1. Look first at the call to work for God and man. To overcome the world, in the original and largest sense of the name “world,” as the Cosmos of the whole creation of God, is, after all, the one true mission of man as man, given him when at his first creation God made him in His own image, to have dominion over all creatures, to replenish the earth and subdue it. We are sent into a world fraught with a wealth of both physical and spiritual force, teeming with germs innumerable of lower and higher life. Each of us, according to his capacity and place in that great order of life, has a command to work on and through these forces to an appointed end, subduing them to his will, in order to minister thereby to the glory of God and the blessing of man. Each epoch in that progress of humanity which we call civilization is an advance one step farther in the consummation of that conquest. There is a material aspect of this work in the gathering and manufacture of all the treasures of the earth, whether of usefulness or of beauty, and in making the physical forces of the universe servants to our thought, our imagination, and our will. There is a higher aspect in the calling out of those powers, intellectual, moral, spiritual, which sway the great world of humanity, and through these promoting that increase of light and beauty, of truth and love, which is for man a fuller participation in the highest attributes of God. In both, just in proportion as each man is a true man, he takes his part in the overcoming of the world, and exercises the marvellous privilege of being “a fellow-worker with God.”
Many during the war found a wonderful “peace” at the Front in spite of all the discomfort and the danger, and this was because for the first time in their lives they had a clearly-defined object, and had wholly given themselves to this one thing. To them this “way of service” was a “way of peace.” [Note: Bishop A. F. W. Ingram.]
2. No men know less of inward peace than the unoccupied. A leading secret of peace is work. When, then, our Lord appeared, with the words “Peace be unto you” (Joh_20:19), He uttered them because He restored to the disciples that sort of peace which comes with occupation pursued under a sense of duty. They had been a prey to all the miseries of hopeless inaction; in seeing Him they saw a career again open itself before them. They knew now that He was alive; that His Kingdom was still a reality, or rather, more a reality than ever before; and that in it they had each an assigned task, in the performance of which their peace of soul would be insured.
There are hundreds of persons in London who do not know what peace is, mainly because they have not enough, or rather anything, to do. They do not know how to get through the day, much less the week. They may have at command money, friends, amusements. But these things do not really secure peace of soul. And many a working man, who does not know how to get into the day what he has to do, supposes that the condition of these idle people is a thing to be envied. No mistake can well be greater. Depend on it, work guarantees the peace of the soul; because the soul must be active in some way, and work secures healthy action. The man who has no regular occupation has his mind and heart full of restless, impracticable, morbid thoughts and feelings, which are fatal to peace. “The happiest days of my life”—they were the words of one of the wisest of men—“have been those in which I have had the most work to do, with fair health and strength to do it.” [Note: H. P. Liddon, Easter in St. Paul’s, 227.]
One of the most successful teachers of our time was Hannah M. Pipe, whose life has been written by Miss Stoddart. To an old pupil she wrote: Do thy work, and leave sorrow and joy to come of themselves. Do not limit the work to the outward activities of life. By work I mean not these only, though these certainly, but also the regulation of our moral feelings—strive against pride, vanity, ostentation, self-righteousness, self-satisfaction and dissatisfaction, resentment, impatience, alienation, discontent, indolence, peevishness, hatred or dislike, inconstancy, cowardice—untiring, hopeful effort after obedience to the will of God, and resolute, believing war with every temper contrary to the mind of Christ. It can be done, and it must be done. It is promised: it is commanded: it is possible. If you wish for something that you may not lawfully grasp, or cannot grasp, begin to fight, and never leave off until the wish is mastered and annihilated as completely as if it had never been once felt. This must be done not by desperate struggling so much as by calm, resolved, fixed faith. Do thus thy work, and leave sorrow and joy to come of themselves. . . . You see to obedience, faith, and righteousness. God will give you peace and joy in such measure as He pleases, and in increasing measure as the years go by. Until I was five or six and twenty, I think I had no peace or joy at all. Indeed, I never found any until I had given up caring for, praying for, hoping for, or in any way seeking after comfort and feeling. I took up with just an historical faith in the Bible and said: He will not make me glad, but He shall not find me, therefore, swerve from following Him. I will do His holy will so far as I can, I will serve Him as well as I can, though not perhaps so well as others to whom the joy of the Lord gives strength. I will be content to do without these inward rewards, but with or without such wages I will do my best work for the Master. With this resolve, arrived at after years, of weary strife, rest began for me, and deepened afterwards into peace, and heightened eventually into joy, and now from year to year, almost from week to week, an ever-greatening blessedness. [Note: A. M. Stoddart, Life and Letters of Hannah Pipe, 119.]
In the dark hour
When phrases are in power,
And nought’s to choose between The thing which is not and which is not seen,
One fool, with lusty lungs,
Does what a hundred wise, who hate and hold their tongues,
Shall ne’er undo.
In such an hour,
When eager hands are fetter’d and too few,
And hearts alone have leave to bleed,
Speak; for a good word then is a good deed. [Note: Coventry Patmore, Poems, ii. 36.]
