THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD, A Life for a Life and other addresses, A Changed Life, THE PROGRAMME OF CHRISTIANITY, THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH, PAX VOBISCUM, and STONES ROLLED AWAY and other addresses, Henry Drummond [digital book reader txt] 📗

of it; but the thing itself stands untouched.
You ask me, "What, then, do you retain? Do you dilute Christianity until it means little or nothing--so little that anybody can call himself a Christian?" On the contrary, we make it the most severe thing, the most definite thing, that a man could choose for his object in life. We make it a necessity that a man shall be turning, that he shall seek first the Kingdom of God. He may choose his own way of doing it; but he must put that before him as an ambition and as his career to seek first the Kingdom of God. We say nothing to those men about saving their souls. We say to them: "Gentlemen, save your lives. Do something with your life. Let that energy, that talent, go out to some purpose. The world needs the knowledge you have, the impulses you can give; aye, and the criticisms that you can offer upon the religious forms round about. It needs all these things. Save your lives. Do something with them." The Kingdom of God, according to Christ's own definition, is leaven; it is salt; it is light. Can you tell me what is going to raise this country, for instance, if it is not to be Christianity? If you take the Christianity out of Boston, weak as some of it may be, and inconsistent as some of it may be, in fifty years it will be uninhabitable by a respectable man or woman. Was it Mr. Lowell who said: "Show me ten square miles in any part of the world, outside of Christianity, where the life of man and the purity of woman are safe, and I will give up Christianity"? There are no such ten square miles in any part of the world. Many things can lift society a little; but, as a matter of fact and history, the thing that has lifted the nations of the world to their present level has been, in some form or other, direct or diffused, the Christianity of Christ. Christian men are to be not only the leaven of the world, but they are to be the salt of the earth. The world is not only sunken, needing to be raised, but it is rotten, and needing to be purified. Salt is that which saves from corruption. Christianity is the salt of the earth. It is the great antiseptic of society. Christian men are the light of the world. The light of Christ was the light of men; and other men are to catch that light and radiate it upon the world.
You point me to other teachers, many of them very great, many of them with great messages for the world--Socrates, Plato--a long list of names; but, allowing all their goodness, can one of them be put beside Christ as a mere teacher? Socrates went about the world asking questions. Christ went about the world answering questions. That was the difference. Socrates was looking for truth. Christ said truth is in living. I am the truth; and the man who lives like Me will live true, and all the wrong in the mind will be corrected. You cannot help seeing truth.
Now, gentlemen, what do you think of that for a life, for a career? You do not know what to do with yourself. What do you think of being a crystal of salt in a community such as this city, or a little cell of leaven which cannot help, by the mere contagion of its presence, passing on influence and life to things round about it, or being a light to the dark people, perhaps the dark Christians, if you like, round about, too?
Do the workingmen of this country not need light? What is to alter the critical condition of the working classes in this country, if it is not to be the teaching of Christianity in some form? What is to guide these labor movements and to work upon the minds in all directions, to make this country continuously prosperous? Men who have looked deepest into these problems have either given them up or seen only one solution, and that is in the teaching of Christ and the application of His principles to common life. These principles are not in the air. They are justified by every fact and law of nature.
I believe in Christianity, first of all, not because I believe in this book. I believe in this book because I believe in Christianity. Religion does not come out of the Bible. The Bible comes out of religion. I believe in Christianity because I believe in evolution. Christianity is to me further evolution. I know no better definition of it than that. The forces of nature carry a man up to a certain point and there they stop. Then the psychic forces carry him up another point to the evolution of mind. Then the moral forces come in and carry him up a little further. Then the vis a tergo, the struggle for life that pushes him on, is reinforced by a vis a fronto; and he sees ideals before him, and is drawn up higher and higher, from strength to strength, until he reaches the fullness of the stature of the perfect man. That is pure evolution, the evolution of the man toward the ideal, toward the perfect man Jesus Christ. This principle of which I have been speaking, of a man giving his life to other people, to help on his country, is in the very, heart of nature. There are two great principles in nature by which all things work and by which all things are moved. The one is the struggle for life. Every plant and animal starts out to nourish itself. That struggle goes on along the line of the function of nutrition. There is the struggle for the life of others--the function of reproduction. These two functions make up life. Now, most of us live along the line of the first. All our lives, nearly, are centered in that; but that is only one half of the life appointed by nature. There is the struggle for the life of others, the function of reproduction, and in its higher forms everything that is high lies. All the happiness in life, in reality, has come along the second of these two lines, and not along the first. All the life of the world, in reality, lies on the side of reproduction. A plant takes a little bit of itself and gives it away. It lives by death. It dies; the life goes on. This chapel is built upon death. That book is death. Those pillars are the death of men. Those clothes are the death of animals. Every part of life and everything in life is kept alive by death. The animal gives off a part of itself and dies. Its life goes on--has passed on; and I say all the comfort and happiness and beauty and luxury of life come along that line. Three-fourths of the world at this moment live upon rice. What is rice? It is a seed --a fruit, therefore, of reproduction. The world lives upon this altruistic principle. All the fruits of the world are the gifts of reproduction. All the drinks of the world are the fruits of reproduction --the milk of the cow, the sprouting grain, the malted liquor, the withered hop, the fruit of the vine, wine itself. All the beauty of the world comes along the line of reproduction--the feathers of the bird, the fire of the glow-worm, the face of a woman. All the music of the world is love music--the chorus of the insect, the song of the nightingale, the serenade of the lover. We live by what the function of reproduction has done for us; and the man who gives his life for what is going on in that line is living for the highest end in nature.
The struggle for life is waning every century, and by and by it will give place entirely to this other. Therefore, when Christ said, "Seek first the Kingdom of God," he propounded a perfectly scientific doctrine. He was offering man a life which would include all other lives, to which all other things would be heir.
Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. You are here at the university. You can't yet begin to do anything for your country, as you might. What you can do now is to leaven this university. What you can do is to get hold of some one man, whose life is of no account, and which is apparently not going to be of any account, and save that man, not for his own sake only, but because that is a piece of energy which has gone off but can be brought in and reclaimed and utilized for the good of man.
There was a medical student in Edinburgh University in his second year (our course is four years), who saw that he had been living there eighteen months entirely for himself. He had never done a hand's turn to be of any good or use to any one, and it hurt him. One day he determined that he would do something to help another man, and he remembered another undergraduate, who had come from the same country town as himself, and who had gone to pieces. He hunted him up. He found him half drunk in a very poor and shabby lodging. He told him that he would like him to come and live in his rooms; that he had nice rooms, and it was snugger than where he was. The other man stated he was in debt and could not leave. No. 1 went out of the room, paid the man's bill, sent for a carriage, bundled up his friend's things--and a newspaper held them all--and took him off to his own lodgings. The next morning he said: "Now, you and I are going to live together. Let us make a contract and both sign it."
There were four articles in it.
"First, neither one of us is to go out alone, unless absolutely necessary.
"Second, twenty minutes to be allowed to go from room to college for recitations. Overtime to be accounted for.
"Third, one hour to be given every night to recreation.
"Fourth, bygones to be bygones."
They both signed it. Everything went on well. They had lived together for six weeks when one night No. 2 sprang up, shut his book with a bang and said: "I can't stand this slow life. I must have a bust." "Very well," said No. 1, "you shall bust here. What do you want?" "I want some drink." "Well, you shall have it," said No. 1, and he got him something to drink and brought it to the room. No. 2 took it. Do you say it was a risk? His thirst was allayed and the wild beast was calmed. He settled down to his books for six weeks again, when the wild beast once more asserted itself. No. 1 gave it a meal to satisfy it, as before. No. 2 worked faithfully this time for three months before another outbreak. And so the thing went on. A year afterward No. 2 said to No. 1: "You never tell me what you are reading at the recreation hour. I think I see you read the Bible sometimes. You never talked to me on that