S. BACKGROUNDS AND FOREGROUNDS.

BACKGROUNDS AND FOREGROUNDS. For lo, He that formeth the mountains, and createth the wind, and declareth unto man what is His thought, that maketh the morning darkness, and treadeth upon the high places of the earth, — the Lord, the God of Hosts, is His name. — Amos 4:13. The mountains to the Hebrew were always full of mystery and awe. They stood around the sunlit level of his daily life robed in deep clouds, the home of wandering winds, flowing down with waters, trembling, as it seemed, with the awful footsteps of God.

They made indeed for him the background of all life, as they make the background of every landscape in which they stand. Close to the eye that watches them there are the shrubs and grass; the river murmurs at our feet; the common works of life go on. And then beyond, holding it all in their strong grasp, setting their solid forms against the sky, sending their streams down into the open plain, stand the great hills, which keep the sight from wandering indefinitely into space and throw out in relief all the details of the broad scenery. The foreground of the plain-land rests upon the background of the hills. From them it gains its lights and shadows. The two depend on one another. Take the background away and the foreground which is left is tame and thin, and leads to nothing. Take the foreground away, and the background, with nothing to lead up to it, is misty and unreal. The man who lives and works in the foreground does not think all the time about the background; but it is always there, and he is always unconsciously aware of it. The background and foreground together make the complete landscape in the midst of which a human life is set.

Now all this is true not merely in the world of outer Nature, but also in the world of inner life. There is a foreground and a background to every man’s career. There are the things that press themselves immediately upon our attention, — the details of life, the works our hands are doing, the daily thoughts our minds are thinking, the ground and grass on which we tread. Those are the foreground of our living. And then, beyond them, there are the great truths which we believe, the broad and general consecrations of our life which we have made, the large objects of our desire, the great hopes and impulses which keep us at our work. Those are the mountain backgrounds of our life. When we lift our eyes from the immediate task or pleasure, our eyes rest on them. They are our reservoirs of power; out of them come down our streams of strength. Once more the background and the foreground together make the perfect picture. You cannot leave out the foreground of immediate detail. You cannot leave out the background of established principle and truth. Both must be there, and then the picture is complete. The danger of our life is not ordinarily lest the foreground be forgotten or ignored. Only a dreamer here and there, wrapt in his distant vision, forgets the pressing duties and the tempting pleasures which offer themselves directly to our eyes and hands. They crowd too closely on us. The detail of life at once commands us and attracts us. The danger with most of us is not lest it should be neglected or forgotten. It is the backgrounds of life that we are likely to forget. The mountains sink out of our sight. The highest sources of power do not send us their supply. Shall we discard the figure for a moment and say that to most men the actual immediate circumstances of life are so pressing that they forget the everlasting truths and forces by which those circumstances must be made dignified and strong? Then must come something like the cry of Amos the Prophet, "Lo, He that formeth the mountains, and createth the wind, and declareth unto man what is His Thought, that maketh the morning darkness and treadeth upon the high places of the earth." Is there not in these words, dimly but very grandly and majestically set forth, the great suggestion of the divine background of all life? It is the same which Tennyson has pictured in the Vision of Sin: —

"At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, ’Is there any hope?’
To which an answer pealed from that high land.
But in a tongue no man could understand;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of Dawn." And now, if I have made my meaning plain, you understand what I intend when I say that I want to make my subject for this morning The Backgrounds of Life. We are troubled — whoever looks carefully at his fellow-men is troubled — by the superficialness and immediateness of living. There is a need of distance and of depth. And the distance and depth are there if men would only feel them. Let us try to see what and where they are.

I speak especially to those who are young, whose life is just beginning, for it is in youth that the landscape of a life most easily constructs itself in its completeness. Then, in youth, the immediate thoughts and occupations are intensely vivid; and at the same time the great surrounding truths and principles have a reality which they often lose in later life. Sometimes, much later, as the man grows old, the great surrounding truths and principles gather once more into sight. The old man feels again the distance, which the middle life forgot. But with him by that time the immediate interest has grown dull. The present occupations are not pressing and vivid. The beauty, the glory of young life, of the best and healthiest of young life, is that while it is intensely busy with the present it is also aware of and inspired by those larger truths, those everlasting timeless verities out of which all true life must be fed. Youth has the power of realism and idealism most perfectly combined. Its landscape is most harmoniously complete; therefore it is to healthy youth, to life with all its promise opening before it, that one speaks with the surest hope of being understood as he discourses on the backgrounds of life.

I shall be most likely to make myself intelligible if I speak not too generally, but describe to you several of the special ways in which the greater and more lasting stands behind the less and temporary and holds it in its grasp.

Consider first, then, how behind every foreground of action lies the background of character on which the action rests and from which it gets its life and meaning. It matters not whether it be an age, a nation, a church, a man; anything which is capable both of being and of acting must feel it’s being behind its acting, must make its acting the expression of its being or its existence is very unsatisfactory and thin. What does it mean to me that the French Revolution burst out in fury a hundred years ago, unless in that outburst I see the utterance of the whole character of that crushed, wronged, exasperated time which had gathered into itself the suppressed fury of centuries of selfish despotism? What is it to me that a great reformer arises and sets some old wrong right, unless I see that his coming and the work he does are not mere happy accidents, but the expression of great necessities of human life and of a condition which mankind has reached by slow development and education? What is your brave act without a brave nature behind it? What is your smile unless I know that you are kind? What is your indignant blow unless your heart is on fire? What is all your activity without you? How instantly the impression of a character creates itself, springs into shape behind a deed. A man cannot sell you goods across a counter, or drive you a mile in his carriage on the road, or take your ticket in the cars, or hold the door open to let you pass, without your getting, if you are sensitive, some idea of what sort of man he is, and seeing his deed colored with the complexion of his character.

If this were not so, life would grow very tame and dull. We cannot picture to ourselves how tame and dull it would become. An engine has no background of character. Its deeds are simple deeds. Unless you feel behind it the nature of the man who made it, its actions are complete and final things and suggest and reveal nothing beyond themselves; therefore its monotonous clank and beat grows wearisome. It’s very admirable orderliness destroys its interest. You weary of it. Nobody can make an engine the hero of his novel; for man, being character, will care for nothing which has not character behind it, finding expression through its life.

Here is the value of reality, of sincerity. Reality, sincerity, is nothing but the true relation between action and character. Expressed artistically, it is the harmony between the foreground and the background of a life. We have all seen pictures where the background and the foreground were not in harmony with one another; each might be good in itself but the two did not belong together. Nature never would have joined them to each other, and so they did not hold to one another but seemed to spring apart. The hills did not embrace the plain, but flung it away from them; the plain did not rest upon the hills, but recoiled from their embrace. They were a violence to one another. Who does not know human lives of which precisely the same thing is true? The deeds are well enough and the character is well enough, but they do not belong together. The one does not express the other. The man is by nature quiet, earnest, serious, sedate. If he simply expressed his calm and faithful life in calm and faithful deeds, all would be well; but, behold, He tries to be restless, radical, impatient, vehement, and how his meaningless commotion tries us. The man’s nature is prosaic and direct, but he makes his actions complicated and romantic. It is the man’s nature to believe, and only listen to the skepticism which he chatters! It is the discord of background and foreground, of character and action. On the other hand, when the two are not in discord but in harmony, everyone feels the beauty of the picture which they make. The act which simply utters the thought which is the man, what satisfaction it gives you! The satisfaction is so natural and instinctive that men are ready enough to think, at least, that they prefer a bad man who without reserve, without disguise, expresses his badness in bad deeds, to another bad man who with a futile shame tries to pretend in his activities that he is good. "Let us have sincerity at least," they say. They are not always right. The good deed which the bad man tries to do may be a poor blind clutching at a principle which he does not understand but dimly feels, — the principle of the reaction of the deed upon the character; that principle and its working we must not lose sight of in our study. The heart gives life to the arm. The arm declares the life of the heart; but the heart also gets life from the arm. Its vigorous exertion makes the central furnace of the body to burn more brightly. So the good action may have some sort of power over the character of which at first it expresses not the actual condition but only the shames, the standards, and the hopes.

What will be the rule of life which such a description of life as this must necessarily involve? Will it not include both the watchfulness over character and the watchfulness over action, either of which alone is woefully imperfect? We are familiar enough with a certain lofty talk which seems to make small account of action. "To be rather than to do; not what you do but what you are; be brave and true and generous," — so some idealists seem to talk. And on the other hand there are hard-headed practical people who have no eyes for anything but action. "Do your duty and do not worry about the condition of your soul; your deed, not you, is what the world desires; get done your stroke of work and die, and the world will take up the issue of your life and use it and never ask what sort of man it was from whom the issue came, — to do and not to be, that you must make your motto."

Oh, the inveterate partialness of man! Oh, his persistent inability to take in the two sides of any truth, the two hemispheres of any globe! "This ought ye to have done and not to leave the other undone" — sometimes it seems as if that were the most continually needed word of Christ. â– > When will men learn that, above all, to feed the fountain of character and yet never to neglect the guiding of the streams of action which flow out of that fountain, — that that in its completeness is the law of life. All the perplexing questions about the contemplative and active life, about faith and practice, about self-discipline and service of our fellow-men have their key and solution hidden somewhere within this truth of the background and the foreground — the background of character and the foreground of action — without both of which together the picture cannot be complete. Do we ask ourselves what culture there is by which the human life can be at once trained into character and at the same time kept true in active duty? I reply that there is only one culture conceivable by which it may perfectly be done, — that is the culture of personal loyalty, the culture of admiration for a nature and obedience to a will opening together into a resemblance to Him whom we ardently desire and enthusiastically obey.

I recall what Jesus said, "You must be born again," — that is His inexorable demand for the background of character. "If ye love me, keep my commandments," — that is His absolute insistence on the foreground of action. And the power of both of them — the power by which they both unite into one life — lies in the personal love and service of Himself. This is the largest and richest education of a human nature, — not an instruction, not a commandment, but a Friend. It is not God’s truth, it is not God’s law, — it is God that is the salvation of the world. It is not Christianity, it is not the Christian religion, it is Christ who has done for us, who is doing for us every day, that which our souls require. What has He done for you, my friend? "First, He has made you a new creature in Himself. He has given you a new character; and then He has guided you and ruled you, making you do new, good, holy actions in obedience to Him. Not two blessings, not two salvations, — only one! This is His promise to the soul which He invites, " Come, give yourself to me and you shall be new and do new things; you shall have opened within you the fullness of new admirations, new judgments, new standards, new thoughts, — everything which makes new character; and there shall be new power for the daily task, new clearness, new skill in the things which every day brings to be done." The background and the foreground! "This ought ye to have done and not to leave the other undone," — the full harmonious picture of a life!

Closely related to the background of character, and yet distinguishable from it, is what I may call the background of the greater purpose. It is like travelling on a long journey. You set out with a clear intention of going to some distant place where there is work waiting for you to do. You keep that intention all the way; it governs the direction of your travel; it keeps yon moving on and will not let you wander, and will not let you rest; it gives dignity and meaning to every mile. But under and within that intention lie the numberless details, the interesting circumstances of your journey, the people whom you meet, the landscape which you see, the conversations which you hold, the waking and the sleeping, the idleness and occupation of your days. Often and often you forget the greater purpose of your travel in your absorption in its incidents, and yet that greater purpose is always lying behind the incidents and holding them in their place. If it should vanish, they would become instantly insignificant and frivolous. That is exactly the way in which a man’s purpose in life lies behind and gives dignity and meaning to everything that the man does or says. He is not always thinking of it. The ambitious lawyer is not always consciously determining to conquer at the bar. The eager scholar is not every moment consciously hungering for knowledge. The avaricious merchant is not always consciously struggling to be rich. The unselfish philanthropist does sometimes cease consciously to labor for his fellowman. But each of them has always the greater purpose of his life unabandoned, unextinguished, resting behind the lightest and most unprofessional action that he does, and making it different because it is he — this man with this purpose — that does it. No wave that plays most lightly on the beach which does not feel the great solemn ocean with the mysterious heaving of its tide behind. The greater purpose may be bad or good, horrible or splendid. One man’s greater purpose is an undying passion for revenge. Another man’s greater purpose is a perpetual desire for the glory of God. Whichever it is, it dominates the life. No word that the man speaks but is reverberated from that background; no act he does that is not shone through by its color. It is what makes two lives which outwardly are just the same, essentially and manifestly different. It is the life, the other, the outward exhibition, is the living. In the larger experience of men, in what we call history, the same truth is true; the same landscape, the same combination of background and foreground, builds itself. Behind the immediate activity of any people rises what we call the public spirit, by which we mean the general thought or idea or purpose of living which the whole people has conceived. Behind the things which a time is doing there grows up the Zeitgeist or spirit of the time. The countless actions of a State, its laws, its wars, its administrations of justice, it’s shaping of its institutions, — all go on within the influence of its idea of its own destiny, the thought of why it exists in the world and what its existence means. Poor is the life that is not in sympathy with its time and with its nation. It fastens itself into no complete picture. It is a spot of discord which the harmony of the whole is always trying to cast out and throw away. In the smaller world, it is a man’s profession which makes the most palpable background of his life. If the choice of it has sprung, as it ought to spring, intuitively and almost unconsciously out of the slowly developed dispositions and capacities of a man’s nature, it then enfolds itself warmly about all he thinks and does. It is as the merchant, the lawyer, the artist that he does everything. Every most broadly human act — the way in which he walks the streets, the way in which he serves his family, the way in which he reasons about abstract truth — has in it the marks and tokens of the chosen occupation of his life. Thereby they all gather consistency. They are saved from being scattered fragments. The life does not drift, but moves from recognized purpose to assured result, carrying each drop onward in its current.

If this were the only truth it would seem to make life very stiff and rigid; it would hold every act in the slavery of the pre-established purpose. But here again the power of a re-active influence comes in. The foreground tells upon the background, as well as the background on the foreground. The settled purpose, the profession, the dedication of the life is not a fixed and uniform thing. Nothing is fixed and uniform. Everything is played upon and beaten through and through by personal nature. No two buglers blow their bugles, no two prisoners rattle their hoarse chains alike. Therefore the great purpose is ruled by the man, as well as the man by the great purpose, and it is the complicated result of the mutual ruling that makes the life. It is the background and foreground telling on each other, that make the picture. And let us notice this, that both the great purpose of a life and its immediate activities are provided with their safeguards that they may not be lost. The great purpose has its impressiveness and its solemnity. The immediate activities have their absorbing present interest. So strong is this last that the great purpose often ceases to be conscious; yet let us not think that this makes it cease to be powerful. I forget to think about the thing I have resolved to be; I am not pondering upon the dignity of the law or the sacredness of the ministry the livelong day; I am busy, I am delighted with the detail of life which my career involves, but none the less I am in the power of the idea with which I undertook it, I am sensible in an instant to any impulse which turns me out of its course, and I am ready to claim the triumph when the gates of success open before me at the end.

Once more we ask ourselves, as we asked before, What kind of life will the presence of this background, the background of great purposes, involve? And our answer is, once more, that it involves a double life, — a life of practical alertness and a life of profound consecration, a life intensely conscious of the present temporary forms of duty and a life also deeply conscious of the unchangeable, eternal, ever-identical substance of duty. Men lose the first, and they become vague dreamers; men lose the second, and they become clattering machines; men keep them both, and they are sons of God, living in their Father’s house, filled with its unchanging spirit, and yet faithful and happy in its ever-changing tasks.

We ask ourselves, How shall a life like that be won? And again we must answer as we answered before, by personal allegiance. No other power is large enough and flexible enough at once to make it. Loving obedience, loving obedience is the only atmosphere in which the vision of the general purpose and the faithfulness in special work grow in their true proportion and relation to each other. The distant hills with the glory on their summits, and the close meadow where the grass waits for the scythe, — they meet completely in the broad kingdom of a loved and obeyed Lord. And who is Lord but Christ? And where but in the soul of him who finds in Christ the worthy revealer of the life’s purpose and the sufficient master of every deed shall the great ideals of life and the petty details of life come harmoniously together? Obey Him, love Him, and nothing is too great, nothing is too little; for love knows no struggle of great or little. No impulse is too splendid for the simplest task; no task is too simple for the most splendid impulse.

I hasten to say a word or two upon another of the backgrounds of life, which every earnest heart will recognize the moment it is pointed out. I mean the background of prayer. Every true prayer has its background and its foreground. The foreground of prayer is the intense, immediate desire for a certain blessing which seems to be absolutely necessary for the soul to have; the background of prayer is the quiet, earnest desire that the will of God, whatever it may be, should be done. What a picture is the perfect prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane! In front, burns the strong desire to escape death and to live; but, behind, there stands, calm and strong, the craving of the whole life for the doing of the will of God. In front, the man’s eagerness for life; behind, " He that formeth the mountains and createth the winds and declareth unto man His thought, that maketh the morning darkness, and treadeth upon the high places of the earth." In front, the teeming plain; behind, the solemn hills. I can see the picture of the prayer with absolute clearness. Leave out the foreground — let there be no expression of the wish of Him who prays — and there is left a pure submission which is almost fatalism. Leave out the background — let there be no acceptance of the will of God — and the prayer is only an expression of self-will, a petulant claiming of the uncorrected choice of Him who prays. Only when the two, foreground and background, are there together, — the special desire resting on the universal submission, the universal submission opening into the special desire, — only then is the picture perfect and the prayer complete!

What Christ’s prayer was all prayers may be, all true prayers must be. What is it that you ask for when you kneel and pray? Directly, no doubt, it is some special mercy. It is the coming in of your ship; it is the recovery of your friend; it is the opportunity of usefulness which you desire for yourself. But do you want any of those things if God does not see that it is best that you should have them? Would they not fade out of your desire if you should know that they were not His will? Do you not wish them because it seems to you that they must be best, and therefore must be His will? Is it not, then, His will which is your real, your fundamental, your essential prayer? You must keep that essential prayer very clear or the special prayer becomes willful and trivial. You must pray with the great prayer in sight. You must feel the mountains above you while you work upon your little garden. Little by little your special wishes and the eternal will of God will grow into harmony with one another, — the background will draw the foreground to itself. Foreground and background at last will blend in perfect harmony. All conflict will die away and the great spiritual landscape from horizon to horizon be but one. That is the prayer of eternity — the prayer of heaven — to which we may come, no one can say how near, on earth.

I must not multiply my series of suggestions. I hope you see that they are mere suggestions and instances of that which pervades all life. All life has this construction of the foreground and the background. Everywhere there must be the background on which the foreground rests; everywhere the foreground grows thin and false if the background is destroyed or ignored. The love for truth behind the belief in the special creed, the sense of duty behind the conviction that this particular thing must be done, the joy in life behind the enjoyment of this single pleasure, all human history behind the present age, the whole man’s culture behind the training of one particular power, the good of all behind the good of each, — all these are instances among a hundred others of the backgrounds of life, and bear witness of how the construction of life is everywhere the same.

Wherever the background is lost, the foreground grows false and thin. "What is this foolish realism in our literature but the loss of the background of the ideal, without which every real is base and sordid? In how many bright books there is no God treading on the high places of the earth; nay, there are no high places of the earth for God to tread upon. What is the practical man’s contempt for theory? What is the modern man’s contempt for history? What is the ethical man’s contempt for religion? All of them are the denials of the background of life. All of them therefore are thin and weak.

Again I say that it is only in personal love and loyalty that life completes itself. Only when man loves and enthusiastically obeys God, does the background of the universal and the eternal rise around the special and temporary, and the scenery of life become complete.

Therefore it is that Christ, who brings God to us and brings us to God, is the great background-builder. You give yourself to Him, and oh, the wondrous widening, the wondrous deepening of life! Behind the present opens eternity; behind the thing to do opens the thing to be; behind selfishness opens sacrifice; behind duty opens love; behind every bondage and limitation opens the glorious liberty of the child of God. So may we give ourselves to Him, and life become complete for all of us!