'O"
Come, my beloved! we will haste and go
To those pale faces of our fellow-men!
Our loving hearts, burning with summer fire,
ROMANS XII. II 287
Will cast a glow upon their pallidness;
Our hands will help them, far as servants may;
Hands are apostles still to saviour-hearts.
2. Enthusiasm is indispensable; there is nothing which the devil dreads so much, there is nothing which the world denounces BO continuously. To call a man an enthusiast has often been regarded as the sneer most likely to thwart his plans. Like the words " Utopian," " Quixotic," " unpractical," it is one of the mud- banks reared by the world to oppose the swelling tide of moral convictions. The famous saying of Prince Talleyrand, "Above all, no enthusiasm!" concentrates the expression of the dislike felt by cold, calculating, selfish natures for those who are swept away by the force of mighty and ennobling aspirations.
For what is enthusiasm ? It is a Greek word which means the fulness of Divine inspiration. It implies absorbing and passionate devotion for some good cause. It means the state of those whom St. Paul has described as "fervent (literally, 'boiling') in spirit." It describes the soul of man no longer mean and earthy, but transfigured, uplifted, dilated by the Spirit of God. When a man is an enthusiast for good, he is so because a Spirit greater than his own has swept over him, as the breeze wanders over the dead strings of some ^olian harp, and sweeps the music, which slumbers upon them, now into Divine murmur- ings, and now into stormy sobs. A man becomes an enthusiast when God has flashed into his conscience the conviction of right and truth ; has made him magnetic to multitudes ; has made him as a flame of fire which leaps out of dying embers ; as a wind of God which breathes over the slain that they may live. Without enthusiasm of some noble kind a man is dead ; without enthusiasts a nation perishes. Of each man it is true that in proportion to the fire of his enthusiasm is the grandeur of his life; of each nation it is true that without enthusiasm it never has the will, much less the power, to undo the heavy burden or to atone for the intolerable wrong.
^ Let us think sometimes of the great invisible ship that carries our human destinies upon eternity. Like the vessels of our confined oceans, she has her sails and her ballast. The fear that she may pitch or roll on leaving the roadstead is no reason for increasing the weight of the ballast by stowing the fair, white
288 OUTWARD, INWARD, CHRISTWARD
sails in the depths of the hold. They were not woven to moulder side by side with cobble-stones in the dark. Ballast exists every- where : all the pebbles of the harbour, all the sand on the beach will serve for it. But sails are rare and precious things: their place is not in the murk of the well, but amid the light of the tall masts, where they will collect the winds of space.^
(1) Think what enthusiasm has done even in spheres not immediately religious. The enthusiasm of the stvdent, of the artist, of the discoverer, of the man of science — what else could have inspired their infinite patience, their imlimited self-sacrifice ? Men cannot without effort render great services to mankind. "The progress of mankind," it has been truly said, "has been from scaffold to scaffold and from stake to stake"; but men animated by a fine enthusiasm have braved the penalty. It plunged Eoger Bacon into torture and imprisonment. It made Columbus face the sickly cruelty of ignorant priesthoods and the stormy hurricanes of unknown seas. It caused years of poverty, of suffering, of persecution, of calumnious denunciation to Galileo, to Kepler, to Newton, to the early geologists, to Charles Darwin. They gave to mankind a toil intense and infinite. And if in these days man has been enabled to
put forth His pomp, his power, his skill, And arts that make fire, flood, and air, The vassals of his will,
it is only because his more gifted brethren have toiled for his good.
(2) Again, there is the enthusiasm of the reformer. Think how low the nations might have sunk if their decadence had not been again and again arrested, and their criminalities again and again rebuked. Think what Italy was fast becoming when Savonarola — until they choked his voice in blood — thundered in the Duomo of Florence against her corruptions and her apostasy ! Think how the cramp of an intolerable tyranny might still have been torturing the souls of men had not Wyclif braved death to give the Bible to the English people ! Think once more what truths would have been drowned in the deep seas of oblivion if
* Maurice Maeterlinck, Life avd Flowers, 76.
ROMANS XII. II 289
John Hu8 had not calmly gone to the stake to which he was con- demned by the bishops who surrounded the perjured Sigismund ! Imagine what a sink of loathly abominations the nominal Church of God might now have been if the voice of Luther had never shaken the world.
(3) Again, there is the enthusiasm of the missionary. In the first centuries the world was full of missionaries. In those days every Christian felt that he was not a Christian if he were not in some form or other God's missionary. And for centuries the Church produced many a noble missionary; men like Ulfilas, men like Boniface, men like Columba. Then began the ages of neglect, and darkness, and superstition, and for whole centuries there was found only here and there a man like St. Louis of Prance, or St. Francis of Assisi, with a mission spirit strong within him. In modern days it is to Count Zinzendorf and the Moravians, to William Carey and the Baptists that we owe the revival of missionary zeal. In the last century missions were regarded as foolish, rash — one knows not what ; for the devil has a large vocabulary of words to quench the spirit which is so dangerous to his domain. Yet men despised and defied the devil, and the world which is his minion. Think of John Eliot, the lion-hearted apostle of the Indians, and his motto, " Prayer and painstaking can accomplish anything." Think of the young and sickly David Brainerd, going alone into the silent forests of America, and among their yet wilder denizens, with the words, " Not from necessity, but from choice ; for it seemed to me God's dealings towards me had fitted me for a life of solitariness and hardness." Think of Adoniram Judson and the tortures he bore 80 cheerfully in his Burmese prison.