Our Father and Our Fellows

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Title:     Our Father and Our Fellows
Author: Henry Frederick Cope [More Titles by Cope]

The Primary Reconciliation
Faith in Our Fellows
The Law of Forgiveness

Sorrow is sympathy's school.

Love makes the heaviest load seem light.

To be willing to be saved alone is to be lost.

The truly godly see something divine in all.

Your appreciation may be another's inspiration.

Kindness is the sign of divine kinship.

You cannot knit the souls of men with soft sawder.

You cannot be a leader and lose sight of those who are to be led.

The shortness of the day excuses no man from greatness of endeavour.

When a man thinks of nothing but his sins and failures he will have nothing else to think of.

Lots of people who talk of their lives as blue are only colour blind, they either are green or yellow.

He is only shortsighted who pronounces the world bad after looking in his own heart.

Many a man is waiting for an inspiration who would find success at once if he was not so afraid of a little perspiration.

 

THE PRIMARY RECONCILIATION

Men in the days of the great Teacher were as we are to-day, prone to compound for the neglect of duties near at hand by the adoration of spiritual delights far off. They talked about getting right with God while they continued to do wrong to men. The problem of the hypocrite who is so thrilled with the delights of heaven that he scorns earthly duties and decencies is not a new one.

How easy it is to substitute syllogisms for service, to think that we do our duty by describing it, so to exhaust oneself in pleasant and seductive dreams of a distant heaven that we have no power left to apply to the problems of a needy present-day world.

The mockery of religion to-day is that men and women are going to the churches, singing themselves into ecstatic complacency and imaginary harmony with their God while their greed is crushing the hearts of the helpless and they are blinding themselves to the world's gloom and pain that unhindered they may enjoy spiritual delights.

Things cannot be right in our relations to the Father of spirits until they are made right in our relations with our brothers in the flesh. In Christianity social righteousness is basic to spiritual blessing. The ideal kingdom waits for ideal conditions and relations amongst its subjects.

The way to the Father lies through the brother. If you would learn to love God--and how indefinite and idealistic that seems to most of us--the lesson is simple, first learn to love His other children, especially the helpless, needy, and wronged. Delights high and spiritual always will be remote until duties near at hand are done.

The revival we most of all need to-day is a revival of the social conscience, the recognition of the fact that we can offer no gift acceptable, in the temple of worship or the place of prayer, until we have washed our hands from the blood of our fellows, that we can pay nothing to God until we have in earnest set about paying our debts to men.

Anxious, perhaps, to claim our rights as children of the Father in heaven, we have forgotten that that title is promised to the peacemakers. What avail is it to pray, Thy kingdom come, if we block its advent by cherishing enmity in our hearts? What use is it to carry hearts torn with malice, souls sunken in selfishness, and spirits torn with pride and covetousness to the place that belongs to the meek and lowly?

Many a man is going to church and coming away empty in heart; perhaps he has given up any hope of finding solace in religion, who would find, as it were, the windows of heaven opened up if he should give himself for an hour to making some other helpless lives happy, to righting some wrong or bringing some joy to lives embittered and oppressed.

The pathway to God is a plain one, strikingly lacking in romance, with no attendant visible angelic choir. It is the doing of whatever duty or kindness I owe to those near me, the breaking down of walls of prejudice--spite fences built in ignorance and hatred--the learning to love and help, the seeking of peace, good feeling, and harmony with all men.

This does not mean that all must become professors of sociology; the study of social theories often is a substitute for the practice of social duties; but that we must seek out the good in men, we must set ourselves right with them, we must discharge all our responsibilities towards men before we can realize God. The kingdom comes as we recognize the kingliness in all the sons of the kingdom, as we express our faith in God by friendship for our fellows.

 

FAITH IN OUR FELLOWS

Poor Peter has never been much of a favourite with the preachers; he was so thoroughly unstable, unideal. But the people have always had a tender feeling for him, partly because he was a fisherman, partly because he was so much like the rest of us. Nothing is more striking in the life of Jesus than His affection for ordinary men. The cultured Pharisees, the philosophical Sadducees seem to have much less attraction to Him than the rude fisherman and the toiler. These men were often weak, sometimes cowardly, obstinate, dull, mediocre; yet He committed His kingdom to them; He believed in them. Before they had faith in Him He had faith in them; and that ultimately made them men.

It sounded much like cruel sarcasm when He told that weak, vacillating Simon that he was a rock. Those who knew Peter best must have smiled; he was more like a jellyfish. But Jesus could see the best that was in a man. He detected the hidden good even in Peter. He proves His own goodness by His faith in the good in every man.

Somewhere in every man there is some good. Overlaid it may be by passion, by habits, by prejudice grown out of wrong and suffering perchance; but still it is there. Faith in this and sympathy, these are the golden keys that unlock the doors to where the good lies buried.

The saviours of society have always been those who looked for the best in it. If you go through life seeking the beast in man, you will find it, and the chances are it will devour you; if you look for the beauty that is from above you will find it, and it will bless you. It is just as necessary to have faith in man as it is to have faith in God. If men cannot become good, then there is no God in the sense of a power that makes for goodness. The optimist not only believes in the best, he creates the better.

Some there are who reluctantly admit that God is a little better than they are, though that may be due to His circumstances, but they have never imagined for an instant that any one else is at all good. Believe that men are wholly bad and they will not disappoint you. Every man somehow responds to the expectations of others. You had better damn a man than despair of him. Neither a church nor an individual can help this world when they have more confidence in the power of evil to become all pervasive than in the power of the Most High to make His purposes felt in every heart as truly as He makes His sun to shine on the just and the unjust. The church first consigns men to perdition and then wonders why they are reluctant to walk with it the other way. So long as you have faith in total depravity you will find some facts to substantiate it.

But there is a better way. Sympathy with men will do more for them than sermons on their sins. Look for the best in them and you will find things better than you expected. There are flower beds as well as garbage heaps in every heart; at least, there are spots where seeds of the fairest flowers of heaven may be sown.

You do not have to be a fool to have faith in your fellows. You do not need to take the padlocks off your house; but you do need to take them off your heart. There may be those whom it would be wrong to trust with your cash box; but it is a greater wrong to withhold from them your kindness. You can show them that you believe the best instead of the worst of them.

The great Teacher told men that He came not to condemn but to give life. His followers have too often occupied themselves wholly with condemnation and then wondered that their sentences saved none. Every soul knows its own sentence; what it needs to feel is that God and all good men are with it, helping it to shake off that sentence, to arise and return to the Father, that, instead of all things conspiring to keep a man down, there is a cloud of witnesses cheering him on, a mighty choir invisible inspiring his heart. And there is nothing any man can do of greater worth to the world than to cheer on another by his faith in him, his high expectation of him, his wise blindness to some little faults, and his propagating approval of the least beginnings of any good. Men are the saviours of men by their faith in men.

 

THE LAW OF FORGIVENESS

A silly interpretation often leads to the utter rejection of a law. Sentimentalists have caused men of sense to pronounce Christ's law of forgiveness an impractical one. Yet we indorse it every time we utter the Lord's prayer, and still we hope to be forgiven whether we find it possible to forgive or not. If this law means the mental flabbiness that sends bouquets to bloody criminals and petitions the pardon of murderers and the release of the foes of humanity, we must reject it as the utterance of one unacquainted with the rugged facts of life.

But forgiveness and pardon are two different things; forgiveness is between man and man; pardon is a matter of executive power. You can forgive a child and still punish him. The forgiveness that does away with consequences would make this an immoral world. No greater wrong can be done to a man than to protect him from the deserts of his evil deeds. This is as unjust as to withhold the rewards of the right.

The difference between the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and the law of the great Teacher lies largely in the spirit of dealing with the offenses. The old spirit was that of getting even with the wrongdoer. His act was largely regarded from the personal standpoint; a crime was individual and not social. Revenge followed wrongdoing.

But Jesus says it is better to lift a man up than to get even with him. It is better to help men to the right than to satisfy your desire for revenge. Forgiveness is more than saying, "Go without punishment"; rather it says, "Come learn a better way; live without sin." Forgiveness takes malice from the mind of the offended; it substitutes for it the motive of friendship for the offender.

Revenge says, "I will make it worse for you than you have made it for me." Sentimentalism says: "Let the poor victim of circumstances go; send him a rosewater spray and an embroidered text and he won't do it again." But love, she of the clear eye and the steady hold, takes him by the hand in silence, lifts him up, and leads him, perhaps by paths of pain, to his better self. Love puts his sins behind her back and teaches him to face her way. Love lets the wrong teach its own lesson, bear its own fruit. And in her labour for him she forgets her own pain and loss caused by his offense.

The best way to forgive a burglar would not be to let him out of jail, but to teach him the laws of property, to train him in the self-respect that would lead to industry, to make him a brother and a fellow worker among men instead of an outcast and a social parasite. The test of any forgiveness is its helpfulness, the manner in which it wipes out the enmity of the victim and turns the guilty into better ways.

Many say, I can forgive, but I cannot forget. No one asks you to forget; but you cannot fully forgive unless you will forego the feeling of enmity and the desire for revenge. You cannot make any one forget that which he has once known; but you can substitute helpfulness for hatred and restoration for revenge. True love simply discounts the past as a ground for present action; it refuses to determine its personal bearing and deeds in to-day by the other's ill deeds of yesterday.

All we are asked to do is to forgive as we are forgiven. Our hope is that when we have fallen our friends will not lose their faith in us nor entirely forsake us, that they will give us another chance; not that they will shield us from the fruitage of our follies and our falseness, but that they will not shut us off forever from their faces.

So far from forgiveness being the weakness of the thoughtless, it is the helpfulness of the strong and the wise. To forgive a man will not mean to escape from the trouble of securing his punishment; it will not mean the weak complaisance of indolent tolerance. It will mean thought for his weakness, taking up his burden, doing the brother's part for him, the endeavour to do for him what we would like to have the Father of us all do for us all.

[The end]
Henry Frederick Cope's essay: Our Father and Our Fellows

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