THE CHANGED LIFE
"I PROTEST that if some great power would
agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition
of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning, I should
instantly close with the offer."
These are the words of Mr. Huxley. The infinite
desirability, the infinite difficulty of being good--the theme is as old as
humanity. The man does not live from whose deeper being the same confession has
not risen, or who would not give his all tomorrow, if he could "close with the
offer" of becoming a better man.
I propose to make that offer now. In all
seriousness, without being "turned into a sort of clock," the end can be
attained. Under the right conditions it is as natural for character to become
beautiful as for a flower; and if on God's earth, there is not some machinery
for effecting it, the supreme gift to the world has been forgotten. This is
simply what man was made for. With Browning: "I say that Man was made to grow,
not stop." Or in the deeper words of an older Book: "Whom He did foreknow, He
also did predestinate . . . to be conformed to the Image of his Son."
Let me begin by naming, and in part discarding,
some processes in vogue already, for producing better lives. These processes
are far from wrong; in their place they may even be essential. One ventures to
disparage them only because they do not turn out the most perfect possible
work.
The first imperfect method is to rely on
Resolution. In will-power, in mere spasms of earnestness there is no salvation.
Struggle, effort, even agony, have their place in Christianity as we shall see;
but this is not where they come in. In mid-Atlantic the other day, the Etruria
in which I was sailing, suddenly stopped. Something had gone wrong with the
engines. There were five hundred able-bodied men on board the ship. Do you
think if we had gathered together and pushed against the masts we could have
pushed it on? When one attempts to sanctify himself by effort, he is trying to
make his boat go by pushing against the mast. He is like a drowning man trying
to lift himself out of the water by pulling at the hair of his own head. Christ
held up this method almost to ridicule when He said, "Which of you by taking
thought can add a cubit to his stature?" The one redeeming feature of the
self-sufficient method is this--that those who try it find out almost at once
that it will not gain the goal.
Another experimenter says:--"But that is not my
method. I have seen the folly of a mere wild struggle in the dark. I work on a
principle. My plan is not to waste power on random effort, but to concentrate
on a single sin. By taking one at a time and crucifying it steadily, I hope in
the end to extirpate all." To this, unfortunately, there are four objections.
For one thing life is too short; the name of sin is Legion. For another thing,
to deal with individual sins is to leave the rest of the nature for the time
untouched. In the third place, a single combat with a special sin does not
affect the root and spring of the disease. If one only of the channels of sin
be obstructed, experience points to an almost certain overflow through some
other part of the nature. Partial conversion is almost always accompanied by
such moral leakage, for the pent-up energies accumulate to the bursting point,
and the last state of that soul may be worse than the first. In the last place,
religion does not consist in negatives, in stopping this sin and stopping that.
The perfect character can never be produced with a pruning knife.
But a Third protests:-- "So be it I make no
attempt to stop sins one by one. My method is just the opposite. I copy the
virtues one by one." The difficulty about the copying method is that it is apt
to be mechanical. One can always tell an engraving from a picture, an
artificial flower from a real flower. To copy virtues one by one has somewhat
the same effect as eradicating the vices one by one; the temporary result is an
overbalanced and incongruous character. Someone defines a prig as "a creature
that is over-fed for its size." One sometimes finds Christians of this
species-- over-fed on one side of their nature, but dismally thin and
starved-looking on the other. The result, for instance, of copying Humility,
and adding it on to an otherwise worldly life, is simply grotesque. A rabid
Temperance advocate, for the same reason, is often the poorest of creatures,
flourishing on a single virtue, and quite oblivious that his Temperance is
making a worse man of him and not a better. These are examples of fine
virtues spoiled by association with mean companions. Character is a unity, and
all the virtues must advance together to make the perfect man. This method of
sanctification, nevertheless, is in the true direction. It is only in the
details of execution that it fails.
A fourth method I need scarcely mention, for it
is a variation on those already named. It is the very young man's method; and
the pure earnestness of it makes it almost desecration to touch it. It is to
keep a private note-book with columns for the days of the week, and a list of
virtues with spaces against each for marks. This, with many stern rules for
preface, is stored away in a secret place, and from time to time, at nightfall,
the soul is arraigned before it as before a private judgment bar. This living
by code was Franklin's method; and I suppose thousands more could tell how they
had hung up in their bed-rooms, or hid in lock-fast drawers, the rules which
one solemn day they drew up to shape their lives. This method is not erroneous,
only somehow its success is poor. You bear me witness that it fails? And it
fails generally for very matter-of-fact reasons--most likely because one day we
forget the rules.
All these methods that have been named --the
self-sufficient method, the self-crucifixion method, the mimetic method, and
the diary method--are perfectly human, perfectly natural, perfectly ignorant,
and, as they stand, perfectly inadequate. It is not argued, I repeat, that they
must be abandoned. Their harm is rather that they distract attention from the
true working method, and secure a fair result at the expense of the perfect
one. What that perfect method is we shall now go on to ask.
This document (last modifiedJune 24, 1998) from Believerscafe.com
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