l^
266 BUSINESS
secular a work to create a cotton plant as to spin the cotton and to weave it. It is as secular a work to create iron as to make the iron into railway girders, into plates for steamships, into ploughs and harrows, nails, screws, and bedsteads. It is as secular a work to create the sun to give light in the daytime as to make a lamp, or to build gasworks, or to manufacture gas, to give light at night.^
^ Eeligion consists, not so much in doing spiritual or sacred acts, as in doing secular acts from a sacred or spiritual motive.^
^ The mite of the widow was more than the gold of the scribe. And why ? Because motive is more to God than matter, though it be gold. The broken cry of the publican was a truer prayer than the self-satisfied cadence of the Pharisee. And why ? Because motive, not method, however beautiful, is what the great Father sees. Let, then, any man, I care not who he may be, bring himself into an intellectual condition in which he feels that religion is essentially a round of outward service only, and whether that man perform his service in a Quaker meeting- house, in a Methodist chapel, or in a majestic minster, he is simply reducing religion into a meanness that is less than human, and abstracting from it every element that makes it Divine and uplifting. But, on the other hand, any action done nobly and in Christ's spirit, whether in the smithy, or in the steamboat, or in the market-place, may be sacred.^
(2) The spiritual life is perfected through the worldly life, and the worldly life is perfected through the spiritual life.
So far from teaching that the spiritual life is antagonistic to life of secular action, the New Testament teaches that the spiritual is directly related to the worldly Life, and that the former is perfected by the latter. The cares of domesticity, the duties of citizenship, the exercises of trade, the implications of industry and toil are all influentially soliciting, training, invigorating, un- folding, and in a thousand ways perfecting the faculties of the soul and disciplining them in righteousness. If we observe the intellectual life we see at once that men can never, except with extreme disadvantage, divorce themselves from tangible things. If from any motive intellectual men isolate themselves from the commonplace world of facts, if they deny their sense, if they attempt to pursue their studies in a, purely metaphysical manner,
1 R. W. Dale. " John Oaird. » W. H. DaUinger.
ROMANS XII. II (AV) 267
they immediately and manifestly suffer. It is almost universally recognized that artists cannot with impunity exclude the actual world and resign themselves to reverie and metaphysics. And the same thing is most true in relation to our spiritual life — that life can grow only as it is elicited, exercised, conditioned by our worldly life. The world is a magnificent apparatus of discipline with which no spiritual man can affect to dispense. We cannot work out our highest life in isolation, abstraction, asceticism, in independence of daily, trivial, vulgar life. It is not by isolating ourselves from earthly things that we shall lay hold of the Divine life; it is by the true use and sanctification of the earthly life that we attain the Divine and the eternal. If intellectual monasticism would issue in monstrous masterpieces, in fantastic symphonies, in bizarre poesy, so any shrinking from natural worldly life and its relations produces deformed and morbid character utterly without attractiveness. Be not afraid of secular life and all that it involves.
^ The painter who refuses to go to nature soon paints badly. He cannot persist in evolving faces and landscapes from his consciousness and continue to produce work of veracity and power. To neglect the colours of summer, the features of the landscape, the lustres of dawn, the aspects of sea and sky, to neglect the facts of anatomy, the lines of physiognomy, the living face, the reality of things, is to sacrifice the truth, the splendour, the magic of art. The painter must live with the visible world, follow her subtle changes, know her as only genius and love can know ; he can lay hold of ideal beauty only through close daily contact with corporeal things.^
Again, the worldly life is perfected through the spiritual life. It is often urged that the spiritual life is injurious to the worldly life. Secularists profess that the two lives are mutually exclusive. They conclude that just as we are occupied with a higher world we become incapable of making the best of this. We boldly affirm that the whole material life of society here and now is secured and perpetuated by spirituality. It is the habit of the secularist to represent the love of God as so much precious feeling dissipated in the abyss ; to consider the worship of God as vital energy scattered in the air; to teach that the thought of the
* W. L. Watkiiiaon.
268 BUSINESS
future is thought withdrawn from a present which demands our concentrated strength ; but, in fact, a living confidence in God, a living hope of everlasting life, a living faith in the higher law is the golden bond which holds society together, the dynamic which keeps the world moving to the glorious goal. The secularist mocks the spiritualist, and reproaches him as " a child crying for the moon," Well, let the child cry for the moon ; it will be a sorry day for the world when the child ceases to cry for it. The child's crying for the moon is the mainspring of civilization. Isaac Newton in infancy cried for the moon, and when he became a man, in a very true and glorious sense, he got it, together with the sun and all the stars. Never crush the aspirations of men, especially their highest aspirations and hopes. Stretching out the hands to that which is beyond urges all things onward to a large and final perfection. Looking to the things which are unseen and eternal we inherit in their fulness the things seen and temporal.