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CHAPTER III

THE WAY OF DEDICATION

I

THE INNER COMPULSION

No life amounts to anything until it becomes absorbed in some aim which carries it out of and beyond itself. The man who is occupied in consuming three meals a day, in dressing his body, and in giving it its due quota of comfortable sleep is superior to the oyster only in corporeal size; they are both biological specimens, only one is larger and more complicated than the other, and, because of his larger power, one of them can eat the other! Now, if this biological man is ever to rise above the biological level and be something more, he must discover a way of living which delivers him from the mere play of natural forces the mere pursuit of materials for the animal life and this lays upon him an inner compulsion to devote himself to an ideal; that is, to an unselfish and spiritual cause, a cause for the pro

motion and advancement of interests other than his own. Nobody gets out of the biological order of life until in some degree he has learned to "For their sakes I consecrate myself." say:

There are, of course, many degrees and scales of this struggle for the life of others, this consecration to unselfish causes, this way of living for aims that are enlarging and spiritual. Many a person finds that his occupation not only supplies him with food and clothing, but also gives him opportunities for the consecrated life. The shoemaker who makes an absolutely honest shoe, not merely because he wants his wages, but still more because he wants the little unknown child that is to wear it to have a solid and durable shoe, who therefore pegs and stitches his own spirit of honesty into his piece of work that man has risen. above the biological scale and has found a way of living a life which has a touch of consecration upon it.

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The sweeper of city streets is, often enough, no doubt, a dull, stupid man who goes to his work with hardly more enthusiasm than the mule shows, and sweeps because he would starve if he did not work. But every now and then there is a sweeper of another type-a real "white angel" who knows that city dust is laden with deadly germs

and disease, and that unless this dust is well and carefully swept away it will endanger the lives of the city; and he knows, too, that in sweeping it he is risking his own life. In spite of that, he sweeps in the dark corners even when no inspector watches him, and forgets his own life in consecration to the safety of others. He belongs somewhere in the order of those unselfish and spiritual knights who have lost themselves to find themselves. Telephone girls" do not usually impress us as consecrated, but when, as happened a few years ago in a terrible crisis which threatened two towns with annihilation, two of these exchange girls stayed at their post and risked their own lives to warn the citizens to flee before the oncoming wall of water, we must feel that they had formed and cultivated a way of living which took them out of self and consecrated them to unselfish aims.

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We stand almost appalled at the bald selfishness which is wrecking so many American homes. The number of cases in which the decree of divorce follows hard after the words, "until death do us part," has become ominous and staggering. But we must not overlook nor forget the millions of happy homes in which men and women are consecrated through love; in which husband and wife toil and sacrifice for each other and for their chil

dren in radiant joy, and in which, through sickness and death, through poverty and privation, through loss and sorrow, as well as in sunshine and prosperity, two persons have ceased to be two "units" and are devoted to each other in selfforgetful love. Here, again, is consecration of no mean order.

It is almost nineteen hundred years since a little band of men who heard" words of life" from the lips of a wonderful Teacher forsook their nets and boats and fishing-tackle to follow him and, through consecration to him and his cause, found themselves on a new spiritual level. Sometimes the Church has failed to realize its mission and has been content to appeal to the self-side in men and to offer them an easy means of passage from a world of woe to a haven of refuge and a scene of peace and joy; and it may be that even now the Church is too much commercialized and permeated with a spirit of refined self-seeking; but still, as of old on the shores of Gennesaret, men, when they hear this Christ call, leave all with joy and follow him. There are plenty of Christians, no doubt, whose religion is formal and traditional and without much insight; many who blindly hold truths for which nobler men have suffered and died; but, nevertheless, there is a goodly number of men and

women who are Christians by first-hand experience, Christians who through Christ have found God and have consecrated themselves with joy to do his will and to lose themselves that they may find themselves in him.

II

THE ALL FOR THE ALL

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Religion above all, Christ's religionis not something which can thrive on a "fifty-fifty' basis. That simple Brother of the Common Life, Thomas à Kempis, was profoundly right when he said four hundred years ago, "We must give the all for the All." The great religious leaders, the persons who have started a new line of march, have always known that truth, and it was their practice of it which more than anything else made them religious leaders. The Laodicean, neither hot nor cold, economical of spiritual zeal and exercising no more faith than is absolutely required for conventional religious purposes, with one eye on the main chance here below and the other turned feebly on the celestial gate, is a well-known type of Christian. But, however common the type may be, it is a pitiable, miserable failure.

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