Part 39

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A great light is thrown on this economic relation of the commandment by the attitude of the Centurion pleading with the Master for his servant's life. Here was an employer whose stretched-out arm of authority could be transformed into a gesture of appeal, for his servant lying sick at home. Indeed only as the spirit of this commandment makes itself felt in our business life will the clenched hands of capital and labor relax from the hilts of their dripping blades and grasp each other with the warm pressure of brotherly sympathy.

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Then there are the mutual relations between the young and the aged. Oh, for a return in our youth to that ancient bowing deference to old age a beautiful instance of which Cicero preserves for us. Into the crowded amphitheatre at Athens, with the multitudes' expectant hush, there staggered an aged man, who made his tottering progress, beneath tier after tier of indifferent or averted faces, looking in vain for a place, until finally he came in front of the section occupied by the Lacaedemonians, who rose as one man and offered him a seat!

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Then there are the superiors and inferiors in wisdom. As we look back through the mists of years to our student years, there stand out sharply distinguished the kindly figures of our intellectual fathers. I recall at this moment that man of infinite reserve behind the desk at Yale, whose eye could flash with authority and yet kindle with concern at the sight of the necessity of one of his boys--in Browning's thought, "As sheathes a film the mother eagle's eye when her bruised eaglet breathes!"

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I need scarcely suggest the obvious pertinence of this command to the relations of the pastor and his congregation. We cling very jealously to the term, "Father," as it has been applied to the men of God in the history of the Church. The picture is beautiful of the Roman Catholic priest, conscious of the reluctance of her neighbors to bear to the poor widow the evil news of the sudden death of her only son, walking quietly up the gravel path, and covering with his healthy hands the two withered ones as he met her at the doorway, answering her searching inquiry, "Father?" with an unmistakable inflection of the words, "My child!" That also of the American Protestant Episcopal bishop, leaving his little birthday gathering already interrupted for three successive years, and foregoing a breath of country air, after weary months of toil in the hot city, to comfort a simple family hovering piteously about a little white casket:--these are attitudes far more impressive than the ceremonious exercise of their loftiest ecclesiastical functions.

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Many lines of evidence from the side of reason converge on the Biblical teaching that civil government is a divine institution. Perhaps one of the most striking features of our later American growth is the colossal selfishness of our people. The habit of freedom from restraint is fast hardening into a lawlessness of character.

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Listen to some of the palliating expressions with which our legal atmosphere is permeated: "indiscreet and untactful," "the unwritten law," "swift justice," "murder a fine art," and remember that these are the terms that play around that triangle of corrupt judge, dallying lawyer, and bribed and illiterate jury--all conspiring to "shove by justice" with technicalities. And what are those sinister figures, flitting and stalking through the land--the law-maker with his spoils, the rioter with his rock, the anarchist with his bomb, the assassin thrusting out his black hand, the lyncher with his battering ram, his rope and his rifle; these are some of the outside lawless who conspire with the inside lawless to make a scarecrow of American law, making it the perch and not the terror of the birds of prey. And who knows how soon all of these lawless ones may stand up together and, with a monarch's voice cry, Havoc in the confines of this Republic!

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But we must be conscious of our Heavenly Father behind the earthly type. This unmistakably is the significance of the Biblical words: "To obey your parents in the Lord"; "To be obedient unto your masters as unto Christ"; "To fear God in honoring the face of the old man"; "To be subject unto rulers as the ministers of God." And this leads us to the great levelling truth, that we are all equally accountable to our Heavenly Father, that we are nations and individuals, in the high thought of Lincoln, "Under God."

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This command carries with it the promise of a reward restated by Paul, "Honor thy father and thy mother that it may be well with thee and that thou mayest live long on the earth." In fact this is the logic of life. This retributive justice is bound up in the laws of nature. Plants that array themselves against these laws wither and die. And higher up in the animal kingdom, Kipling's verse tells us that this inexorable sequence prevails:

"And these are the laws of the Jungle, And many and mighty are they; But the head and the hoof of the law is, And the haunch and the hump is--obey."

And it is true that obedience in a human being conduces to a long and prosperous life. The beautiful truth is gradually emerging in science and theology that religion is healthful. As one of my discerning fathers was often wont to say, "The whole Bible is a text-book of Advanced Biology, telling men how they may gain the fuller life."

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Here and there the obedient die early, you say.--Yes; and this fact sounds the deeper spiritual import of this promise, for they, sooner than we, enter upon that eternal life, and pass over into that greener Canaan, to that inheritance incorruptible and undefiled.

Standing one afternoon in the Gallery of the Louvre in Paris, a vision of the perfect adjustment of our seemingly conflicting relations to Caesar and to God shone forth to me, in the divine gesture of the Master in Da Vinci's wonderful painting of the Last Supper, where the hand turned downward lays hold of the things of earth, and the hand turned upward grips the things which are eternal, both of which obligations are glorified in those later words of the Saviour spoken out of the agony of the Cross: "Son, behold thy mother! Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."

LIFE'S MORN

BY WILLIAM C. JASON, D. D.

Principal State College for Colored Students, Dover, Delaware

"Nature," says one, "is like a woman; in the morning she is fresh from her bath, at noon she has on her working-dress, and at night she wears her jewels."

Nature is most charming in the morning. The following extract from "A Picture of Dawn" is a tribute Edward Everett pays to the morning.

"As we proceeded, the timid approach of the twilight became more perceptible; the intense blue of the sky began to soften; the smaller stars, like little children, went first to rest; the sister beams of the Pleiades soon melted together; but the bright constellations of the west and north remained unchanged. Steadily the wondrous transfiguration went on. Hands of angels, hidden from mortal eyes, shifted the scenery of the heavens; the glories of the night dissolved into the glories of the dawn. The blue sky now turned more softly gray; the great watch-stars shut up their holy eyes; the east began to kindle. Faint streaks of purple soon blushed along the sky; the whole celestial concave was filled with the inflowing tides of the morning light which came pouring down from above in one great ocean of radiance; till at length, as we reached the Blue Hills, a flash of purple fire blazed out from above the horizon, and turned the dewy teardrops of flower and leaf into rubies and diamonds. In a few seconds, the everlasting gates of the morning were thrown wide open, and the lord of day, arrayed in glories too severe for the gaze of man, began his state."

Nothing but the morning itself is more beautiful than this sublime description.