3. And as individuality is developed with the deepening spiritual life, so the wiUingness to recognize and welcome in- dividual differences of thought and feeling and action increases too as Christians grow riper. Seeing ourselves made more our- selves as our faith grows richer, we are glad to see other men made more themselves too. This is true charity. It is your undeveloped, crude, commonplace Christian who is uncharitable. He expects other Christians to be like himself. He has never felt that Divine, deep movement of Christ in his own soul, telling him that from all eternity there has been one certain place for him to fill, one certain thing for him to be, and summoning him to come and fill his place and be himself.
•jj I can well understand that the seeds in a sower's basket might be very uncharitable to one brother-seed that had dropped out of the basket and taken root and grown to be a stalk of corn. It is too unlike them. It is too original and singular. But let them all fall together and take root, and then, with life in all of them, they will not compare their ears and tassels, each being so busy in growing to the best that its separate bit of earth can bring it to. The true Christian charity is that which life teaches. * P. Carnegie Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, i. 287.
48 THE GOOD WILL OF A LIFETIME
It is the tried and cultured souls that understand each other's trials and cultures, though they may be wholly different from their own. And no sight is more beautiful than this grace growing in a body of believers.^
4. And here comes in another noble characteristic of the growing spiritual experience — its ever-increasing independence. This is the best personal result of charity. There is an independ- ence that is arrogant and defiant, and there is a dependence that is weak and fawning. Both come of narrowness. Both are the signs of immature and meagre life. One man arms himself against his brethren because he holds them to be wholly wrong and himself wholly right. Another man yields to his brethren because he fears that he is wrong and they are right. Here is a man of mellow strength who, deeply conscious of the work the Lord has done in him, made sure of it by long feeling the very pressures of God's hand kneading the truth into his nature, stands by that work, will let no man cavil it away from his tenacious consciousness, is so perfectly dependent upon Christ that he can hang upon no fellow-man, respects himself by the same reverence for the individuality of the Divine life that makes him also respect his brethren.
^ Not long ago I read this in what many hold to be our ablest and most thoughtful journal : " It is a law, which in the present condition of human nature holds good, that strength of conviction is always in the inverse ratio of the tolerant spirit." If that is so, then the present condition of human nature is certainly very much depraved. But if human nature can ever be rescued by a personal salvation, if mankind can ever become possessed by the Spirit of God, lifting the mass by filling the individuals eacli with his own strong manifestation of its power, then the world may still see some maturer type of Christianity, in which new ages of positive faith may still be filled with the broadest sympathy, and men may tolerate their brethren without enfeebling themselves. Such ages may God hasten.^
f[ Berry reached Chicago on Saturday, 20th November, and was entertained at a reception at the house of Professor W. Douglas Mackenzie. On the following day he preached in the morning in the Union Park Congregational Church, and in the evening in the Second Presbyterian Church. On the Monday morning he addressed what was nominally a gathering of the ministers of
» Phillips Brooks. » Ibid.
DEUTERONOMY xxxiii. i6 49
the city in the auditorium of the Y.M.C.A. The hall was crowded to excess by an influential and representative audience composed of the leaders of the churches of the city, about a thousand people being present at an early hour. A little slip which he made in the course of his speech caused much good-natured amusement, and at the same time revealed the orator's readiness of wit and presence of mind. The Eev. Hugh Price Hughes and he had gone through England together advocating this federation of which he was speaking, and that without surrendering any of their theological convictions. " In fact, we had none to sur- render," said Berry grandly. The house came down in a roar of laughter that pealed out again and again. When at last it sub- sided Berry said quietly, "That is one of the things which, as Punch would say, one had rather have expressed differently. Don't misunderstand me. There are no two men in England so full of theology as Price Hughes and myself — from the sole of our feet to the crcwn of our heads we are brimful. What I intended to convey was that there is nothing of these theological convictions that we are called upon to surrender so as to work upon a common platform and in a common cause." ^