Robert E. Speer

“ The law of things is that they who tamper with veracity, from whatever motive, are tampering with the vital force of human progress. Our comfort and the delight of the religious imagination are no better than forms of self-indulgence, when they are secured at the cost of that love of truth on which, more than on anything else, the increase of light and happiness among men must depend. We have to fight and do lifelong battle against the forces of darkness, and anything that turns the edge of reason blunts the surest and most potent of our weapons. ”

“ It was the life of peace,—of the quiet agricultural people, of the tradespeople, of the homes, which is not written up in any history at all,—that was the real history of the world. The men and the women who were doing earth’s work were not those who went out to battle or on great expeditions, but those who, day by day, heroically, unflinchingly, and without fear of oblivion, did the real business of the world. ”

“ Thank God, we are not called out on any soft errand under the incitement of bright choices, but challenged by great difficulties, black nights and rising storms, to work in the hope of that which is invisible and which lies beyond. It is by hope, and hope that lies behind impenetrable clouds, that men are nerved and empowered. It is because the world is so black and dark to-day that we walk out into it smiling in its face, knowing that behind all this the morning the more [110] surely waits, the morning in which the men believe who have faith and love and hope. ”

“ If a man or woman wants to do any despising it is better to despise the world than the soul. It were well for us to go back a little to the spirit of the mediæval time. When that spirit was pure and good the world’s richest service flowed out from it.
The glory of life for us consists in finding the rough, the morally austere things in life and then fearlessly and unhesitatingly doing them. There is no splendour in the easy indulgent way. The splendour lies in finding the hard thing to be achieved and revelling in it. ”

“ And I think if only we would go deep enough in our own lives, and be honest enough with ourselves to gain a clear insight into our motives and impulses, we would discover how large a part fear has played in us,—fear, of course, in all the wide range of its aspects, that shades off on the one side into arrant cowardice and on the other side into a mere hesitancy of character and timidity, but fear nevertheless. Some of us are even now cloaking the things that lie deepest in our hearts, because we are afraid to give expression to them. ”

“ He opened the gate of his house within and out they came—Christian and Great-Heart and Hopeful and Evangelist and Mercy and Dare-to-Die—and the loneliness of John Bunyan’s cell became the greatest society on earth, and the immortals who marched out of the wealth of his soul are the companions of millions who could not name one human being who was Bunyan’s contemporary. The rich men who have transmitted real wealth have been the lovers, the dreamers, the servers who ate bread at God’s hands and who knew and taught men that the life is more than meat and the body than raiment. ”

“ Let us thank God, that there that Saturday morning in the dark of the grave all that broke free the next day was, and was not dead beyond the resurrection of life.
And the assurance that a man simply cannot do anything in vain is not only a word of great courage to us in the work that we are trying to do in the world, it is a word of hope and courage to us also in our own personal life and struggle for character. All the energy we need to accomplish anything that ought to be accomplished in us is in our reach. ”

“ If it is meant by compromise that we have to live under conditions with which we do not agree and to which we must adjust ourselves, why, of course, we must assent to that—it is perfectly obvious; but we do not need to live under those conditions assenting to them. We can bear our testimony against whatever we morally disapprove. We can assert our conviction by word or by the silent protest of life that those conditions are not right, and so to live in the midst of conditions in which we do not believe, but from which we cannot escape, is not compromise. ”

“ For war is not conservation, it is destruction. It educates any people not in frugality but in wastefulness. Military supplies must be bought at once at any cost. Everything is thrown away with a negligent and wasteful hand. And so long as any people is pouring out its best possession, the precious life-blood of its sons, like water on the battle-field, you cannot expect it to be saving and careful in its material possessions.
The days of waste that followed the Civil War are gone forever. The nation has begun now to count carefully the amount of its available wealth. ”

“ There ought to be a Kingdom of Living Love and Brotherly Will on the earth. And some day there will be, but there is not now and there cannot be until the anemia of man is healed, and it can be healed in only one way—by more life in man, by life abounding in men. The commercial and materialistic solution of the world’s problem has been fully tried. For a generation it has been preached and practiced as the one saving gospel and out of the depths to which it brought us we begin to turn heavenward again. ”

“ We can have no knowledge of that God, no fellowship with His life, if what we are living is the smooth, easy, indulgent life, everything bought for us by others, nothing done by us for others, no blood of sacrifice colouring our life red with the glow of God and His incarnate Son. The New Testament despises the smooth life that makes it impossible for men and women to have any part in the deepest life of their Father. ”

“ The deserts have never bred polytheism. The great polytheistic systems have sprung from the lush jungles of the tropics. The great monotheisms have been born in the deserts. And out on the lonely sands beyond the Jordan, beyond the hills and amid the great level places where there was no one but God, Elijah came to know that He was and to know that his life stood in Him.
This was the principle of the man’s life—the consuming conviction of a living God and of the commission of His uncompromising service. ”

“ AN UNFRIGHTENED HOPE If we were asked what we considered to be the supremest motive in life, the motive which does actually exercise the largest control over human conduct, what would our answer be? A generation ago men would have answered glibly enough: “The desire for happiness.” That was then supposed to be the one commanding motive of mankind. But it was not long before the answer seemed unsatisfactory and indefinite, because what brings happiness to one man brings misery to another, or what a man thinks will delight him in the end disappoints and such experiences issue in confusion. ”

“ Now I have put it—this matter of our need of discipline—in the most personal and individual way, but it is our great national and corporate need. The body of a nation can only exist through the ordered discipline of its members and the spirit of a nation like the spirit of a man needs to be cleansed of all the lusts of willfulness and self-indulgence. The spirit of our American nation needs such cleansing. ”

“ O God, I have in Thee in me all the energy and strength that I shall need this day. No temptation can come to me to-day that I have not got the power in Thee, that I never have used yet, to draw upon, that will enable me to meet and conquer. No work will come to me to-day that is too much for me, no matter how exacting or unprecedented in my experience. ”

“ For a man to love himself so much that he never thinks of his neighbours, to blind his eyes so completely to consequences that he can live for the passing moment,—this is a very easy philosophy, and the man or the woman who is able to practice it will seem, for a while, to live in the sunshine, a fine butterfly, smooth-going life. All this is easier than to say, not, What is my impulse? ”

“ Think how greatly we need this emancipation from fear in the simple matter of loyalty to principle. There is so much of expediency and compromise and adaptation among us, so great reluctance to ruffle the smooth conventionalities of life, whereas what the world needs is men and women who can see right principle as principle, unconfused and undistorted, and then who, unafraid, will abide in that right principle. ”

“ There might be a clearing up of the past; we might secure something like a clean conscience; but there could not be any confidence, any ease, any rest, as over against the tragic problem of life, if a man could not look out into the future—which is really the thing he now has to deal with—with boundless hope. Salvation is just that thing. It is not cleaning up our lives from the point of view of the past, just for the sake of cleaning up our lives; but it is the hope that for the sake of our future God is going to live in us a saving life. ”

“ The day for a new creed has dawned—the old creed of truth and hope and freedom and life, of the wealth and glory of a city unseen as yet, hid in the heavens and only possible on the earth as drawn down by men to whom the invisible things are the surest of all realities and who live and are strong in God. ”

“ Not alone is this the only kind of training that can produce this kind of character, but unless a man learns control from without, he will never learn self-control. Unless he passes under the discipline of a wiser and stronger hand at the beginning, he will never come to the time of deliberate and moral self-discipline, which alone is character. For this only is character,—the binding of life beneath the firm sovereignty of the principle that is the heart of God. If nations do not realize this they will pay heavily for their failure. ”

“ One of the great purposes of our Lord’s coming here to earth was that He might show men the value of a man’s life in the plan and thought of God. Even the most sacred and time-honoured institution our Lord weighed over against one man and found him outweighing the institution. What was His own example but the illustration of the immeasurable value of man? He did not come to teach the uselessness of human life, but its pricelessness. He did this by becoming a man Himself. And this principle of God’s need of men and their latent possibilities is not mere theological theory. ”

“ Faith must not only show works: works are faith. There is no need of metaphysics or creeds. Deeds are religion. The only wealth is tangible wealth, things handled, works seen, bread out of the ground, not down from heaven. Meat that the disciples could not see is too pallid for this earth. Man is his skin and the bag which it contains, and religion must understand this. ”

“ He was not only unafraid of physical harm, but he had none of that subtler fear that every man knows—the fear that he himself will fail, the fear that he cannot carry himself safely through. What you and I are afraid of is not the things that are without; our enemy is inside. Treachery within the walls is all that we need to dread, and our deepest fear is of our own failure. That was the great thing [155] in Elijah’s life, that he dared to stand on Mount Carmel, before all that crowd of priests, confident and fearless. ”

“ Then, years after, all of Peel’s correspondence was published and the whole world knew what a gentleman Goldwin Smith had been. Our modern ideals of what constitutes high social and national standing and character say: “Fight fire with fire. Dishonour releases honour from itself. He struck you foul; strike him so in return.” But the man who had learned self-restraint in the school of God’s loyalty and truth, who understood that power is ours, not to use for self-seeking, but for the good of men and for God’s honour, would not stoop to any such disloyalty and shame. ”

“ The kingdom of heaven will have no war in it; the kingdom of heaven will have no brothers cutting one another’s throats in it; the kingdom of heaven will have in it no vice and lust dragging its slimy trail across men’s hearths and hearts. If the kingdom of heaven is within, why not set it free, that we may live in it as well as have it buried inside of us! The world that we are living in is calling us to go back to that principle of Saturday morning and to believe that all we need to do the will of God is made available for us by God’s grace now, if we will but obey. ”

“ There is scarcely a great poppy field in the Republic, scarcely a fume of opium that you can smell on the public street in any Chinese city. The bonfires flared across the land as they burned up the signs of the old bondage. A great race arose in power and in a massive moral upheaval shook itself free. God had planted the energies there that needed only the touch of a living faith in Him, a new assurance [70] of the freedom of man to do His will, and in this matter the whole nation came out of its bondage into its liberty. ”

“ That is an absolute truth of experience all through life. In our great crises, any one of many forces may unlock these energies and let them loose. And the present needed appeal of the world is to men and women that they should not be content to draw upon these reservoirs in crises alone. The tragic crises come because these powers are not drawn forth and used. The great wealth of the nations and of the world that needs now to be unsealed is just this wealth of moral capacity lying latent and dormant within. ”