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An essay by Henry Frederick Cope |
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The Fruits Of Faith |
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Title: The Fruits Of Faith Author: Henry Frederick Cope [More Titles by Cope] Root and Fruit
Sow happiness and reap heaven. Every man is made up of many men. You cannot travel towards heaven with your back turned to honour. Earthly prudence is a large part of heavenly providence. Homes are often closest knit about some grave of separation. Your credit in heaven depends on earth's debts to you. To attempt a great work is to become a great worker. The practice of happiness does much for the power of holiness. No man ever found this world a weary place who had a worthy work to do. It's no use talking about the religion in your heart if it is not visible in your home.
ROOT AND FRUIT There is honest inquiry rather than querulous criticism in the question, often asked, Why does not religion produce a higher and stronger type of moral character? Enthusiasm for the teachings of Christ often is cooled by contact with some flabby-willed, narrow-minded professed follower of those teachings. It is a common saying with business men that it is hard to find a man of absolute integrity, one who even measures up to the standards of commercial honour among those who are religious, either by vocation or avocation. At any rate, it is true that a certificate of religious affiliations by no means is equivalent to a guarantee of high moral worth. Yet it is easy to arrive at wrong conclusions when judging the effect of religion on personal character as tested by daily business and living. One is in danger of judging from exceptions. We may remember as a religious person the man who makes the loudest protestations of his piety and fail to recognize the religious sources of strength in the quieter one of whose sterling qualities we need no persuasion. When religion has little root it often springs up with a rapid self-assertive growth; but it withers even more quickly under the scorching sun of the market and business affairs. It also would be the height of folly to conclude that religion contributed nothing to a man's moral worth, because the morally worthless seek to hide their nakedness by wearing it as a cloak. If we stop to think of the strong men and women we know, of those whose integrity is undoubted, whose character wealth constitutes the real reserve and bulwark of our business stability, we shall find that they are controlled by religious ideals and principles, that the strength and beauty which we admire in them in itself is religion. They may have or may not have ecclesiastical affiliations; these are but incidental. They do have religion. Somehow we feel that their actions rise not from superficial wells of policy or custom but from deep springs that go back into the roots and rock of things. They look out on life with eyes that see beyond questions of immediate and passing advantage; they see visions and ideals; they are drawn on by lofty aspirations. The recognition which we accord to real worth, to high, and noble, and strong manhood and womanhood, with the scorn we have for the canting weakling, is but part of our discrimination between a living, deep religion expressed in conduct and a mask or pretense adopted for profit or convenience. Still there are many good people, sincere in their religious professions, who practically are no good at all when they come to some strain on conscience, or some real test in life. Is it not because in their minds religion never has been related to conduct? They are grounded on the eschatology of Christianity but not on its ethics. It is possible to go through a full course of religious instruction in the regularly appointed agencies of many churches and to come out with clear-cut conceptions of heaven and angels, but with the most misty and even misleading conceptions of right relations among men, of honesty, and justice, and truth. The schools teach us about the stars and the earth, about men dead and beasts living; the church teaches us of saints and seraphs, and about an ancient literature; but who shall teach us and our children the art of living, the laws of human duties? Of what value is all our knowledge unless we get the wisdom of right living? No man is saved until he is made strong, sane, useful, and reliable. The most irreligious thing in this world is a religion that makes people think that an imputed or technical salvation absolves them from the necessity of practical salvation, the working out of the best and noblest in their lives. Religion without morality is a mockery. Real religion is the secret and source of the highest, strongest, cleanest character. It furnishes the life with motives mightier than any considerations of advantage or profit; it ties the soul up to eternal and spiritual verities; it refreshes the heart as with living waters when life seems all desert; it sets the heart in step with the Infinite One who marches on through the ages.
THE ORTHODOX ACCENT Perhaps the chief damage done by the confusion of tongues at Babel was that it tended to a multiplicity of words. Whether it was so before that time or not, it is certain that ever since there has been a constant likelihood of religion and every other good thing being drowned in floods of rhetoric. Where there are ten ways of saying a thing it is so much easier to use them all than to do the thing in the one way in which it may be done. Words become the chief enemies of works. A volume containing all the words of the great Teacher would look mighty insignificant beside the ponderous tomes of the modern exponents of His teachings. That is because the minister has become the preacher. The tendency also is for laymen to prove their piety by becoming teachers. It is so in every direction. Reforms dissipate into theses; it is always easier to make speeches on the city beautiful than it is to refrain from throwing the refuse in the street. We are all talking about what ought to be done. Perhaps some leader will arise and institute the order of the practicers. Dreamers, philosophers, thinkers, writers have poured forth their floods upon a thirsty world. But the only words that have been worth anything to mankind have been those that have grown out of the speaker's soul as it has been molded by his living and doing. Because talking is so easy to the knowing ones it is not strange that they should water their stock of superstitious prestige with the less knowing ones from their reservoir of words. Then it is the most natural thing for the glib man to set up the thing he can do most easily as the thing essential to salvation, and thus a shibboleth becomes the saving sign. But salvation does not depend on any shibboleth. No man is going to fail of seeing the Most High because he cannot render the precise name by which one race chose to call Him, nor will the sun cease to shine upon him should he seek the highest good in other ways than names. The heart of the universe asks not that we be consistent with the syllogisms of the past, but that we be true to the truth we know ourselves. Every man has some creed back of every deed; but when he puts his creed up in front his deeds soon die. Where words reign they soon reign alone, with nothing but words to serve them. Orthodoxy is so general, because it is so easy and so meaningless. Catch the accent and you are orthodox. But if heaven is to be won by an accent most honest men would rather pay board, somewhere else. No life can be interpreted in language alone. The church is but an obscuration on Christianity when it meets only to analyze the life of its Lord and never to exemplify His deeds. What must heaven think to see a thousand able-bodied men and women gather in a beautiful building to sing hymns of praise to their Diety [Transcriber's note: Deity?] and to listen to arguments about His divinity while, within block of them, there are, in sickness and squalor, distress and sorrow, the ones to whom He sent these people to minister? The doctrines manufactured about Him have hidden the directions given by Him. The trouble is not that we have too much doctrine so much as that we have the wrong kind. The Master's great teaching was, Do the divine things, and the divine truths will take care of themselves. The kingdom will never come until His will is done. Half-tones of heaven will not keep people warm in winter; it is half tons of coal they need. The world will believe in any church that tries to do good. But the church does not believe in itself yet; half the people are strenuously endeavouring to fool themselves into what they call spiritual warmth. What they need is plain Christian perspiration. No man really credits his own religion until he converts it into reality. But the man who prides himself on his heterodoxy is often equally guilty here. He ridicules the old type of piety and thinks to improve on it with new sets of phrases. All these critics have is new arrangements of words. Even the man who rejects all religion satisfies himself with the cant phrase of irreligion. We need most of all to treat religion as sensibly as we do business, to leave the science to those interested while we give ourselves to the practice of its art, the doing of its deeds, the living its life.
THE BUSINESS OF RELIGION Any religion that will not stand the strain of modern business may have been good for some other age; but it is valueless in this one. The test of your piety is not peace in the pews of the church, but power and direction in the stress of the market, its adaptability to your activities as well as your meditations. The problem of the reconciliation of business and religion is not nearly so complex as we would believe. The people who are saying it is impossible to be upright and get on in the world mean that it is impossible to be honest and to gain all the questionable advantages on which they have set their hearts. When a man says that religion and business will not work in harmony he either has a wrong brand of piety or a false conception of business. Religion is built for business. The only creed that is worth a moment's thought is a working creed, that is, one that gets into action. Religion is not the mere acceptance of a speculative philosophy of this and other worlds. It consists in principles, ideals, and motives which dominate conduct. It is more concerned with the kind of a world you are making here than with the conceptions you may have of a world beyond. Religion is more than an institution; it is a course of life. It has to do with the church only in so far as the church serves its purposes. It is more concerned with what a man pays his employees than with what he puts into the plate at the collection. The man who can put all his piety into the prayer-meeting and the services of the church never has enough seriously to embarrass him under any circumstances. If for your religion you have adopted principles of high living; if you have set the worth of the soul above all other things; if you have determined to frame your life according to the golden rule of the great Teacher, and, with Him as hero and ideal, are seeking to do good to others and make this world a better place for us all, with less of sin and sorrow and more of joy and love, you will make your business as well as your praying the servant of these ends. But if you have said that you wish to do these things, that you wish to live the pure and beneficent life while in your heart your sole desire is to get riches, to gain fame, to secure power, then there is bound to be conflict between the religion you profess and the business that possesses you. Everything depends on the purposes of living, on the things a man really and deep within himself sets first in his life; he will follow those things no matter what other professions he may make. Business as a servant deserves our allegiance and devotion; business as a master is the most evil and soul devastating thing in this universe. There is the most perfect harmony; there is relatively easy settlement of problems and difficulties if but this principle be adopted; that you have taken as your chief business in life the ends of true religion, the development of character and the service of humanity, and, with this purpose, the daily toil, the opportunities and enginery of your trade or profession shall be made to serve these higher ends. Religion then becomes the motive in business and business the manifestation of religion. A man serves the Most High in his office with the same devotion and elevation of spirit as a priest at the altar. He is doing a great work, because the spirit is great. In questions of conscience he can afford to lose everything except the great end; he will not sacrifice the lesser to the greater. [The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |