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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Personal Problems (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 31. Ditching Life's Stream.
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Ditching Life's Stream.
Self-mastery requires a full knowledge of one's self, or at least a steadily growing knowledge. It means a reverential regard for the marvelous functions and powers that he finds within himself. Control requires knowledge, as well as more than knowledge. Increasing knowledge leads the way to increasing mastery, and should lead to greater reverence.
The man who reverences his wonderful powers is held off just that far from sin. The man who sins despises himself. Sin is never reverential. It is always profane. Self-mastery is always reverential, towards God most and first, then towards the man himself made in the image of God, and then towards all other men in that same image, and towards all of God's creation. The man who sins is blurring and blotting out the fine image of God imprinted on himself. Knowledge of one's self, and reverence for one's self, are open doors, one after the other, into purity and maturity and control.
We have talked together a bit about the ideal man in the talk on ambition. And one should keep that ideal clearly in mind. There are three spheres within one's self, the body, the mind, and the spirit. Self-mastery means fullest culture and control of all three of these. Spirit culture is the rarest to be found of any of the three. But a full, rounded culture of all three, each in itself, and each in due relation to the others, is rarer still.
But there is yet more to be said here. A man has three relationships, inward to himself, upward to God, outward to his neighbor. The relationship to God holds the key to the other two. There is ever the tendency to push some one of these at the expense of the others. How sin has unsteadied our nerves, and given a twist to our eyes! To keep true and steady the upper relation means to keep the others true too. The nearer to God a man gets the nearer does he come to his own true possible self. And the nearer to God the closer to one's fellows always; and not only the closer, but the purer and stronger and fairer that neighborly contact will be.
Self-mastery means holding true to one's relationships, upward, inward, outward. There are men who are regarded as masterful men who yet ignore their relationship to God. They are masterful. They reveal rare power. Yet it is one-sided. Another side, the upper, is untouched, ignored; and the one-sided mastery itself is incomplete because it can become full only through what comes in from above. The stream of life flows down from above, it flows in and through, and then flows out to others. Any other running of the stream by ditches or dams is changing nature's order, and spoils the life. It will either stagnate and grow green slime on its surface, or else it will run low and run out.