Trusting One Another.
If all the world did not trust all the world, we could not do business for a single day. The amount of coin and bank notes in circulation is ridiculously inadequate to the needs of business. By far the larger part of every day's transactions of every kind is conducted by means of promises to pay.
The National Monetary Commission reported an investigation of this matter. About seventy per cent of the daily bank deposits consists of checks. More than ninety per cent of the payments in wholesale dealings is made by checks, and even more than half of the retail business is conducted in the same way, while the banks report weekly payrolls aggregating $534,800,000, seventy per cent of which is settled by checks.
This is a gigantic illustration of the principle of faith. We have faith in the integrity of the average man. We have faith in the business institutions of the country. We have faith that the future will be as good as the past. And in this faith we continue to accept bits of paper in return for most of our labor and the goods we sell.
In exalting the principle of faith in our relations toward God and the concerns of the next world, religion is merely applying to the Owner of all things the same rules that we apply without question to the petty properties of earth.
He Doubted Providence.
The newspapers tell about a New Orleans minister seventy-four years old who came "to the conclusion that God had wholly abandoned the world." He added, "I have grave doubts about the providence of God, and do not want to live." So he committed suicide.
We "have grave doubts" about the authenticity of that story, but we know that many good Christians are perplexed concerning the vast weight of woe which God's providence has allowed to roll upon the world. Their faith is sorely tried. They do not see why a loving, omnipotent Father could not have prevented it.
Nor do we. He could have prevented it. But only by making men mere automata, only by crushing the freedom of the human will and reducing us to the level of sticks and stones.
God loves us too much to do this. "Grave doubts about the providence of God," at this juncture or any other, are merely the result of unreasonableness. They ask God to do for His children what He could do only by causing them to cease to be His children. And who of us wants that?
Steady!
This is what Captain Loxley of the Formidable said to his men while the battle-ship was sinking: "Steady, men; everything is all right! Keep cool and be British! There's tons of life in the old ship yet!"
Noble words. Heroic words. Words that will ring down the ages.
They fit precisely the needs of those that fear for Christianity, in this severest of trials in modern days, the most deplorable of the world's failures to live up to the teachings of the Prince of peace: "Steady, men; everything will be all right! Keep cool and be Christians! There's tons of life in the old ship yet!"
Give Nature a Chance.
Not many good things have come out of the horrible war, but certainly the ambrine treatment is one of them.
The method was discovered by a Frenchman, Dr. Barthe de Sandford, and used by him in treating terrible tar-gas burns. The inhuman modes of warfare introduced by the Germans, who first began fighting with liquid fire and flaming air, caused the most fearful burns. Soldiers in large numbers were brought into the hospitals suffering the extreme of torture, their flesh one awful mass of black and swollen agony. The new method was at once applied. The raw flesh was dried, and then with brush and atomizer the ambrine was applied at a temperature of 150° Fahrenheit. Over this a layer of cotton dressing was applied and over this another layer of ambrine. The whole hardened at once, sealing up the burn hermetically. The excruciating pain ceased at once, and beneath the casing the forces of nature had a chance to do their work. With perfect fidelity they labored, day after day, restoring what had been destroyed, building up new flesh, white and smooth as it was before the baptism of fire. When the casing was at last removed, one would not know that the soldier had been burned at all. As one investigator expressed the result, "It is a resurrection."
A similar process is needed to cure our spirit wounds. Do not irritate them with man-made expedients. Do not keep at them with anxious forebodings, with querulous complaints, with skeptical questionings. Close them up and leave them with God. Trust His wise and steady processes. Trust the power of His providence. Yield yourselves to His patience. Rest in His love. Thus treated with the salve of faith, even the most terrible wounds of the spirit will be healed, and soul as well as body will enter the resurrection life.
Try the Tank.
If the "tanks" did nothing else, they would be well worth while for the hilarity they have introduced into warfare.
A "tank" is a great, lumbering, water-cart affair, protected with heavy plates of steel, and mounted upon big, broad wheels moved by a powerful gasoline engine. Its armor is pierced with apertures for guns, and it is filled with gunners as the Trojan horse was filled with Grecian warriors.
It can go anywhere, over plowed fields, over fences and hedges, over the German trenches, over the German batteries. It is proof against cannon balls and bombs. It can straddle a trench and rake it from end to end. It allows the enemy to swarm all over it, and do their worst in vain. And it wallows over the field with a clumsy gait that is the essence of awkwardness and irresistibly mirth-provoking. "Tommies" hailed its advent with shouts of delight, and Germans fled before it in utter rout.
War is coming to an end some day. What then will be the fate of the tank?
If it is relegated to the museum of outgrown follies, yet it will have given us a lesson well worth heeding.
For the realm of thought has its tanks, and always will have. And the most effective of these is faith.
Faith is a strange contrivance. It is curious and comic in the eyes of the infidel world. "Crude" cry the philosophers. "Obsolete," exclaim the modernists. "Absurd," say the cynics. But nevertheless the tank of faith moves on over the battlefield, impregnable and irresistible. It holds a stout-hearted little group of fighters. It breathes out the flame of fiery conviction. It hurls forth the word of God, mighty to the beating down of all the strongholds of Satan.
Get into it, Christian! Let the worldling laugh, let the infidel sneer, let the wicked frown. Get into the moving, armored fort of faith, and you will come off more than conqueror.
Hold on!
It is strange to draw a lesson in optimism from a suicide, but that is just what we may well do from a very sad case of self-murder in New York City. A certain art-dealer became financially involved, and his creditors set appraisers to work taking an inventory of his stock. The art-dealer had valued the stock at a sum amply sufficient to pay all his debts, but he became terribly afraid that his estimate was too high, and that fear, together with the shame of being thought insolvent, led him to take his own life. One hour after his death the appraisers made their report, showing that the man was perfectly solvent, that his actual assets were double his present liabilities and any that might accrue within the next six months. If the art-dealer had held on a single hour he would now be alive and hopeful.
O, the importance of faith! Faith in God, faith in other men, faith in one's self, faith in the wise ordering of Providence! What a safeguard is good cheer! What an insurance is optimism! Simply to believe that all is coming out well is of itself a powerful means of making it all come out well.
Not that I would counsel imprudence or foolish shutting of one's eyes to the actual condition of affairs; but the actual condition of affairs is, in the main, a good condition. Worry is usually unjustified. Things are not so bad as they seem. The world is kind, and God is in it. Optimism can always give a better account of itself than pessimism. Good cheer is to be chosen because it is likely to be based on truth and not on falsehood.
In the case of that New York art dealer worry was death; death suddenly, death in a terrible form. In the case of everyone that indulges in it worry is death, though usually it is a slow death, and a death to which doctors give other names than suicide. Suicide it is, none the less, on the record book of the recording angel.
Ring the Bells.
Massena, one of Napoleon's generals, suddenly appeared, with eighteen thousand men, before an Austrian town which had no means of defense. The town council had nearly decided to surrender when the old dean of the church reminded them that it was Easter, and begged them to hold services as usual and to leave the trouble in God's hands. This they did; and the French, hearing the church bells ringing joyfully, concluded that an Austrian army had come to relieve the place, and quickly broke camp. Before the bells ceased ringing, all the Frenchmen had vanished.
The incident has often been duplicated in individual lives. They have rung the joy bells in the face of pain and sickness and poverty and fear and loneliness and all other trials. Then the joy bells have conquered. Speedily the foe has slunk away. Speedily the bell-ringers have found themselves in possession of the field. For no enemy is quite so strong as faith companioned with good cheer.