S. HOW TO BE ABASED.

HOW TO BE ABASED.

I know how to be abased. — Php 4:12.

I SPOKE to you last Sunday about knowing how to be rich. Let us think to-day about knowing how to be poor. Saint Paul declared that he had both kinds of knowledge, and certainly he had had the chance to win this last; for his had been a life of poverty. First as the poor student, then as the poor missionary, he had never known what it was to live an easy life. He had met all the temptations, he had enjoyed all the opportunities which hardship involves. He knew them from his personal experience. And after all, the knowledge of hardship and privation which comes from personal experience, must always have a reality which cannot belong to any other kind of knowledge of them. There is a way, a true way, — as I pointed out last Sunday, — in which a man may be able to say in the midst of his abundance, " I know how to live the life which is destitute of all this. " There is a central knowledge, a knowledge of the heart of things, a consecration to God who is the King and Heart of things, which makes it possible for one to know conditions in which he has never lived; but still the supreme reality of personal experience remains. The poor man looks askance while the rich man talks to him about poverty. "Wait till you have tried it," he says. And the rich man owns the rebuke to his theoretical wisdom and is silent and almost ashamed. Nothing of this kind is there in Saint Paul. However we may have hesitated when he said, " I know how to abound, " when he says this other thing, " I know how to be abased," we accept most cordially the self-assertion of a man who has come out of the midst of persecutions and disappointments and disasters and poverty, with a strength of character and a record of work which has been one of the great glories of the world.

All men have owned that the knowledge which Paul claimed is not an easy one to win or keep. To know how to be poor! Plenty of people there are who are set down to the hard lesson. Plenty of people — yes, all people, in different degrees and different ways — are led into some disappointment and abasement, but how few seem to stand in it evidently the stronger and the better for it. How few look when they are in it as if they understood it, and come out of it as if it had done them good. Indeed, men’s feeling with regard to the possible blessing of adversity and trouble is, I think, very suggestive and significant. They know there is some secret hidden there, but it seems to be hidden so profoundly that it is almost hopeless to find it, and the effort to find it is most dangerous. Poverty seems to men to be like the old fabled sphinx, — a mysterious being who has in herself the secrets of life, but who holds them fast, and tells them only in riddles, and devours the brave, unfortunate adventurers who try to guess at the wisdom she conceals and fail. The result is that few men seek her wisdom voluntarily. It is only when all the other schools turn them out that they will go to hers. Her gifts of wisdom seem to be possibly very rich, but actually very hard to win, and to be meant for single and exceptional souls rather than for the ordinary run of men. Is not this the feeling about the uses of adversity, — that, while probably the few very best men which the world has seen have been trained by disappointment, the general mass of the world’s average virtue has been educated by success; that disappointment and difficulty make the officers, but prosperity makes the rank and file of the great human army; that while the best man in all the world today, probably, if we could find him, would prove to be a very poor man, — perhaps a man just on the brink of starvation, — it is the moderately comfortable classes of mankind in which you will find the highest level of good and comely living? If these are the ordinary judgments of mankind about the blessing of abasement, I think we ought to be interested in what Paul’s words suggest about knowing how to be poor. And at the very outset, to come at once to the controlling idea of what we have to say, do we not feel in Saint Paul’s words a certain tone and accent which convey to us some sort of idea that to him abasement, as he called it, was a positive thing, was not simply a condition of privation, but was something definite and real, — something with a character and influences of its own; not merely a condition of being without something, but a condition of being with, of being in, something else? You cannot imagine him as he writes thinking of himself as one who is waiting outside of doors where he is wholly anxious to enter in, the cultivation which comes to him as he stands outside being only the negative education of patience. It is evidently a distinct region of life in which he finds himself, where so long as he lives there is a special harvest for him to reap which he could reap nowhere else. To recognize the land in which he finds himself, and to reap the harvest which he finds waiting for him there, — that is the knowledge of how to be abased which Paul is thankfully claiming; that is what all his life of abasement has given him. This appears in many of the words of Paul. He writes to the Corinthians, "I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then am I strong." There is a noble dignity about those words. They are not the words of one who is merely trying to console himself for the lack of comfort, and to hold out till comfort shall bestow itself upon him. They are the words of a man whom circumstances, which he knows to be the hands of God, have led into a certain life. He has not led himself there; he has not chosen poverty; he has not tried to be poor; but being in that land of poverty, he looks about, and lo, it is not barren. It has pleasures, revelations, cultivations of its own. It has its own peculiar relationships to God. It is not necessary to say whether it is poorer or richer than the other land, the land of profusion and abundance. It is a true land by itself; and Paul, who lives there, honors and respects it, and so it honors him and gives him freely its own peculiar strength; and ho stands in the midst of it and cries, " When I am weak, then am I strong. " Is there not here a true intelligible picture of the way in which a man may know how to be abased? If it is possible to look upon a limited, restricted life as a certain kind of life with its own peculiar chances and enlightenments out of which a man, if he knows how, may get a character; in which a man, if he knows how, may live a life which would be impossible elsewhere, — then certainly this limited, restricted life may win and hold an affectionate respect which is a positive thing and may be very strong and real. We need not be haunted with the demon of comparison; we need not say whether the cultures and pleasures of abasement are greater or less than those of abundance; enough that it has its own, peculiar to itself, and full of value. Life is a medal with two sides; the other side, as we choose to call it, has its own image and superscription, and is not made up only of the depressions which are necessary to make the elevations on the face. Or change the figure: we live here in rocky New England. Surely there is something more to say of its harsh landscape than simply that it has not the palms of Egypt or the oranges of Florida. We need not talk of it or think of it in negatives. It has its own peculiar wealth of forest and pasture and pond; it has its own peculiar beauty of rocky ridges and broad sea-shore beaches; it has its own sky and soil and water; and we who live here are not merely resigned to our New England life and climate from necessity. We honor it and love it for its own intrinsic qualities. The pine-tree is as real a thing as the palm-tree. It does not be a pine-tree merely because it cannot be a palm; and surely it has no complaint to make. This is the picture in my mind of the positive nature of a life of abasement which makes it worthy of honor and respect.

Such an idea as this is not in any way inconsistent with the constant struggle of the abased and limited life toward profusion and enrichment. Each stage or kind of existence keeps the possibilities of its own character, although it feels the impulse which is always moving it on toward another stage or kind of life. Boyhood is a positive thing while it lasts, although it is forever being carried on toward manhood. Rugged New England may still struggle to improve her soil and grow as near the palm-tree as she can, while still she treasures and honors the characteristics which her present condition has decreed. To honor the life you live in now and here for its intrinsic goodness, part of that goodness consisting in the fact that it may open into some more abundant life, so to hold within it in perfect balance contentment and hope together, — that certainly must be the way for a man to get the best out of any stage of living.

I shall venture to take again for the illustration and enforcement of what I have been saying, the same enumeration of the departments of living which I used last Sunday. Abasement of life, like enrichment of life, is a term which may be applied to wealth or to learning or to friendships or to spiritual privilege. Let me speak of each

Here is the poor man then — in the most literal sense, the man who has not money! His face and figure is familiar enough. I rejoice to know that he is here this morning, and that I may speak to him to-day as I spoke last Sunday to his wealthier friend. I should be sorry indeed to be the minister of any church in which I might not speak to both. And how shall one speak to the poor man? That must depend upon what the speaker thinks he sees in the poor man’s face, upon what is the attitude in which the poor man stands toward life. What some of his possible attitudes toward life are, we know. To take the meanest first, he may be servile and cringing in the presence of a wealth some of whose overflowing crumbs he thinks that he can coax to fall into his lap; or, with more spirit, he may be eagerly envious and jealous, over-estimating the unknown luxury of wealth, and restless so long as he must go without the things his richer neighbors have; always in feverish struggle to be rich himself. Or, with the same cause working just the other way, he may despise the abundance which has not fallen to his lot. He may denounce wealth as wickedness; he may grow bitter and morose, and talk about his poverty, which certainly he has not deliberately chosen, as if it had somehow a sort of merit in itself. Now all these attitudes of the poor man toward life, different as they are from one another, have this in common, — that they are all shaped and controlled by the man’s perpetual consciousness that he is not as rich as other men; therefore they all have a touch of slavishness about them. If my neighbor’s wealth keeps me in a condition of continual defiance, I am as much the slave of it as if it kept me in a condition of continual obsequience. It controls my life. It decides what I shall be, and interferes with my self-decision; and that is slavery. But now suppose that some bright day of freedom comes, — some day when I forget comparisons and do not think whether my neighbor is richer or poorer than I, Still I am just as poor as I was before. Still all the positive condition of my poverty remains, but now it is positive not negative, not relative; and so it has a chance to show me its true character. A rugged, barren land it is to live in still, — a land where I am thankful very often if I can get a berry or a root to eat; but living in it really, letting it bear witness to me of itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging it after the standards of the other lands, gradually there come out its qualities. Behold, no land like this barren and naked land of poverty could show the moral geology of the world. See how the hard ribs which make the stony structure of the planet stand out strong and solid. No life like poverty could so get one to the heart of things and make men know their meaning, could so let us feel life and the world with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown away. No life like poverty could call out such need for struggle. Poverty makes men come very near each other, and recognize each other’s human "hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, demands and cries out for faith in God. Not with a greater need, but with a more ready consciousness of need, than wealth, it turns in the destitution of external things to the internal, to the spiritual, to the eternal, to God.

Now it is not right to think of these things as mere mitigations of a lot whose real intrinsic quality is that it is not wealthy. On the contrary, they themselves make a lot with its own qualities, with a value of its own. Do you quietly laugh and say, "At least, however fine you may make them sound as you describe them, no man would ever see in them such a value that he would be poor for the sake of living the life which those things make "? The answer is, "Men have done it. Men of other races, other standards, other natures than yours have deliberately chosen poverty because it seemed to make the richest and most honorable life. And men of all races, of all times, who have not chosen it but have been led into it by God, have found when they had come there a true life which satisfied them. "

I know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem. I am not taunting the poor man by telling him that it is better to be poor. God forbid! But I am sure that the poor man’s dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of life with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness, and revelations of God. Let him resist the characterlessness which often comes with being poor. Let him insist on respecting the condition where he lives. Let him learn to love it so that by and by when he grows rich he shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a true pang of regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home where he has lived so long, and which he leaves to other men. We know that such a reverence of the poor man for his poverty is possible; for men enough whom we could name have borne indubitable testimony that they have felt it. Sometimes it has been almost elevated and incorporated into a religion. We know that any man who truly feels that reverence for his own poverty is thereby liberated from the worst part of the slavery to wealth. He may still struggle to be rich, but he is not the slave of other men’s riches nor of his own unwon wealth for which he strives. Calm, dignified, self-respectful, with no bitterness and no pride, — who but he is the man who knows how to be abased?

I must pass on and speak about the way in which a man may know how to be poor in learning. That was our second point. There are many of us who need that knowledge, — many of us who before we have got well into life see what a great world learning is, and also see for a certainty how hopeless it is that we shall ever do more than set our feet upon its very outermost borders. Some life of practical duty claims us; some career of business all made up of hard details, sharp, clear, inexorable, each one requiring to be dealt with on the instant, takes possession of us and holds us fast, and the great stream of learning into which we long to plunge and swim sweeps by our chained feet and we can only look down into its tempting waters and sigh over our fate. How many practical men — men who seem to be totally absorbed and perfectly satisfied in their busy life — really live in this discontent at being shut out from the richness of learning. Is there a right way and a wrong way, a wise way and a foolish way of living in that discontent? Indeed there is. The foolish ways are evident enough. The unlearned man who by and by is heard sneering at learning, glorifying machineries, boasting that he sees and wants to see no visions and that he never theorizes, — he has not known how to be ignorant. He has let his ignorance master and overcome him. It has made him its slave. The man who, the more he became conscious of his hopelessness of great scholarship, has grown more and more sensible of what a great thing it is to be a scholar; and at the same time, by the same process, has grown more and more respectful toward his own side of life, more and more conscious of the value of practical living as a true contribution to the great final whole; the man therefore who has gone on his way, as most of us have to do, with little learning, but has also gone on his way doing duty faithfully, developing all the practical skill that is in him, and sometimes, just because their details are so dark to him, getting rich visions of the general light and glory of the great sciences, seen afar off, seen as great wholes, which often seem to be denied to the plodders who spend their lives in the close study of those sciences, — he is the man who knows how to be unlearned. It is a blessed thing that there is such a knowledge possible for overworked, practical men. The man who has that knowledge may be self-respectful in the face of all the colleges. He may stand before the kings of learning and not be ashamed; for his lot is as true a part of life as theirs, and he is bravely holding up his side of that great earth over which the plans of God are moving on to their completeness. And next we speak about the destitution of friendships, which is the appointed life of many people. Is it a hard thing to know how to be poor in, perhaps almost destitute of, cordial associations with our fellowmen? "Let them pass me by! I know well enough how to do without their help or their society! "Who has not heard those scornful words coming out of the hot lips of some angry man, and been sure, as he heard them, that the man who spoke them did not know the very thing which he boasted that he knew so well. For, as I said last Sunday, no man knows how to do a thing, who does it so that it makes him a worse and not a better man. We say that society is a fine art. It may be true that solitude is a finer. To get along with our fellow-men seems often very hard, but to get along without them seems impossible. But let me suppose that somewhere in these pews this morning is a man or woman whose life seems in some strange, marked way to have been left out of the great currents of humanity. Perhaps your very earliest days were without the protection of a father’s and a mother’s care; no circle of friends received you into the warm world of its hospitality; your own nature has not been such as has easily attracted friendship; your business has been of some solitary sort; and besides all these things, what we call accident has seemed to always break every crystallization just as it was being formed. Not even the church has seemed to gather your life into the natural and cordial society of other lives; so you have lived alone. Years, years ago you must have found what a problem had been set you in that isolated life. You must have seen that as it offered you temptations and dangers, so it offered you also chances of its own. You must have seen that, without disparaging the social life which opened to other men more readily than it did to you, without ceasing to keep yourself ready for it if it came, there still were certain valuable things which, while it did not come, were peculiarly within the power of your solitude. Whether you have attained those valuable things or not, you can at least imagine what they are. Can you not picture to yourself a man who, shut out by any circumstances from most active contact with his fellow-men, became thereby a watcher of the universal human life in such a way, from such a point of view, that he saw it more truly than if he were in the very heart of its whirl and movement? A wiser insight, a larger knowledge of mankind, a broader vision of the significance and, one may say, of the glory of human life may surely come to him who looks at it, as it were, sympathetically from the outside, as a true man, and yet in some degree as a spectator of humanity. The planet Mars shines for us with a light which no citizen of Mars can see. And then something more may come. The man thus gazing upon life may see in the larger aspects which are given to him, revelations of God. The Great King may show Himself to one who gazes with such thoughtful and broad view at His Kingdom. And then, having seen the King and loved Him, the watchful man may come back to the Kingdom which first revealed that King, and love it for His sake. Here is a noble and natural and beautiful progress. I am sure that it has made the charm and strength of many men who have seemed somehow to be rather spectators of life than themselves deeply involved in the complexity of living. They have often been men who have loved their race with the deepest and the largest love. The enthusiasm of humanity often has seemed strong in them just in proportion as their lives had little contact with the personal lives around them, and it has come about through God. The large sight of the world has first led them to Him, and then from Him they have come back to love His Kingdom.

Now here is something which is much more than compensation and consolation. It is not a reward given by pity to make up for the loss of the privilege of social life. It is a life itself. It brings out its own qualities and powers in the man who lives it. He may think it better or worse than some other life; he may endeavor to pass out of it into a fuller life; but while he lives in it, it ought to be always making him more profoundly aware of his own soul, more reverent toward God, more able to think great thoughts of his fellow-men. If you must pass through what is even a desert to get to fertile, smiling lands beyond, still it is not good to count even the desert a mere necessary evil to be got through and forgotten as soon as possible. It is good as you plod through the sand to feed your eyes with the vastness and simplicity of the world which the monotony of sky and sand can most impressively display to you. So if God has appointed to any of us times of solitude and friendlessness, — perhaps times of unpopularity and neglect, — let us pray that we may not pass through them, however dreary they may be, without bringing out from them greater conceptions of Him and of our fellow-men and of ourselves. This is the way in which a man may show that he has known how to live alone, or even to live neglected and despised. And so we come to the last of our specified instances of abasement, — the loss of spiritual exaltation and delight. It is a loss indeed. Delight, enthusiasm, hope, content, — these are the true conditions of a Christian life, just as song is the true condition of the bird, or color of the rose. But just as the bird is still a bird although it cannot sing, and the rose is still a rose although its red grows dull and faded in some dark, close room where it is compelled to grow, — so the Christian is a Christian still, even although his soul is dark with doubt, and he goes staggering on, fearing every moment that he will fall, never daring to look up and hope. To such conditions of depression every Christian sometimes comes. In such a condition many Christians seem to live all along through their melancholy lives. What then? What shall we say? It is not good. It is not necessary. That we ought to know first of all. Let us beware of giving to such moods and conditions any such advantage as would come from thinking them to be the right and true condition of a humble Christian life. Humility for the Christian, the truest humility, means hope and enthusiasm. It must be so. Since the whole strength of the Christian experience is in the Saviour and not in the soul, the real acceptance of the Saviour by the soul must, just in proportion as it is complete, endow the soul with His vision and open before it all His certain prospects of success. No! To be distrustful and gloomy in the Christian life is not a sign of humility; often it is a sign of pride. Yet the evident distinction still remains. A man may be a Christian and yet fail of a Christian’s rapture and peace. And what then? While he walks in the darkness, he must know how to be abased. However he ought to be up and out of this condition, yet while he lives in it there is a right way and a wrong way for him to live. Then there comes in the great regulative force of duty, — duty, the due, the thing that ought to be done. Oh, how we come to value the perpetual ministry of that great power! I spoke last Sunday of how it kept the soul in its exaltations from flying wildly off into vague rhapsodies and dreams. Behold, to-day how this same power of duty preserves the soul in its depression from despair! Then when all higher light seems dark, may be the very time when the light on daily tasks grows clear. You cannot see the distant heaven. You cannot hear the songs of angels. You cannot even say assuredly that you know the love of God, — but you do know that to be brave and true and pure is better than to be cowardly and false and foul. You do know that there are men and women all about you suffering, some of them dying, for sympathy and help. You do know that whether God loves you or not, right is right! Oh, how these great simple assurances come out when the higher lights of the loftier experiences grow dark! I will not say, I dare not say, that God lets the heavenly light be darkened in order that these earthly duties may appear. I only say that when the cloud stretches itself across the heavens, then, underneath the cloud and shut out from the sunshine, the imprisoned soul still finds for itself a rich life of duty, a life of self-control, a life of charity, a life of growth. Is there some man or woman here who says, "My religious life has no exaltations, no high hopes. I am not equal to this life of depression. I do not know how to be abased. I do not know how to go on and be true to my religion, still shut out from its divinest hopes. "What shall our answer be? The world of duty is your world. Go; do your duty, giving to every task the sublimest motive which you know and which you can bring to bear upon it. Get at the essence of goodness, which is not in its enthusiasms or delights, but in its heart of consecration. Sometimes the consecration may be all the more thorough and complete when the joy of consecration seems to be farthest away. And yet every consecration made in the darkness is reaching out toward the light, and in the end must come out into the light, strong in the strength which it won in its life and struggle in the dark. So here, then, is one brief conclusion, — here is the result and substance of it all: Not to all men, not to any man always does God give complete abundance. To all men sometimes, to some men in long stretches of their lives, come the abasement times, — times of poverty, times of ignorance, times of friendlessness, times of distrust and doubt; but God does not mean that these times should be like great barren stretches and blanks in our lives only to be travelled over for the sake of what lies beyond. To him who, like Paul, knows how to be abased, they have their own rich value. They do for him their own good work. To have our desire set on nothing absolutely except character, to be glad that God should lead us into any land where there is character to win, — this is the only real explanation of life. He that has it may be more than reconciled to living. He may do more than triumph over his abasements. He may make close friendships with them, so that he shall part from them with sorrow when he is called to go to the right hand of God where there is no more abasement, nothing but fullness forevermore.