01.28. The Effect of Distance

Chapter 28 THE EFFECT OF DISTANCE.

It is well known that remoteness has the power of softening and beautifying many objects in nature, and also when applied to individual character and life work, works an equally striking charm, attractiveness and potent spell. But it is also equally true that distance is decidedly against our seeing and knowing correctly the history as well as character of men. There are heart victories of the most tremendous nature that the world never knows anything about. There is a patient suffering, a sacrifice of life, a bearing of others’ burdens that takes place in many an individual existence of which the multitude hurrying by occupied with itself has no knowledge. Such an existence from its very nature is removed, and then the world is distant after another order, and so the peculiarly tried and overburdened man goes on his unrecognized way to the grave and the Judgment. As we have brooded over the sad as well as cruel mistakes made in life through the fact and power of distance in some form, we have been compelled to say alas for it! Would that something might happen or could be done, that drawing people nearer, would end this most prolific cause of human suffering and unhappiness. There is such a thing as territorial distance. This separates the nations, and has caused prejudices, antipathies, reprisals and wars beyond number. This is still at work separating North from South, dividing England from Ireland, and isolating one continent from another.

Truly the Fall is great, and Sin a fearful thing when through its effect, a few miles of earth and water makes it impossible to be kind or even just to one another, when a New Englander bristles at the very name of South Carolina, and honor cannot be done to a great statesman and a polished gentleman because his name was Jefferson Davis and he lived in Mississippi. And what shall we say if entire sanctification or perfect love cannot remove this spirit? Sometimes the territorial distance is only a side or back yard, and lo! we have to behold, though on a smaller scale, the same prejudices, antipathies, reprisals and going to war with each other.

We know of a family feud in Mississippi that has lasted over fifty years, and yet both households are refined, cultured and very lovely in many particulars. But a little strip of earth only a few miles wide has utterly prevented the homes in question from knowing and loving each other.

Then there is the creed and ecclesiastical distance.

Here is a separation broader than the Atlantic, and stormier than its big billows and winds.

Members of different denominations if they only knew each other would be filled with love and admiration, yet separated by nonessential doctrines, shun each other as if they possessed the black plague or leprosy.

Convicted at a gospel meeting of another church they refuse to seek conversion or sanctification at the strange altar, because forsooth it is not their meeting house. They are even surprised and sometimes in indignant that they should be asked to seek the Lord at a Methodist or Full Salvation revival. Why, I am a Catholic or Episcopalian or a Presbyterian! they say, as if that completely released them from the moral obligation of the truth or the conviction of the Holy Spirit.

They might with equal propriety and wisdom have gone on and said, why the shingles on the roof are not those I have been worshipping under, and your windows are plain and ours are stained, and our church building cost more than yours.

We do not doubt that the devils in hell indulge in roars of laughter at our poor narrow headed, shallow hearted, spirit blinded human race as seen here and there walled in and fortified against each other through sectarian and denominational misconception of Christianity.

Some cannot enjoy a sermon unless the preacher wears a garb that looks like a nightrobe.

Others must have a ritual where they rise up and sit down in worship a great deal. Still others will not allow another Christian to partake with them of the Lord’s supper because the water of baptism was applied to the body instead of the body being applied to the water. Then comes the minor tribes of No-Hog Meat, No-Breakfast, No-Necktie, Postum Coffee, Jumpers, Rollers, Third Blessingers, Tongues and Walkers-Around-With-Shut-Eyes.

Meantime not to take up with the idiosyncrasy of each one of these movements is to fall under its reproof and ban; and Blood washed, Spirit filled, God accepted and heaven honored men are set aside, cast off and struck at because of their refusal to endorse and press some doctrine, form or custom that is perfectly nonessential to happiness, usefulness and salvation. A little brick wall, or plank partition seems as powerful to prevent people from knowing and loving each other as a Himalayan range of mountains twenty thousand feet high, a Desert of Sahara a thousand miles wide, or a vast Pacific ocean seven thousand miles from shore to shore. A third kind of distance between men is that of temperament.

It hardly needs any argument to convince the thoughtful, observant man of the extreme difficulty of getting human beings of the nervous, bilious, sanguine, or melancholy order of constitution to understand and appreciate each other.

It is this dissimilarity which occasions such widely different views and oscillating see-saw speeches in Congress, State Legislatures and the various ecclesiastical bodies known as Synod, Council, Convention and Conference.

Each representative of the psychically unlike declares that the opinions and proceedings of the other will ruin church and country. Something in the mental character construction has thrown up Alps, Appenines, and Mediterraneans between them, and they are foreigners to one another, and again we have to behold antipathies, reprisals and wars.

Well for the race that Christ was the Son of Man in the deepest, broadest, truest respect; that He possessed all the temperaments in a happy balancing power so that He sympathizes with all, while everybody can come to Him knowing that He understands them and that perfectly. A fourth kind of distance that divides men is found in utter difference of life history and experience.

We once heard a prominent minister say in enumerating the blessings which filled his life that he found it hard to sympathize with a number of his brethren who had walked ways of bereavement, sorrow, trial and suffering that were unknown to himself. He had never lost a child; all were living. He had never been called to stand by the coffin of his wife. He possessed an ideal home. His household was devoted to him. He had a number of rich relatives and devoted friends whose purses were open to him. Then there was property in the immediate household. As he counted off these temporal and beautiful mercies, and showed up the Edenic setting of his peculiarly sheltered and favored life, we could well understand why he could not understand, nor feel for, nor do justice to other men whom he called his brethren.

Once when a young pastor in New Orleans, with a heart bowed down and almost broken with a combination of perplexities, cares and troubles, we were about taking a street car to visit one of the leading bishops of our church and confide to him a number of painful, delicate and unbearable things; when we were as suddenly arrested by the divine touch and voice as if a friend had laid his hand upon our shoulder and spoke in our ear. The inward voice, the quick, deep, vivid impression was "Do not go to him."

Another instant and just as clear was a direction and leading to visit an elderly lady of sixty, who had been through every kind of sorrow and was the saintliest woman in the city.

Both voices and touches were from God. Time thoroughly proved it. The man high in official capacity as he was could never have understood the heart and life history of the young preacher. The woman on the other hand could and did comprehend the goaded, perplexed and burdened life, spoke the right word, gave the true counsel and comfort, and undoubtedly delivered a soul at one of the great crises which comes into the lives of so many if not all the children of men.

These are not all of the causes of the separation and mutual misunderstanding of good people. But as natural barriers keep the nations apart, and they know very little of each other, so the ignorance is about as profound existing between acquaintances, neighbors and even friends because of ecclesiastical, social, domestic, educational, temperament and character conditions. The Alleghenies, Ural and Andes ranges of mountains are nothing as compared to the separating power of these states and circumstances. The desert is not more forbidding. The polar regions scarcely more impenetrable. The seas are hardly wider than the little side yard or church creed which separates two men living side by side on the same street, or in pews just across the aisle from each other.

There are few travelers who are willing to cross these deserts. Few like Abruzzi who scale the Himalayas. The followers of Columbus are not many who will take the trouble to sail from the east to find out who and what is in the west. So the ignorance of each other continues, the antipathies prevail, the misjudgment goes on, reprisals are the order of the day in many quarters; and war is carried on after the bitterest and most relentless fashion in homes, neighborhoods, communities and churches in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ten, nearly two thousand years since the Holy Ghost fell on the church in the baptism of purity, power and perfect love.

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