Article October 25, 1913 Issue

From Our Exchanges

with contributions from R. J. Campbell, Woodrow Wilson

[The Christian World]

Save us from the people who pose as examples, who on every occasion deliver their little moral lectures, their Pecksniffian maxims, who talk from their own height of virtue down to the inferiors they patronize! These are no builders. They lack that first principle of moral architecture, the knowledge of themselves. The work we are thinking of is hardly an affair of words at all,—certainly not of lecture words. It is a work of insight and of sympathy; of faith in our brother and of the attitude toward him which faith begets. We see in him, behind all his faults, the possible structure, and the materials for it that lie in him; and with these materials we deal, letting all others severely alone. We perceive his own daily inner struggle of his good with his evil, and we put all our strength into his fight. Does his evil, his passion, his temper overflow upon us? Shall we reenforce that bad side of him by adding fuel to the flame? The essence of a quarrel is that each is meeting the other's evil by his own evil. Here are two bads uniting for a common defeat of the good. At such moments the thing is, not to talk, least of all to talk back, but to dive down to the depths of our being, down to our innermost reserves of faith, hope, and love. There, where in silent wrestling we have won the victory over ourselves, we have won it for our brother, for wrath cannot contend forever against love. A soul of that temper in a household, in a workroom, yes, in a senate, in a world, is accomplishing the finest artistry, is rearing structures with which no Parthenons or Taj Mahals can compare. They are spiritual buildings with heaven's own beauty, its own eternity upon them, palaces to adorn the city of God.

[The Christian Work and Evangelist]

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