We have seen that to have faith in one’s self is to have power, but that it has its dangers. How are we to have the power and escape the peril? The answer is, by seeing to it that we have a good foundation for our faith.
1. A man may be self-confident by temperament. Is that a good foundation?
(1) If by temperament a man is an optimist, that is certainly better than if he were by temperament a pessimist. It is better for himself; it is better also for the world. Nothing can well be more distressing to one’s self or more depressing to others than a disposition to look always on the dark side of things. An extreme example is that of Marie Bashkirtseff, who was born at Poltava in the Ukraine in 1860, the daughter of General Bashkirtseff, a wealthy landed proprietor, and who died in 1884, before she had completed her twenty-fourth year. Here is one of the entries in her Journal:
“I am profoundly disgusted with myself. I hate everything I have done, written, and said. I detest myself, because I have fulfilled none of my hopes. I have deceived myself; I am stupid; I have no tact—and have never had any. Show me one really clever thing I have said—one wise thing I have done. Nothing but folly! I thought I was witty; I am absurd. I thought myself brave; and I am timid. I thought I had talent; and I don’t know what I have done with it. And, with all that, the pretension of being able to write charmingly. Ah! my Emperor you may possibly take all I have been saying for wit; it looks like it, but it isn’t. I am clever enough to judge myself truly, which makes me seem modest, and I know not what besides. I hate myself!” [Note: The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, i. 350.]
(2) On the other hand a temperamental self-confidence, if more comfortable, may exceed all reason or reality, and end in disaster. Perhaps the most conspicuous case is Lord Bacon’s. This is what Dr. E. A. Abbott says of Bacon :
“If throughout his life, if even in his private prayers, he habitually used the language of conscious and superior virtue, he was not thereby imposing upon others more than he imposed upon himself; however he might occasionally dissemble and justify dissembling, he never deserved to be called a hypocrite, for he was thoroughly persuaded of his own general rectitude, and even in his deepest disgrace and dejection he still retained his self-esteem. Yet to many readers, after perusing the following pages, Bacon’s retention of self-esteem will appear nothing less than portentous. To describe it as bordering on insanity would be unpardonable, for Bacon’s nature was eminently sane; but it would be nearer the mark to say that from his restless, perfervid mother, who is said on reasonable grounds to have, been frantic for some years before her death, Bacon inherited some abnormal characteristics, one of which took the shape of an excessive and even monstrous self-confidence. But for this, Bacon’s Apology would have been more humble and more accurate; but for this, the Norm, Organum, would never have existed; it was the secret alike of his great strength and great weakness; it nerved him to superhuman enterprises, and blinded him to his own most obvious faults.” [Note: E. A. Abbott, Francis Bacon, xvii.]
Beware of too sublime a sense
Of your own worth and consequence!
The man who dreams himself so great,
And his importance of such weight,
That all around, in all that’s done,
Must move and act for him alone,
Will learn, in school of tribulation,
The folly of his expectation [Note: W. Cowper.]
2. Without being temperamentally an optimist or even an egotist, one may believe in one’s destiny. Is that a good foundation for faith?
(1) There is no doubt that a sense of “calling” is a mighty incentive to heroic deeds. In the old days of paganism success thus gained would be credited to the gods.
The career of Timoleon, as described by Plutarch, is perhaps the most remarkable instance of unchequered success ever recorded. Though unskilled in strategy, he undertook to lead a small Corinthian force for the liberation of Sicily from the tyrant Dionysius and the Carthaginians. In respect to material force the enterprise seemed desperate; but the omens were highly favourable. During the ceremonies at Corinth which preceded his departure, a crown of victory, detached from some decorations, fell down upon his bead; and a light as from heaven guided his ships towards Rhegium. By skill and address he slipped across the strait, evading the Carthaginian galleys. Victory crowned his daring rush against their troops, whom he took unawares. The Greek cities, startled by these signs of divine favour, espoused his cause; and he succeeded in capturing the citadel of Syracuse and Dionysius himself. A plot to murder Timoleon was foiled by an avenger of blood striking down the very man who was about to take the hero’s life. All these events (says Plutarch) “made the people reverence and protect Timoleon as a sacred person sent by heaven to revenge and redeem Sicily.” He himself before the crowning battle against the Carthaginians gave a happy turn to what seemed an evil omen with a skill like that displayed by William the Conqueror at the landing in Pevensey Bay. Finally, after giving liberty and just government to Sicily, Timoleon thanked the gods for the favour which they had vouchsafed, and erected a shrine in his house to Good Fortune, ascribing all his successes to her. Clearly these uninterrupted triumphs were in large measure the outcome of the belief in the special favour accorded to him by the gods.
(2) But if the “high calling of God” (Php_3:14) is no more to a man than good luck, however it may be enforced by resolute effort, it is sure enough to end in disaster at the last. Napoleon, a child of the Mediterranean, brought up among a primitive people, half hunters, half fishermen, realized the force of superstition. Perhaps at one time he was imbued by it; for he retained the custom of crossing himself on the receipt of good news. He early rejected revealed religion, but he retained his belief in good luck, much as Frederick the Great did. He knew that soldiers, peasants, and many of a higher station as well, worshipped good fortune, the shadow of all primitive cults. It is therefore highly probable that his appeals to his star, or fortune, or destiny, were designed to enlist on his side the crude but potent conceptions which have always counted for so much among the Mediterranean peoples, nerving the Greeks to do more than their best for Alexander the Great, Epaminondas, and Timoleon. Some generals are lucky, others unlucky. Napoleon determined to be among the lucky ones, and set himself to conquer Fortune by claiming that she was already on his side. [Note: J. Holland Rose, The Personality of Napoleon, 202.]
Let me tell you a saying that is given in that lovely book, Christ’s Folk in the Apennines. The cholera was raging in the district, and there was a peasant woman, Marina, a very beautiful woman of 25, with her two little children, who in the demand and the need of the dying patients offered herself to nurse them. She went into the dangerous atmosphere and nursed them with her own hands, and with great tenderness and skill; people protested against it, and said, “Why should you expose your life for those who are not connected with you at all?” Her answer was, “The poor things must not be neglected, and I am as fit to do it as anyone.” Then she said to her friends who spoke to her about it: “You see, when you have a call everything is easy.” [Note: R. F. Horton, The Springs of Joy, 178.]
3. Will it do to rely upon our gifts?
The word is promising. If we recognize our ability to do this or that as a gift of God, it is not likely that we shall use it foolishly. But how often does the word “gift” retain its true meaning for us? It may express no more than the conscious possession of certain powers—even if it expresses so much. And it is not powers that we must rely upon but power. Powers we have. Not only are they the prime cause of our weakness, however, but often the more a man has the worse off in this matter he is. How often has a man been prevented from finding and living by the power of God through possessing such “riches” and “powers” of his own as, say, social position, or personal charm, or artistic temperament, or quickness of brain, or distinction in games? The greater our “powers,” the greater our need of “power,” if only because we are the more likely to be blind to our own weakness.
Has it ever struck you that, in the material universe, “power” is never originated by man, but always given to him? Man has to find the power and to apply it, but it is there quite apart from him. An electrical “power-station” is not a place where power is created, but a place where power already found in one form is converted into another and applied to certain uses afterwards. And then look at the machinery to which it is applied. It has “powers”—it is designed to do certain things, and can do them. But when? Only while it uses, or rather is used by, the power laid on. Then you get your light, or motion, or heat. Your machine has “received power,” and “in” that power it can “do all things” which it was made to do. But if the power be cut off, the engine stops, and the light goes out; in spite of its “powers” the machine stands “powerless.” [Note: E. A. Burroughs, Faith and Power, 6.]
4. What is the best foundation? One word will answer the question—sonship. That is the best and the only foundation for faith in one’s self.
When it was said in the presence of John Smith, who was an under-master at Harrow School, and whose life was, as far as we ever can say it of any human life, a perfect and saintly one, that someone had a very difficult task before him, he exclaimed in astonishment, “Difficult? Difficult? Why, he is a Christian.” [Note: R. F. Horton, The Springs of Joy, 166.]
(1) To be a Christian—that is the foundation. Says St. Paul, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Php_4:13). By “all things” he means all that he desires, as a Christian, to do. He means also all that, as a Christian, he has to suffer. Just as in a great factory where all the power is generated at one spot, perhaps by one engine, and is all conveyed and distributed to each part so that every wheel is turned, every hammer is lifted, every implement is employed in a perfect harmony and with complete efficiency, the power distributed according to the direction, so it is to be understood that an individual life placed in Christ is in the line of power, and exactly what is wanted is supplied. But the difference is, this is not a factory, nor is it a machine; it is a Divine Person whose omnipotence moves the universe.
(2) Now to be a Christian, to possess sonship, there is necessary first of all the recognition of two things standing over against one another—the grace of God and the faith of man. “Grace” is simply a convenient term for “all the ways in which God comes in to the help of our lives,” And over against it stands “faith,” which similarly covers “all the ways in which we appropriate the help of God.” The terms are correlatives; neither, strictly, can be conceived of without the other.
A small boat is in the bay and wants to cross to the other side. The power which is to help it across is all there in the wind; but when is that power effectual? Only when those on board give it the means of communicating itself to the boat, by hoisting a sail. True, the sails are powerless without the wind, but so is the wind useless till a sail is held up for it to fill and drive. Faith is the continual readiness to count upon the presence and to claim the help of a God who is such as we see Him in Christ. It is the stretching out of the hand, the hoisting of the sail. And, because God is there, faith succeeds; and, succeeding, confirms itself. The experiment passes into an experience: an attitude results from the act. Not, however, the attitude of mere passive adherence, but the active dependence of friend upon Friend, the faith which is not only made active but kept in activity through love.
(3) The first effect of the hoisting of the sail is forgiveness. For the very central element in our “weakness” is the strange fact we call sin. There is no more serious handicap to a man than a guilty conscience, and even those who do not themselves feel the burden of their past, yet know its weakening effects. To have chosen wrongly many times is almost tantamount to selling your free-will, and compelling yourselves to choose the same way again. Thus, the grace of God appears, first and foremost, as forgiveness—that is the first way a man needs God’s help in his life. He requires to be “justified by faith” in order that he may “have peace toward God.” But then, when that is provided, and the handicap removed, there is still need of help for the course before him, and that need may be summed up as the need of power, the thing which we find we have not in ourselves.
(4) And with peace of conscience (or before it) there comes the sense of sonship. This is the central fact. It is reconciliation to and harmony with God; it is heirship of God, joint-heirship with Jesus Christ; it is the ssurance of God’s love to us” Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.” Everything Christ said and did had the grand intention of quickening man’s nobler nature to the realisation that, in spite of all the demons that possess him, of the insanity that maddens him, of the sin that encumbers him, he is yet a son of God. What man is yet to be, he has not now the faculties to know; but even now, in his fallen condition and ruined state, he can claim- the great prerogative of sonship to God. Wherever Christ went and taught He developed in men the consciousness of this stupendous fact of their Divine relationship to God. He quickened it in publicans, sinners, and harlots. He sealed it by His rising from the dead and the outpouring of His Spirit, and wheresoever He quickened it two results followed: first, a prostrate sense of utter unworthiness; and, secondly, an unspeakable thankfulness for God’s mercy and love in making men His sons.
There are two stages in religious experience; there is the fear and horror of sin, in which passion clutches at the skirts of an unknown and awful Deity; but there is another and more blessed, state into which we may come: I mean the victorious faith, peace and fellowship of the Sons of God. For those who enter into that communion there is no devil, no Power of Evil, no duality in the worlds of God. [Note: H. B. Mims, in Present Day Papers, iii. 69]
I have faith in the hereafter because I have faith in myself. I pray God that I may ever be humble, and think of myself as a child should who feels that he owes everything—being, guidance, support—to his Father. But may He keep me from that false humility which imposes a sense of self-degradation, that pulls His dignity downward as it sinks. I am proud of the Father in me; and because I am His child I dare not write myself downward below a certain height of being. I feel that eternity is mine because I inherit it through Him. I feel that immortality is mine because His Spirit begot me, and out of His loins death cannot come. And so I say to those who say, “there is no life beyond, there is no world to come: to the grave we go, and in the grave we stop for ever and ever”—very well, take that for your faith. Faith in vacuity; faith in nothingness; have that for your faith. But I have that in me,—faculties, powers, beginnings of powers, thought and awakenings of thought, fruit, blossoms, buds, germs, beginning of germs, that point with the prophecy of indestructible life to ages ahead, as theirs. [Note: W. H. Murray, The Fruits of the Spirit, 75.]
Here where the loves of others close
The vision of my heart begins.
The wisdom that within us grows
Is absolution for our sins.
We took forbidden fruit and ate
Far in the garden of His mind.
The ancient prophecies of hate
We proved untrue, for He was kind.
He does not love the bended knees,
The soul made wormlike in His sight,
Within whose heaven are hierarchies
And solar kings and lords of light.
Who come before Him with the pride
The Children of the King should bear,
They will not be by Him denied,
His light will make their darkness fair.
To be afar from Him is death
Yet all things find their fount in Him:
And nearing to the sunrise breath
Shine jewelled like the seraphim. [Note: A. E., Collected Poems, 247.]
(5) We are made sons of God by the Cross of Christ. But when St. Paul says, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me,” (Php_4:13) it is clear that he is thinking of Christ not as He died on Calvary but as He is alive now and for ever. It is, undeniable that he recognized. Jesus Christ as living and accessible; that he lived in direct, intimate, habitual communion with Him: and that the strength by which he was enabled to do and to suffer was strength imparted to him immediately by Christ, without whom he could do nothing. It was not by his own native force of resolution, not by his own courage and fortitude, constitutional or acquired; nor was it from any past supply of gracious influence which he had received, that he was enabled to go on confronting danger and enduring affliction, maintaining a calm contented mind in the midst of privation and difficulty; but only by a continual supply of strength directly from Christ Himself.
Look, for example, at the account which he gives of his mysterious rapture into Paradise. Lest he should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations, there was given him “a thorn in the flesh”—dome grievous infirmity, or some sharp, constant, humiliating affliction—which he describes as “the messenger of Satan to buffet” him. And “for this thing,” he says, “I besought the Lord thrice.” Earnestly and repeatedly, he prayed to Christ Himself, “that it might depart from me; and he said unto me, my grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly, therefore,” he continues, “will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
Here, then, we find him not only communing directly with Christ, and receiving from Him the assurance of such a constant supply of spiritual strength immediately from Himself as should enable him to bear up under the infirmity with which he was still to be harassed, but also welcoming his affliction, as the means of his enjoying larger communications of Christ’s gracious influences than he would otherwise have been privileged with. And “therefore,” he goes on to say, “therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak then am I strong” (2Co_12:10): when I am the most sensible of my own utter insufficiency and impotence, then am I strongest in the strength which Christ immediately imparts. In a similar manner he writes to Timothy—“At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me. Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me” (2Ti_4:16-17) filling him with a courage and a fortitude no human countenance could have inspired—“and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.” So again he says to the Galatians, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal_2:20): liveth in me by the energy of His own spirit animating and sustaining me. All these, and other similar passages clearly show that Paul lived in personal and habitual communion with Christ, and that when he speaks of Christ strengthening him, his language must be accepted in its strict and literal meaning.
Now, where Christ is self cannot be. The entrance of the love of Christ drives out the love of self. There is “the expulsive power of a new affection,” of which Chalmers spoke. Truly, if there is no God-life in us, we cannot think too meanly of ourselves. But if He, and not nature, is the Root of our life, we cannot think too much of ourselves. Therefore our Divine Teacher and Lord counsels us to repudiate our recent, carnally-generated selfhood; and to love, and lay up wealth in Heaven for our Divine identity. “If any man come to me, and hate not his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” In other words, if he will hold to his earthborn selfhood, he cannot inherit his Divine selfhood. “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal!” The ground which Christ takes on our behalf is absolute, and not debatable. We cannot follow Him up the high path of our return to our God-born humanity and blessedness, unless we conclude once and for ever that our nature-born selfhood is unworthy of us.
And as self is driven out there enter love and service. The religion of Jesus, says John Pulsford, is sublimely simple; it is insusceptible of wranglings and independent of all ecclesiastical systems. If the two great loves prevail in us, no moral darkness can ever blind our eyes, nor any death touch our central life. Children in the house of their father and mother quietly assume their birthright, and all the rights and privileges of their home. So do the angels of Heaven; and the men and women of the earth, as much as angels, when they know who they are, whence they came, and whither they are going. By leading us into ourselves Jesus awakens in us self-reverence and quenchless affections; and the recognition in all men of the same God-derived nature as in ourselves makes us sacred to each other as members of one Divine Household.
There is a sound of altercation among the little ones; cries of “I want!” are heard. Whereupon mother enters and exclaims: “That is never my Charlie!—snatching and shouting like this! I don’t know that rude boy I Send him away, and let me see my loving little Charlie back again I” She repudiates the grasp-the-whole-world self of her little boy, and teaches him to do the same, in order that his higher self may be reinstated.
And before long, as her efforts are rewarded, there is a different cry heard. It is still “I want,” but the I is that of a higher self, which says: “I want to kiss you, mother.” The selfish little grasper has disappeared: the submissive little son has come back. The two are mutually exclusive. To realize the one is to repudiate the other. [Note: W. A. Cornaby, In Touch with Reality, 142.]
How wild are our wishes, how frantic our schemes of happiness when we first enter on the world Our hearts encircled in the delusions of vanity and self-love, we think the Universe was made for us alone; we glory in the strength of our gifts, in the pride of our place; and forget that the fairest ornament of our being is “the quality of mercy,” the still, meek, humble Love that dwells in the inmost shrine of our nature, and cannot come to light till Selfishness in all its cunning forms is banished out of us, till affliction and neglect and disappointment have sternly taught us that self is a foundation of sand, that we, even the mighty we, are a poor and feeble and most unimportant fraction in the general sum of existence. Fools writhe and wriggle and rebel at this; their life is a little waspish battle against all mankind for refusing to take part with them; and their little dole of reputation and sensation, wasting more and more into a shred, is annihilated at the end of a few beggarly years, and they leave the Earth without ever feeling that the spirit of man is a child of Heaven, and has thoughts and aims in which self and its interests are lost from the eye, as the Eagle is swallowed up in the brightness of the sun, to which it soars. [Note: Carlyle, in The Love Letters of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh, ii. 158.]
The apostles were impressed with the fact that they were builders, that their work was constructive, that a world purpose was being effected through their ministry. The eye of St. Paul never left, if we may so put it, the map of the great Empire which he was to claim for Christ. “Fear not, Paul, thou must also see Rome” (Act_27:24). His conversion meant the conviction of an imperial, nay, a universal apostolate committed to him and making constant demands not only upon an intensity to which all things were possible but upon a statesmanship, an economy of opportunity, a husbandry of power, which could trust in God and keep its powder dry. He is never carried away by the impetuous impulse, though the imperious claim of the gospel never lets him rest. He is master of himself and therefore commands the situation. There is no tactless anxiety for the salvation of souls. He knows how to become all things to all men in the strenuous effort to save some. He knows how to abound as well as how to suffer loss. His life is confined in no narrow channel. For him truth, beauty, excellence, as these things are understood by the cultivated intelligence, retained their interest and meaning. The evangelist has not ceased to be the critic, the observer, and the gentleman. What strikes the mind in contemplating the career of St. Paul is not so much “Here is a man who has made the great renunciation,” but “Here is the man of power.” His missionary journeys rival in interest the travel of Odysseus. They impress us by the fulness of their experience rather than by the greatness of their self-sacrifice. The strong man delights in dangers, in hairbreadth escapes, in critical situations. The adventurous lad who first hears the celebrated catalogue of Pauline perils hardly pities the man who encountered them. These are all in the day’s work of him who would earn the reward of efficiency. The strong man, who disdains crucifixion, shrinks from no suffering :
“I sought where-so the wind blew keenest. There I learned to dwell
Where no man dwells, on lonesome, ice-born fell,
And unlearned man and God and curse and prayer,
Became a ghost, haunting the glaciers bare.” [Note: Canon J. G. Simpson, Christus Crucifixus, 29.]
