Article May 6, 1916 Issue

From Our Exchanges

with contributions from Canon Alexander

[The Sunday School Times]

All of us see and approve of many new courses of action, and we would like to get the enlargement that they promise, but we cannot see how it is going to in precisely with what has gone before, and so we resist the new impulse instead of throwing ourselves in with it cordially and fully. It is natural and right to appraise at its full worth what has been so well done hitherto; we do not wish to imperil it, and because we can find no formula that makes the new start in life perfectly consistent with what has gone before, we refuse our opportunities. New and enlarged righteousness is apt to seem dangerous to us, or risky, and we forget that what has already been gained was gained principally by the very risks and daring that we now refuse.

Yes, it is just this fear of getting things out of joint that keeps thousands of us from responding to the visions and impulses, the appeals and the experiments that are always offering us a larger life. A new order of living no sooner suggests itself than we ask: 'What will people think? What will people say? Is Saul also among the prophets?" We dread calling attention to ourselves. It will seem to people as if we confessed that what we had been doing hitherto was mistaken. The new course will imply that the old one was at fault. If we could glide into it without making any appreciable break, well and good, but when it entails the making of comparisons and the tacit confession of failure, we dread it. There is hardly a good thing we would not do if it could only be done without a break, but most improvements in life do not come without something of the nature of a leap or a plunge. They justify themselves afterward and not before.

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