S. IDENTITY AND VARIETY.

IDENTITY AND VARIETY.

There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars j for one star differeth from another star in glory. — 1 Corinthians 15:41.

These words are part of Saint Paul’s great argument for immortality. His reasoning has caught fire. It has become far more than a mere piece of logic, although it has not lost its logical consistency. Before him as he reasons there has opened up the splendor of the thing he pleads for; as he talks of heaven he has been caught up into heaven, and sees the glory of the everlasting life. The way in which he comes to the particular words which are my text is this, — he has been claiming man’s resurrection on the strength of Christ’s. Christ has risen and entered into glory. Man too, because he is one in human nature with Christ, must also rise. "Now, is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept." But then the great misgiving came. Can man’s life undergo a change like that and yet be truly his? Must he not be another being if he enters on such a different condition? If he remains the same being, must he not ever repeat the same experiences which are bound up with his very nature? Are real identity and such variety compatible with one another?

Paul sets himself to answer those questions. First comes his beautiful parable of the seed and the plant. "That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die; and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body which shall be, but bare grain. But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him, and to every seed its own body. "The vital principle is too spiritual to be confined to one form. It passes from one form into another which is wholly different, and yet it remains essentially the same. The buried seed and the wheat waving in the sunshine are the same, and yet how different they are! Then he passes to a yet more brilliant illustration. There is a power of life which pervades the universe. Everywhere it is identical; everywhere it is glorious. It shines in everything. By it sun, moon, and stars are clothed with radiance. But how different is the splendor which it gives to each! It fills each with itself; and lo, the result! "There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differeth from another star in glory," — the same life keeping itself the same through every change, yet changing so completely. Shall not then this human life, still keeping itself the same human life, be able to go up to heaven and stand in the light of God? That is Paul’s argument.

It is not so much the way in which his argument bears upon human immortality that I wish to speak about to-day, — though to that we will return at last, — it is rather this whole idea of identity and variety coexisting and ministering to each other, and of the interest and beauty which that idea gives to the world. But notice first of all how Saint Paul builds his argument for immortality upon the richness and the splendor of this mortal life. Because this world is so great and beautiful, therefore there must be another greater and still more beautiful. Often enough have men made heaven a compensation for the woes of earth. Often enough have men said, "Because this world is so full of wretchedness, therefore there must be another world, where the starved soul shall be fed, and the wounded soul healed, and the frozen soul warmed." Paul makes heaven not a compensation, but a development. Because this world is so glorious, therefore the glory of heaven must be surpassing and unspeakable. How much nobler is Paul’s way! How much fuller of inspiration and of genuine faith!

One sign of how much greater Paul’s way is, lies in the higher life which it will make for one who uses and believes in it. For he who finds in the manifold glories of this mortal life a symbol and witness of the glories which belong to immortality will always be led to live this life as intensely and profoundly as he can, in order that the higher life may become real and attractive to him. Men have thought that they must separate themselves from earth in order that they might believe in heaven. Paul’s doctrine says emphatically, "No!" He says, "The deeper that you go in life, the more life must spread itself out around you and become eternity. He who gets to the centre feels the sphere. Live lightly, superficially, and formally, think little, make little of life, and it will be little to you. Think much, make much of life, and it will assert its greatness and prophesy its continuance." Indeed his doctrine seems to teach almost this: that immortality is not a truth to be directly striven for and proved, but a truth which will open itself to and fold itself around the man who deeply reaches the meaning of this life, — the man who realizes in living how identity and variety blend and unite to make the richness and solemnity of existence.

Identity and variety; identity and difference. Do we not feel even as we say the words together how they express together the tone and feeling which our thought of life demands? Identity sounds solid and substantial; it means the steady, continuous, unchanged quality of things; it almost suggests monotony; it is dimly haunted with misgivings and fears of dullness. On the other hand variety is vital. It quivers with the constant expectation of change; it is full of the interest of novelty; it sparkles and rustles, and is sensitive and open to all influences. If it has a danger, it is not dullness but restlessness; not heaviness but lightness is what it has to dread. But join the two; quicken identity with variety; steady variety with identity; make the man always himself, yet let him always feel the power of new conditions opening around him, — and then have you not made the best and happiest life? You have preserved at once responsibility and hope; you have gained both stability and movement; your man is at once a rock to build on and a wind of living inspiration.

Think of the men whom you know best and who have been most to your life, and I am sure that you will find in them these qualities in highest union. They have been the men who, you were sure, always were themselves, and yet men who have felt the largeness and richness of life, and so who have made changes ever from condition to condition. In the union of these two qualities lay their helpfulness and strength. But let us trace a little more largely how this union of identity and difference pervades the universe, and how wherever it appears it gives richness and depth.

I wish I knew enough of the great world of physical Nature to realize how true it must be there, in the region to which Saint Paul’s image first transports the mind. The most ignorant observer, the merest lounger by the rivers or among the mountains, can catch sight of it, — the genuine reality of Nature as one true existence, and yet the manifold variety with which the whole earth teems, in which Nature embodies herself. The lark and the lily, the sunbeam and the flashing river, the mountain and the ocean and the man, — it takes but the most elementary sensitiveness to feel the oneness of them all; while still our eyes and ears and all our senses are tingling with the tidings of their difference which they are always sending. I stand in awe and wonder when I think how delightful and impressive this must grow to a great naturalist, as year after year he learns more of Nature’s countless differences; and yet year by year, the more he knows her differences, she — the one Nature, the single being, great and gracious — issues from her vast variety, and shows herself to him. It must be a life full of fascination, — the eternal, undivided glory never losing its divine unity, ever unfolding itself into "one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars."

Pause here a moment as we pass, to think how when Saint Paul wants to depict the vast variety of which the world is full, it was distinctly as a variety of glory that he conceived of it. Enough he knew of the variety of woe. Easily enough he might have depicted how man, the same man still, was tossed from suffering to suffering and remained the same identical miserable sufferer in all. It would have been the same truth taught upon its darker side. But Paul knew that the true side on which to teach it was its side of light. The real variety of life is a variety of glories. Such a choice of the side from which to draw his illustration is a noble characteristic of Saint Paul. It is a sign of how healthy he is. Change from glory into glory, — that was what life seemed to him. Remember, it is no rapturous and untired boy who is talking; it is a man all sore with sorrow, beaten and broken with disappointment and distress. Is it not a sign of what a true Christian he was that life seemed to him still to be only a variety and constant interchange of glories? But turn from physical Nature and think of the history of man. How true it is that history cannot be rightly understood unless it is illumined by this double truth of the identity and difference of life. The ages come and go, each stamped with its own character. There are the ages of war, and the ages of peace; the centuries of thought, and the centuries of action; the times of faith, the times of philanthropy, the times of philosophy, the times of prospect and of retrospect, of certainty and of doubt, — each has its glory. In the eyes of the inhabitants of each it seems as if all other times were inglorious by the side of theirs. The truth of the difference of ages is most manifest and claims the first importance; but all the time the other truth of identity is always true, and is always making its assertion. The time is great which in the midst of its self-value is conscious always of the deeper value which belongs to the long life of man. We rejoice in the nineteenth century. We believe that there has been since Adam no century so good to live in. But greater than the nineteenth century is the sum of all the centuries, — this varied, ever-changing life of man. One long, unbroken nineteenth century from Adam all the way to us would be terrible indeed. The ages of the cloisters and the castles, of the dreams and mysteries, of the starlight and the moonlight, they are all needed in the sky of universal history; each of them, while it is thoroughly itself, may be proud and glad of all the rest. And so with nations. We say England, France, Italy, America. What mere geographers we are unless as we say each of those names a very being stands before us, — a being with a character, a being unlike all the others, and yet bearing a true identity with them because both it and they are made of men, and have shaped all their ways and institutions out of the needs of the same old manhood living on the same old earth. The nations learn more and more how the advantage of one is the advantage of all. Great universal tendencies are bringing them to more and more of likeness with each other. Not quite so far-away and impossible a dream appears "the parliament of man, the federation of the world." But more terrible almost than that absolute diversity and consequent hostility, would be the perfect identity of nations. The nations, like great children, match themselves with each other, compare their characteristics, call each other small or great, are filled with contempt or envy; but really it is not a question of smaller or greater, it is a question of the difference of glory. Palestine or Greece or Rome, — who shall decide, who cares to decide, their rank? "There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars," and all together fill the radiant sky. Or take another illustration, from the occupations of mankind. Three men are close together on the street. One of them makes shoes, another writes books, another is mayor of the city. It is foolish and false to say that there is no rank and precedence between the lives which those three men live. One of their lives demands higher powers and offers the opportunity of higher education than the others. It is perfectly right and wise that the shoemaker, if he feels in himself the power, should aspire to leave his shoemaker’s bench and become in his turn the mayor of the city; but there are other truths besides this truth of rank and precedence. The truth that quite apart from all comparison with other arts, each of these arts has absolute standards of its own, has its own bad ways and good ways of doing its own work, has its own high and noble way of being done; and the truth that each art, so far as it lives up to its own best standards, becomes a true utterance of universal human nature, an utterance which gets its value from the fact that it is at once identical with and different from all other utterances, — these are the real truths about men’s arts and occupations which are most important. It is these truths which make the thronged streets of a great city food for thought and imagination. They clothe the vast buildings in which men do their various work with a fascination and an interest which the trees of the stateliest forest in springtime or in autumn cannot begin to match; they give dignity and pathos and meaning to our colleges and schools; they make the richness and the harmony of all active life. And so our illustrations bring us at last to human character. There, in the difference and the identity of personal human natures, is the fullest exhibition of the two truths of identity and of variety, and of their essentialness to one another. Here is the endless variety. Men are thoughtful or active, spontaneous or mechanical, conservative or radical, simple or elaborate, — where is the end of the differences which we might describe? And yet below all differences men are men. The endless variations are all wrought upon one single mighty strain. Think of the dreadful loss if either of these truths should fail. If the variety fails, mankind is a great, dreary, indistinguishable monotony. If the identity fails, mankind is a great tumult of confused and unharmonious particles which have no kinship with, no lesson for, each other. How unreligious, how unchristian either of those conditions is any one knows who has entered at all deeply into the truth of Christ and into the spirit of the Incarnation. Christ is at once the inspiration of the individual and also the assertion — such as the world has never heard before — of the identity of man. He is the Revealer of the Fatherhood of God, we say. Think what that means. He builds mankind into a family; and whereas in a family is every life distinct and yet are all lives one? That household of your own, — is not its beauty here, that in it every child’s nature and ways and destiny are a distinct and special study, and yet that a sweet, subtle unity runs through the whole and makes it one? One blood runs in the veins, one spirit looks out of the eyes of all, — identity and difference, not in contention with each other but confederate, helping each other, make the completeness o* the family life. Conceive Christ’s thought of the human race; see all humanity, as he saw it, as one great family; and then there too there is the harmony of these two truths, and every man honors his individual existence, while he rejoices in the oneness of the mighty whole. A new child is born into the world to-day, this Sunday morning. What shall you say as you stand beside his cradle? Shall not two consciousnesses fill you? Shall you not say two things: First, here is something new, original, and strange, — another apparition on the earth, another history commenced, different from any that the world has ever seen. That fills you with the fresh delight of newness. Curiosity, inspiration, exaltation fill your heart. But you say also, lo, the old life-spirit once more utters itself. Lo, that which has seen is once again. The tree puts forth another bud. The chain builds on another link. That fills you with the peaceful sense of permanence, and lets you feel the whole humanity and the God of humanity holding this infant life. In the union of these two emotions lies the best fitness for the wisest work that you can do in training this new immortal.

I leave the statement and illustration of our truth, and turn now in what time remains to point out very plainly what its consequences are, what sort of life and conduct it will make in him who understands it and accepts it as his law.

First of all, it will make self-respect. Here are you, seemingly insignificant, not making much of yourself, not seeming to be worthy to be made much of. Oh, if you could know two things about yourself: First, that you are a different creature from any that the world has ever seen; and second, that you are a true utterance of the same Spirit of Life out of which sprang Isaiah and Saint John. Indeed, there must come self-respect from both those truths together, wrought and kneaded into the very substance of a human nature. It is some glimpse of them which makes the school-boy idling at his desk on some inspired morning gather up his books and go to work. It is some glimmer of these in his poor dark soul that gives the slave the power to look boldly in his eye the master who is flogging him and keep his heart untamed. It is the simple certainty of these that makes it easy for the laborer who digs your ditch not to be bullied by your arrogant wealth, but to do his task perfectly, and report it, past your arrogant patronage or fault-finding, to God. Every act has its appropriate glory, its perfect and entire way of being done. To do any act in its perfect way is a perfect act. The star is not a little sun; it is a star. It is not a fragment broken off from the great orb and shining with a broken, fragmentary lustre; it is a thing by itself. It has its own way of shining, which the sun itself cannot invade. There is one glory of the sun and another glory of the star. To shine itself out boldly in the heavens is to do a new, distinct thing which makes the heavens rich.

I would that I could make this clear to some disturbed and discontented soul which is here this morning. You are a star and not a sun. God forbid it that you really are a sun and not a star any arbitrary compulsion should keep you in the star’s place and shut you out of the sun’s. We must labor everywhere till there is perfect freedom for every nature to know and be itself. But you do know yourself. You are a star and not a sun. Your place in life is not in the forefront of things; it is subordinate and secondary. What then? Can you learn this truth, — that if you do your work with complete faithfulness and with the most absolute perfectness with which it is capable of being done, you are making just as genuine a contribution to the substance of the universal good as is the most brilliant worker whom the world contains? You are setting as true a fact here between the eternities as he. You are doing what he cannot do. It is Emerson’s fable of the Mountain and the Squirrel, —

"If I cannot carry forests on my back,
Neither can you crack a nut."

"There is one glory of the sun,
and another glory of the stars."

All our works, even the greatest, arc so little in relation to the world’s need; all our works, even the least, are so great in relation to the doer’s faithfulness. There is the secret of self-respect. Oh, go take up your work and do it. Do it with cheerfulness and love. So shall you shine with a glory which is all your own, — a glory which the great heaven of universal life would be poorer for missing.

You see how inevitably respect for others is bound up with such self-respect as this. Let us turn and think of that. The absorbing character of a great enthusiasm is one of the commonest of observations. He who cares earnestly for anything is apt to care very little for other things, and is apt to wonder and be indignant that other people do not care as much as he does for the thing he cares for. How the philanthropist, all eager to set right the world’s tumultuous wrongs, chafes and grows furious at the sight of the recluse or scholar sitting in his cell, raking over the ashes of history or dreaming of the sacred elementary and abstract truths! Then how that scholar, if he looks abroad, is ready to despise the bustling restlessness which is forever organizing committees and petitioning legislatures and screwing up the loosened machinery of charity! "There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differeth from another star in glory," — is not that the very truth which such despisers of their brethren need to understand? Sometimes it seems as if such narrowness were necessary, — as if it were the inevitable price which you must pay for earnestness and energy; but surely that cannot be so, surely it must be possible for men to be profoundly devoted to their own work and yet to be profoundly thankful for the work which other men are doing, — work which they could not do, and whose details and methods it is not in their natures to understand and care for. Surely I may claim my right to be glad and proud that the great singers are singing, though my ears are dull to music; and that the great sculptors are carving, even if my soul does not respond to art; and that the great statesmen are ruling, though my quiet life seems to be lived entirely outside the region of their grand ideas. They are all mine, and I am theirs. Is this a fancy? Is it a mere blind struggle to enlarge my life, whose littleness makes it intolerable? Not if I genuinely believe in God! If I feel Him behind all existence, then there is a great identity established between all the utterances of Him throughout the length and breadth of human life. The volcanoes know each other, — Etna crying out to Vesuvius across the sea, — because of the oneness of the central fire from which they all proceed. Let me know God, the source of all that man does anywhere, and then, poet, sing your song! sculptor, carve your statue! O builder, build your house! engineer, roll out your railroad on the plain! sailor, sail your ship across the sea! They are all mine. I am glad; I am proud of them all. Is it not what Paul wrote so triumphantly to his disciples, — "All things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s"? And then that everything should reach its best, that every man should do his best in his own line, that every star should shine brightly with its own light, becomes the wish and prayer and purpose of my life. Here is the only true respect for fellow-man.

All this applies to the different conditions and degrees in which we see other men’s lives to stand; but it may also be made to apply to the different conditions and degrees into which we may think of our lives as passing. You or I are this to-day; tomorrow or next year we may be something quite different. To-day we are insignificant; to-morrow or next year we may be illustrious and prominent. Or just the opposite — to-day we are illustrious and prominent, to-morrow or next year we may be insignificant. How shall we look upon those possibilities of change? Is not this what we want? To see each condition as a distinct thing with its own values and meanings, and yet to feel how our human life may, still the same that it is now, spread itself out and come to larger things. This harmonizes contentment in the present with large-hearted aspiration after greater fortunes. Let the student honor his studentship. Let him live in it as in a home thoroughly honorable and worthy. Let him think of it, not as a road over which he is compelled to travel, but as a dwelling in which he has the privilege of living; but let him realize himself in it so truly that whatever else he may be capable of doing in the coming years may seem to him not hopeless while he looks forward to it, and not strange or unnatural when it arrives. He who lives so, lives in a present peace which the large hopes of the future do not disturb, but deepen. And so at the end as at the beginning of my sermon I touch the use which Saint Paul first made of this truth which we have taken from him for our study. To him it was a proof of immortality. He would have men live here on earth, yet conscious of their capacity of Heaven. He would have earth real, clear, definite, distinct, shining with its own color, holding us with its own grasp; and yet he would have man so conscious of his larger self that the very definiteness of what he is today makes real to him the greater thing that he will be in the vast world beyond. Is not that what we want? The life of earth now, the life of heaven by and by, — each clear with its own glory! And our humanity capable of both, capable of sharp thinking, timely hard work here and now, capable also of the supernal, the transcendent splendor there when the time shall come! The glory of the star, the glory of the sun! We must not lose either in the other; we must not be so full of the hope of heaven that we cannot do our work on earth; we must not be so lost in the work of earth that we shall not be inspired by the hope of heaven. God grant us all the contentment and the hope which come to those who live in Him who covers all yesterday, to-day, and forever with Himself.