Article March 8, 1913 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Frank N. Riale, Elbert W. Whitney, Charles Edward Stowe, T. Rhondda Williams

[Continent.]

In times past in Christian experience, the main reason why men were strong to do what they understood to be right was their feeling that God would mark their failures if they fell short. Doubtless it was fear in the first stages of Christian living, — in the more seasoned of God's servants it was loyalty,— but whichever it was, the pleasing of an eternal Master was a compulsion which forbade men to shirk or cower or retreat, and prevented their sneaking away to indulge the languors and appetites of the flesh. Under that compulsion stout hearts went to the stake and welcomed slaughter rather than violate the least item of their opinion of truth and right. Under that compulsion men attempted enterprises of incredible hardship and apparently certain failure, just because they felt God expected it of them. But now all this background of "God and I" has grown to be so unaccustomed that the average layman thinks it almost freakish for one to say that God expects of him anything at all. The sense of God standing by and giving instructions for a man's life, even of God standing near to approve when he does right and condemn when he does wrong, is hardly to be found at all in the modern man's store of rational, downto-the-fact ideas. But has the modern man anything to put in place thereof which will give him equal steadiness in stalwart morality?

Ingrained respect for the eternal and immutable laws of right, beautiful sentiment about what a human being owes of fairness and sympathy to his fellow humans, and prudence which cannily sanctions the wisdom of the golden rule, are the safeguards on which the twentieth century imagines it can depend for ordered morality among men and for individual character fit to bear stress. But these will not do for the long strain; they will not supply permanent moral motive power. Loss of God-sense means eventually the breakdown of right doing wherever right doing is difficult or against immediate apparent interest. Back to God's presence— that is the watchword of safe morality and enduring religion. Think yourself back to it; better, pray yourself back. It is only when you feel God searching you that you are sure to stand fast in His ways. And the church — let it bestir itself to proclaim the reality of the onlooking eyes — the eyes of infinite knowledge and infinite justice and infinite love that look in every place of human life, "beholding the evil and the good." If the church neglects that, it will see the awful result at the end in a society where neither evil nor good is known in distinction from the ways of an aimless and reckless human vagrancy. "Thou God seest me!" There is the encyclopedia of right.

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