XXX

THE RECORD AND THE IDEAL

"And the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life." Phil. IV,

3.

In a private collection of works of art in the city of Amsterdam, there may be seen one of the rarest of Dutch masterpieces by one of the most gifted of Dutch painters. The picture is the picture of Faust. The world outside is asleep; it is midnight. Faust is in his study, and the great head and the fine face and the doctor's scarlet robe stand out with fascinating distinctness under the glare of the lamp. The room as a whole is dim, but one can see the thousands of books on the shelves lining the walls. One can see book after book on the floor; the desk is covered with them; one book is open, and those great eyes are studying with intense and painful interest the contents of its pages. There the artist has drawn the student among his books, the student in vital relation to his books. What does that relation mean? It is the individual man, consulting the universal man, hoping from that consultation to gain insight into the mystery of human life. How powerfully and how beauti

fully the masterpiece to which I have referred brings out that relation of the one intellect to the many; the solitary, single-handed, isolated individual, consulting the genius of his race!

What is a book? Letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, symbols set in order, with a beginning and a middle and an end? A book is all that and infinitely more. Milton, one of the greatest readers of great books, has told us that a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit. It is, then, the record of life. If we would understand the book, we must have access to the life and bring the light of the life to bear upon the record of it. This brings me to the text, to those beautiful words, as deep as they are beautiful: "The rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life." I think that these words have a message to the student and I would like to indicate briefly part of that message. Technically or untechnically are we not all students? Are we not inquirers, seekers after the truth, learners one from another, confessing the immeasurable scope of truth, and our own immediate poverty of faculty and knowledge, facing the infinite, hoping to add to the effective power of our knowledge by the study, the search, the learning of each day?

I think that mood is characteristic of the true man in college and out of it; it is characteristic

of the true man everywhere. There is the confession of a momentous reality beyond him; there is the consciousness of some insight into it; there is the third consciousness of inadequate knowledge and the desire to add to knowledge every day. This is the attitude of mind, believe me, of the man of the greatest learning as it is of the enthusiastic youth who knows that he has little learning. We are all together in this great and noble fellowship, seekers after truth, seekers after the meaning of life, sitting at the feet of the great, inquirers of the way through the valley, across the wilderness, over the mountains into the glow of the sunset that means our home.

1. Guided by my text my first remark is that primacy belongs not to books, but to life. Take the greatest example of all, the Master of the Christian world. He wrote nothing; He lived about three-and-thirty years in this world; his public ministry was confined to a few years in which He spoke his message to the people of his country and his time. You must mark these three things in this order: first, the mighty life of Jesus, that is the original thing; then the

spoken word of the Lord; and in the third place the record, the evangelical record that we call the Gospel, which came into existence many years after He left the world.

If we are to understand the record

we must

go

to the speaker of whom it is the record; visualize Him, his time, his place, his audience, and, as it were, hear the word spoken by Him to human souls. Then if we are to understand anything of this word, we must pass beyond it to the life of the Lord; we must get at the quality of his being, the majesty of his mode of living, the tenderness and the sublimity of his soul. That is the order.

The New Testament writings all came into existence in this way. No one ever thought of writing a book. It never entered into the mind of Paul or Peter or John that they were to make books. The great thing was a divine life in that community reproduced, in the first instance, in the lives of the apostles; reproduced, in the second place, in the lives of those whom the apostles had persuaded to become disciples of the Lord. This divine life called forth a record of things done. These apostles of the Lord had new thoughts, new insights, new interpretations of man's life, new interpretations of God, and God's world, and of all things. Thus a record was made of the Acts of the Apostles; thus great souls came to write their thoughts to cheer one another on. This church, that church, and the other church needed to be enlightened, comforted, guided, and inspired, and so these occasional, and as it seemed to their authors

ephemeral, productions came into being; they were all processions out of life, they were all witnesses of the primacy of life.

An illustration from the classical world of Greece may confirm this fact. Socrates, the founder of philosophy in the Western world, wrote nothing; he despised writing; he thought the written word was a poor, defenseless infant. He lived the intellectual and the good life his full seventy years of existence and passed on into the other world leaving nothing written. Then came Plato, who, in the so-called Socratic dialogues, with consummate art, preserved the method, many of the thoughts and the image, the living image of his great master. If you are to understand these works of Plato, you must pass behind them into life. Look at our American literature, consider the "Essays" of Emerson ; they cannot be understood apart from the life of a Puritan community. Webster's "Reply to Hayne" means nothing unless you have a vision of the life of the nation at that time, discordant, almost belligerent. The finest words of Lincoln have a national life behind them. Whittier's war-songs are sung first in the heart of the American people of the North. All literature — Greek, German, English, American - refers the student back to life. A book is first of all a witness of the book of life; the primacy belongs to life.