John M. Tyler

“ For in the dark hours others will lean on you to catch your hope and courage. To many a poor discouraged soul you must be "a hiding-place from the wind and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." Every power and force in the universe of environment makes for the ultimate triumph of truth and right. Defeat is impossible. "One man with God on his side is the majority that carries the day. ”

“ And yet what a power there is in the appetite for truth and righteousness? In obedience to it man gives his body to be burned, or pours out his life-blood drop by drop for its attainment, and rejoices in the sacrifice. There are victims to appetite: there are only martyrs to truth. This soul hunger for truth and right, growing more intense as the soul is filled with the object of desire, is the only one capable of indefinite development and dominance of the will. This must be and is the mental goal of animal development, if man has a future corresponding in length at all to his past. ”

“ Are there older and lower powers and modes of action, which, though once supreme, must now be rigidly kept down in their proper lower place? Are there lower motives, for which the very laws of evolution forbid us to live, just as truly as they forbid a man's living for stomach or brute strength instead of brain and mind? Are these lower powers merely the foundation on which the higher motives and powers are to rise in their transcendent glory? ”

“ Thus prosperity and adversity, success and failure, continually test a man. If he can rise superior to these, can subjugate them and make them subserve his moral progress, he survives; if he is mastered by them, he perishes. Through these does natural selection mainly work to find and train great souls. They are the threads of the sieve of destiny.
In this struggle man must fight against overwhelming odds, and the cost of victory is dear. He must be prepared, like Socrates, to "bid farewell to those things which most men count honors, and look onward to the truth." ”

“ And the essence of heroism is self-forgetfulness. The last thought of William the Silent was not for himself, but for his "poor people." And those rugged Ironsides, "fighting with their hands and praying with their hearts," smote with light good-will and irresistibly, because they struck for truth and freedom, for right and God. These are motives of incalculable strength, and they transfigure a man and raise him above his surroundings and even himself. The man becomes heroic and godlike, and when possessed by these motives he has clasped hands with God. ”

“ Roman legions shall suffer defeat, rout, and extermination; and Roman power shall cease to terrify. All its might must decay. But "everyone that is of the truth" shall attach himself to me with a love which will brave rack and stake. All your power cannot give a grain of new life. I can and will infuse my own divine life, my own divine self, into men. And this new life is invincible, immortal, all-conquering. I have infused myself into a few fishermen, and they will infuse me into a host of other men. ”

“ For heroism begets faith, just as surely as faith begets heroism.
"Where there is no vision the people perish." When the member of Congress can see nothing higher than spoils of office, nothing larger than a silver dollar, you should not criticise the poor man if his oratorical efforts do not move an audience like the sayings of Webster, Lincoln, or Phillips.
Future man will be heroic and divine, because he will live in an atmosphere of truth and right and God, and will be consciously inspired by these divine, omnipotent motives. ”

“ Primitive society was thus the best possible school of conscience; and the family and it are the great school of unselfishness. But society is even more and better than this. It is the medium through which thought, power, and moral and religious life can spring from man to man. This is its last and culminating advantage: it is that for which society really exists.
For, in the close bonds of family and social life, a new possibility of development has arisen based upon articulate speech. We might almost call it a new form of heredity, independent of all blood-relationship. ”

“ But preach "Christ and him crucified"—not merely dead two thousand years ago—but risen and alive for evermore, and with us to the end of the world, the grandest, most heroic, divinest helper who ever stood by a man, one all-powerful to help and who never forsakes, and every one of your hearers who is not dead to truth will catch the life, and go home alive and not alone. ”

“ But choose you will and must. I am not propounding theories; I am telling you facts. Whether for better or worse man always does and will choose because he must. Look about you, look into yourselves. Have you no hero whom you admire and strive to resemble? no teacher to whom you listen? You must and do have your example and teacher. Is he teaching you to conform to environment, or leading you to be ground in pieces by its forces all arrayed against you? ”

“ And in the man of the future all these powers will be not only highly developed; they will be rightly proportioned and duly subordinated. He will be a well-balanced man. But how few complete men we now see.
We see the strong will without the clear intellect to guide it; the gush of feeling either directed toward low ends or evaporating in sentiment; the clear head with the cold heart. The high development of one mental power seems to draw away all strength and vitality from the rest. How rarely do we find the strong will guided by the keen intellect toward the highest aims clearly discerned. ”

“ But what of our tendencies to specialization in education and business? Are these wrong and injurious? Specialization, like great wealth, is a great danger and a fearful test of character. It tends to narrowness. If you will know everything about something, you must make a great effort to know something about, and have some interest in, everything. The great scholar is often anything but the large-minded, whole-souled man which he might have become. He has allowed himself to become absorbed in, and fettered by, his specialty until he can see and enjoy nothing outside of it. ”

“ Their power for good, and sometimes for evil, is inestimable. And the great advantage of social life, as a means of conforming to environment, is the medium which it furnishes to conduct the power of such men. Man's last effort toward conformity to environment, the struggle for existence in its last most real form, is the life and death grapple between good and evil. For here good and evil, righteousness and sin, come face to face in spiritual form; "we wrestle not with flesh and blood." Life is more than a game of chess or whist; it is a great battle; every man must, and does, take sides ”

“ We notice, first of all, that it is against the whole course of evolution that these faculties should be other than mental, and what we class under powers pertaining to our personality. For ages past evidently, and no less really from the very beginning, evolution has worked for the body only as a perfect vehicle of mind, and for this as leading to will and character. And human development has led, and ever more tends, as Mr. Drummond has shown, to the arrest, though not the degeneration, of the body. It is to remain at the highest possible stage of efficiency as the servant of mind. ”

“ You will catch glimpses of the divinity of Nature. Most of us travel threescore years and ten stone-blind in a world of marvellous beauty. Why does the artist see so much more in every fence-corner and on every hill-side than we, set face to face with the grandest landscapes? ”

“ But I can alienate and make void every promise and title, if I will or if I do not care. This is the unique glory, and awfulness of the human will. And we know that to them that love God all things work together for good. "If God is for us who is against us?" It must be so if God's laws are his modes of aiding men to conform to environment.
And what of the church? Is it anything else or other than a means of aiding man to conform to environment? If it fails of this, can it be any longer the church of God? The church is a means, not an end. And it is a means of godlikeness in man. ”

“ Rather what we usually call present advantage is not advantage at all, but the first step in degeneration. If one will be rich in old age he must deny himself some gratifications in youth; his present reward is his self-control. If a man will climb higher than his fellows he must expect to be sometimes solitary; his reward is the ever-widening view, though the path be rougher and the air more biting than in their lower altitude. If he point to heights yet to attain, the majority will disbelieve him or say, "Our present height was good enough for our ancestors, it is good enough for us. ”

“ And the questions arise, Is one mode and line of mental action just as much the goal of man's development as another? Is man to cultivate the appetite for food and sense gratification just as much as the hunger for righteousness? Or is appetite in the mind like digestion in the body, a function, necessary indeed and once dominant, but no longer fitted for supreme control? Is there in the development of the mental powers or functions just as really a sequence of dominance as in that of the bodily functions? ”

“ It is no mere delight of the understanding in the doctrines of our faith; no mere excitement of the sensibilities, now harrowed by fear, and now jubilant in hope; but a warfare and a work, a warfare against sin, and a work with God. Religion is not an entertainment, but a service. We are to set before us the perfect standard, and then struggle to shape our lives to it. ”

“ Man's chief end is intellect, knowledge. Each one of these three ends, while good in a subordinate place, will surely ruin man if made his chief end. For they leave out of account conformity to environment. "Man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever." And just as the plant glorifies the sun by turning to, and being permeated and vivified and built up by, the warmth and light of its rays, similarly man must glorify God. This is the religion of conformity to environment: man working out his salvation because God works in him. ”

“ At present we emphasize only the historical [154] fact that man has not become what he is by a higher development of the body, nor by giving free rein to appetite, nor yet by making the dictates of selfish prudence supreme. And if there is any such thing as continuity in history, such modes and aims of life, if now followed, would surely only brutalize him and plunge him headlong in degeneration. He must live for right, truth, love, and duty. In just so far as he makes any other aim in life supreme, or allows it to even rival these, he is sinking into brutality. ”

“ And our Lord and Master is the connecting link between God and man, through whom God's own Holy Spirit is poured like a mighty flood into the hearts and lives of men, transfiguring them and filling them with the divine power. ”

“ And this is the reason that, when man awakened to himself and his own powers, he knew that there was and must be a God. "Pass over the earth," says Plutarch; "you may discover cities without walls, without literature, without monarchs, without palaces and wealth; where the theatre and the school are not known; but no man ever saw a city without temples and gods, where prayers and oaths and oracles and sacrifices were not used for obtaining pardon or averting evil." ”

“ The social wealth of a community is the sum total of the wealth of its individual members. And a community is truly wealthy only when this wealth is, to a certain extent, diffused. If there is any truth in our argument that the sequence of functions culminates in righteousness and unselfishness, the real social wealth of a community consists in its moral character, not in its money, or even in its intelligence. We may rest assured that character, resulting in industry and economy, will bring sufficient means of subsistence, so that all its members will be fed and housed and clothed. ”

“ And what is conformity to the personal element in our environment but likeness to him? This is my only possible mode of conformity to a person—to become like him in word, action, thought, and purpose, and finally in all my being. Very far from a close resemblance we still are. But we are more like him than primitive man was; and our descendants will resemble him far more closely than we. And thus man, conscious of his environment, and that means capable of knowing something about God, knows at least what God requires of him, namely, righteousness, love, and likeness to himself ”

“ What is best and highest in us is the record of the working of what is best and highest in environment. And the personal God so dimly seen in environment is revealed in man's soul. Man must study himself, if he is to know what environment requires of him. And if the knowledge of himself and of the laws of his being is the highest knowledge, is not the vision of, and struggle toward, higher attainments, not yet realized and hence necessarily foreseen, the only mode of farther progress? ”

“ There is vastly more in environment than man has yet discovered, and he will discover these elements only by obedience to their laws.
Environment includes ultimately all the forces and elements which go to make up our world or universe. It is an exceedingly general term. I might say that under the environment of certain wheels, springs, and spindles, which we call a Jacquard loom, silk threads become a ribbon worthy of a queen. Is Nature and environment only a huge divine loom to weave man and something higher yet? ”

“ Every upward step in knowledge, wisdom, and righteousness only opens our eyes to greater heights, before unperceived and still to be attained. These capacities, even to our dim vision, are evidently capable of an indefinite, perhaps infinite, development. What, as yet only partially developed, faculty remains to supersede them? As being capable of an endless development and without a rival, may we not, must we not, consider them as ends in themselves? They are evidently what we are here for. Everything points to a spiritual end in animal evolution. ”

“ Our emotions, and this is but another word for our motives, stand far nearer to the centre of life; for they control our conduct and directly determine what we are. Knowledge of environment is good, but of what real and permanent use is such knowledge without conformity? Our real weakness is not our ignorance; we know the good, but lack the will and purpose to live it out. And this is because the thought of truth and goodness excites no such strength of feeling as that of some lower gratification. We cannot perhaps overrate the value of intellect ”

“ Moreover, his higher mental capacities increase their power. Memory recalls past gratifications as it never does to the animal; imagination paints before him vivid pictures of similar future enjoyments, and mental keenness and strength of will tell him that they can all be his. But if he yields himself a slave to these appetites, if he seeks to be an animal rather than a spiritual being, he becomes not an animal but a brute; and the only genuine brute is a degenerate man. And thus after conquering the world man's very structure compels him to join battle with himself. ”

“ You may answer that it is no injury that the promise is too large, the vision too grand, to be fulfilled in the span of a single life, but must become the heritage of a race. But what has been the history of Abraham's descendants? A death-grapple for existence, captivity, and dispersion. Their national existence has long been lost.
Was there ever a nation of grander promise than Greece or Rome? But Greece died of premature old [2] age, and Rome of rottenness begotten of sin. But each of them, you will say, left a priceless heritage to the immortal race. ”

“ And faith in Christ is confiding communion with him and obedience to his commands that his divine life may flow over into me and dominate mine. And common-sense, and the more refined common-sense which we call science, can show me no other means to the attainment of that godlikeness which is the only true conformity to environment.
And, holding such a belief and faith, we must be hopeful. And only next in importance to faith and love stands hope. The hero must be hopeful. And when times look dark about you, and they sometimes will, you must still hope. ”

“ Man can never overcome in this battle with the allurements of material prosperity and with the pride and selfishness of intellect, except as he is interpenetrated and permeated with God, any more than we can move or think, unless our blood is charged with the oxygen of the air. It is not enough that man have God in his intellectual creed; he must have him in his heart and will, in every fibre of his personality, in every thought and action of life. ”

“ And similarly science emphasizes that the chief end of all knowledge is that we should know the environment to which we are to conform. Knowledge is useful to strengthen and clarify the mind, that it may see and conform to truth and God: and if it fails to become a means to conformity, it has failed of the chief, and practically the only, end for which it was intended. We are to come "in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." ”