under very definite conditions. Nothing must be done in vain-mindedness. The slightest taint of mere fortune-telling will vitiate and nullify the whole process. When men promise themselves that they will “be as gods,” it is the devil that speaks in them, and tells them his one poor lie. They are not prompted by necessity, but by ambition, and ambition in such cases means death.

The purpose being right, the body must be under healthy discipline. Many a prayer is lost in the swamp of a foul body. Let no man imagine that ‘he can suddenly turn aside from self-indulgence, and with the lips of a debauchee ask Heaven to direct him how to invest his money. For such a man there is no heaven. On the other hand, I am not supposing that perfectness is possible — the body will never be pre-resurrectionally perfect. The difference is between the man who wallows in sin and the man who struggles against it. The latter has heaven on his side.

There is a third condition difficult to define — a condition of rightness or harmony with the movement of nature; a realised kinship with the whole environment; the sensitiveness of membership in a stupendous and intricate economy. All this consciousness is but another name for a larger and truer conscience — the conscience that declines a personal advantage at the expense of a general loss to others. The prayer which I offer is to this effect: “Lord, I want to do this; it would gratify me to do it; my poor reason sees no objection to it; but, without Thee, I will not touch it; now show me Thy way” — that is my little prayer spoken at the Cross. Often the answer is what I do not want it to be, but I accept the agony as a pledge that the joy is coming.

What the sign is between God and the heart, every man must determine for himself. A sweet and secret confidence must subsist between the two. I love to steal away to God and tell Him all I want. I come back a man. My disappointment is not without a sweetness. The grave of my prayer is the garden of my faith.

Does the process never fail? Never. God cannot lie. Sometimes I am so self-willed that I am overborne, and cannot avail myself of the process. That

ANGEL-FRIENDS. 175°

is the hour and the power of darkness. Sometimes the heavens and the earth will not help me. The stars will not come my way. I am then an outcast and an alien. But the hindrance is physical. I have been wounding my body, interfering with its functions, neglecting its ablutions; or I have made room for a burning and guilty thought in my brain, and that has poisoned all the rills of life. Thus the body avenges itself upon the soul. Thus the astronomic union is broken, and for the moment I am no longer counted in the universe. There is no census of the dead. I know that our graves are swung around the sun as well as our homes, yet they are not warmed by his smile.

To be right with our environment, what is it but to be in conscious or unconscious sympathy with the angels that gather round us for vigilance and service? They are invisible. So is the air. But we feel the air. Yes, and we may feel the angels, too. I often see my angel-friends — outlines of faces, solemn, but with fulness of joy. Visions of this kind make life large, and elevate all other nature into noble symbolism. Such visions we applaud with tears, happy tears, cleansing tears, dew distilled in heaven.

A word of caution. No man can adopt this sacred masonry as a pastime or a trick. Nor can any man calculate it as a factor in the mystery of chances. Nor is it to be classified under any aspect of prognostication. It is fellowship — it is almost identity with God. Here I find the ultimate meaning of clairvoyance, hypnotism, spiritualism, and even of the rudest forms of estimating probabilities or laying stakes upon events. Gambling is a disennobled virtue. It has its own blurred and depleted Bible of Providence. It testifies to a ghostly element in life. It would seem as if by some law man is forced to have commerce with spiritual agencies. I have never despised what is called spiritualism, notwithstanding the knaveries and impostures of every name and degree which have brought discredit upon the whole range of its pretensions. It pointed toward something better than itself. It appealed to an instinct which external civilisation has never satisfied. But for this inborn something on which to work, spiritualism could not have lived a single day, so vulgar and preposterous have been its pretensions.

Looking over what I have thus written, it occurs to me that at all its main points it can be supported by Biblical testimony. “Shall I withhold from Abraham the thing which I do?” ‘Then there must have been some way of communicating it. “The secret of the Lord is with them that fear

Him.” Then it must have been made known. “In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct thy paths.” Then the direction must be made definitely certain, and not be left in vagueness. “I will hear what God the Lord will say.” Then we must have something more than mere impression — the voice must be distinct and unmistakable. “Ask, and ye shall receive,” — how? “Thy Father which seeth in secret will reward thee openly.” If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God. Our asking must be sanctioned by reason. I have no right to ask how long the earth will continue; nor have I a right to ask for answers which will give me an advantage over other men. I have no right to pry into the future for vain or selfish reasons. But I may take all my perplexities to God, and have them set in order. I can ask God how to use my money, how to treat opportunities, how to trust the men who seek my confidence, how to guidé my daily course. I can enlarge the whole ground of inquiry, and ask questions regarding the policy of nations, the issues of statesmanship, and the significance of portentous events — to all these inquiries I can (the context as already explained being right) have immediate and decisive answers, answers on which I could risk my

eternal destiny.

You will ask me whether every man can do this? M

I do not know. Possibly not. Certainly no man can do it without faith, and faith is the gift of God. ‘Be it unto thee according to thy faith” is Christ’s law of communication. To faith all things are possible. If ye had faith as a grain of mustard-seed ye could remove mountains, is distinctly the teaching of Christ. Yet we will not seize our inheritance and rule according to the measure of our sovereignty. We hesitate, and tremble, and perish. We do not take Christ at His word. We turn that word into poetry, symbolism, and film, rather than into the nutritious bread by which our souls are to be sustained.