S. HOW TO ABOUND.

HOW TO ABOUND.

I know how to abound. — Php 4:12.

Saint Paul is rejoicing in a double knowledge. "I know both how to be abased and how to abound," he says. The experience of want and the experience of abundance, both of them he understands, and he is ready to meet either of them. It is of the second of his two kinds of knowledge that I want to speak to you to-day; but the two are not distinctly separable from one another. No man can have one kind of knowledge and be wholly destitute of the other. Just as no man knows how to rule who is not able also to obey; and no man knows how to obey without being also ready to command, — so the man who is truly wise in poverty would be wise also in wealth; and he who is most truly fit for wealth would not fail if poverty should come upon him. Thus each condition becomes in some sort a test of the other. There is one great philosophy which covers both. Let us try to remember this as we think this morning about knowing how to be rich. "I know how to abound," says Paul.

It often seems as if men had more than enough instruction as to how they ought to meet adversity, but far too little as to how to meet prosperity. As if that were so easy! As if success could take care of itself! Nor does the prosperous and affluent man know his own need! A hundred poor men come and say, " Show me what all this means. Tell me how shall I live in poverty and not grow wretched, sour, cruel, hopeless." Hardly one comes to God or fellowman, and with his hands overrunning with good things cries, " help me to escape my dangers! Show me how to abound! "Our Litany, indeed, does make men think." In all time of our tribulation, in all time of our prosperity, good Lord deliver us, "it bids us pray. As those words fall upon his ear, the rich, abundant man must sometimes look up almost in surprise, and see the dangers of his lot in life staring at him through the silken curtains; but at most times the curtains hang ample and smooth and quiet, and no fear disturbs them. "Hard enough to get rich," men will say, "but very easy to be rich. Tell me how to win prosperity, and I will not ask anybody to tell me how to use it. " And perhaps it is just because affluence does not seem to bristle with dangers as poverty does, that it seems often too many people to be an inferior, almost an unjustifiable condition for a noble man. It seems to afford no chance of moral heroism. It looks sleek and self-satisfied. The sweet moral uses of adversity monopolize our thought. To throw away wealth and profusion, to turn ascetic, to disparage learning, to isolate one’s life from the pleasant association of family and friends, — we all know how this has seemed to many men, to many noble men, to many groups and generations of men not destitute of lofty aspirations, to be the first condition of high spiritual character, — the making of life bare and meagre. It is a strange confusion. The idea seems to be that a man ought to throw away wealth and luxury because they make life too easy. Really it is throwing away wealth and luxury because they make life hard, because in them the chance of deep and spiritual life is beset by many mysterious and subtle dangers, over the conquest of which alone can man go forward to his best. Surely there is a braver, a franker, and a nobler way. Surely the man who takes his wealth or privilege and keeps it and learns how to live in it and use it and conquer its dangers by continual watchfulness and care, — surely he has done work more worthy of respect than any monk or ascetic in the cell or cave to which his coward life has fled.

You will not think of me that I stand here as a Christian minister before a congregation in which there are many people who are rich, simply trying to feed their self-complacency, to congratulate them upon their lot. I am not so mean as that. If there are men and women here whose lives are full of privilege, it is not my place to bid them throw their privilege away; it is not my place to tell them that their privilege is wrong; but my duty surely is to remind them of the dangers and responsibilities which privilege involves, and to exhort them as earnestly as I can to think and pray and study that they may " know how to abound." The phrase is very simple. Behind the duty of being anything, lies the deeper duty of knowing how to be that thing in the best way and to the best result. I meet a man who says, "My fellow-citizens have chosen me to such and such an office." His face is all aglow with triumph. He has won the victory. He has carried the election. How quickly the question starts up in my mind — "Does this man know how to govern? He is going to sail the ship of State. Does he know anything about such navigation? Woe to the State if he does not!" ""Woe to thee, O Land, when thy king is a child," says the wise preacher. Another man is proud that he is a father; but he has evidently not got hold of the first ideas of fatherhood, of its sacredness and seriousness and far outreach. There are officers in every great army who have the commission but have not the knowledge, and they are the officers whose men are sacrificed in reckless ventures. The priest is made by ordination, but the knowledge how to be a priest comes only by prayer and study and the grace of God. No man has a right to be anything unless he is conscious that he knows how to be it. Not with a perfect knowledge, for that can come only by the active exercise of being the thing itself, but at least no man has a right to be anything unless he carries already in his heart such a sense of the magnitude and the capacity of his occupation as makes him teachable by experience for all that his occupation has to make known to him.

How the strict application of our rule would depopulate our industries and professions! How it would bid the king come down off of his throne, and the judge off of his bench! How many fathers and mothers it would depose from their sacred seat at the head of the family! How it would beckon many a priest out of his pulpit, many an author from his desk, many a teacher from his school-room, many a merchant from his counting-house many a mechanic from his bench! Every man who is satisfied with being anything, and is not trying to know how to be that thing as well as it is possible to be it, this law would summon to resign and leave his place for larger, more earnest, more conscientious men! This is the law which Paul suggests with regard to abundance. Wealth is a condition, a vocation, he declares. A man may have the condition and not have, not even seek to have, the knowledge of how to live in that condition. Go to, ye rich men, and learn how a rich man ought to live.

I talk of wealth as if it were synonymous with Paul’s word "abundance;" but no doubt the word as he uses it means much more than what we generally understand by wealth. He is thinking of any plentiful supply of life, of anything which makes life sumptuous and ample. Plenty of learning, so that the mind is nowhere starved; plenty of friends, so that the affections are all satisfied; plenty of peace and spiritual comfort and certain faith and enthusiastic inspirations, — all of these may be included in his great word, "to abound." Not only to the man of money, but to the man of scholarship, to the popular man, to the man of great spiritual hopes and enjoyments, — to all of them his words suggest that there is something more needed than to have these great possessions, even to know how to have them, to be worthy of them, to be able to get the real heart and substance of their value out of having them.

He did not certainly have all these things himself, but one of the subtlest and profoundest suggestions which his words contain is this, that as a man may have the things and yet lack the knowledge how to use them, so on the other hand, a man may lack the things and yet possess the knowledge of them, — the knowledge of their nature and their use. Paul, a poor man, nevertheless says, "I have the best part of money still, — the knowledge of what money is, and what a true man ought to do with money." Some secret he possessed by which he unlocked the heart of wealth, even although his lot in life was almost abject poverty. That is a very lofty mastery indeed. And now is it possible for us to put our finger upon this mysterious knowledge of Saint Paul, and say exactly what it was? I think we can. It must have been a Christian knowledge. He is speaking, as he always speaks, distinctly as a Christian. Remember he became a Christian not later probably than thirty-five years after the birth of Christ. He wrote this epistle to the Philippians as late as the sixty-fifth year of the Christian era. It was then after thirty years of Christian life that he professed this knowledge. Thirty years had passed since he first saw his Master, Jesus, on the road to Damascus. Thirty years of consecration, thirty years of ever-deepening communion with his Lord, thirty years of the profoundest consciousness of his own soul. If we sum up those thirty years in one great phrase what shall we say of them but this, — that Paul had learned in them the true perfection of a human soul in serving Christ. All knowledge for him had become summed up in that, — the true perfection of a human soul in serving Christ! And now imagine that to his meagre life there had been brought the sudden prospect of abundance. "Tomorrow, Paul, a new world is to be opened to you. You shall be rich; you shall have hosts of friends; your struggles shall be over; you shall live in peace. Are you ready for this new life? Can your feet walk strong and sure and steady in this new land so different from any land where they have ever walked before? "What will Paul’s answer be?" Yes, I have Christ, I know my soul in Him. I am His servant. Nothing can make me leave Him. With the power of that consecration I can rob abundance of its dangers and make it the servant of Him and of my soul. I shall not be its slave; it shall be mine. I will walk at liberty because I keep His commandments. "So in the words which David had spoken long ago might Paul reply. The power by which he could confidently expect to rob abundance of its dangers and to call out all its help was the knowledge of the true perfection of a human soul in serving Christ.

Let us turn quickly from Saint Paul to ourselves. Let us take one by one the different kinds of abundance of which we spoke, and see how it is true that over each of them a man would win the mastery who carried into it the secret of Saint Paul, — the knowledge of the true perfection of a human soul in serving Christ; how such knowledge would certainly be the power he would need.

Take then, first, the simplest of all the meanings of abundance, which is wealth, — the ownership of riches. Do all rich men know how to be rich? He does not know how to do anything who does that thing so that he brings it to its worst and not its best results. Is that not true? A man does not know how to sail a ship who steers it so that when it ought to go to Liverpool he brings it into Madagascar. Where is the ship of wealth then meant to sail? Her port is clear and certain, — to generosity and sympathy and fineness of nature and healthy use of powers. What shall we say then of the man whose money makes him selfish and cruel and coarse and idle, or any one of these bad things. There are many hard names which we may call him by, but the real philosophy of the whole matter, the comprehensive definition of it all is this, — he does not know how to be rich! He is a blunderer in a great art. Look at his opposite. Look at the man who takes money into the easy mastery of his character. His self-hood, which is his character, appropriates it. He makes it part of him. The richer that he grows the more generous and sympathetic and fine and active he becomes. What can you say of him but that he does know how to be rich. I say of a man that he knows how to travel when he makes each new country, as he enters it, open its secrets and render up to him new interest and knowledge. I say of a man that he does not know how to swim when the water takes possession of him and drowns him in itself. So I say that a man does not know how to be rich when his money makes him its slave, and turns him into a coarseness like itself instead of being elevated and refined by the commanding spirituality of his human soul.

There is certainly a very terrible aspect to a sight like this, — an aspect of it that makes one very angry, that sometimes stirs up a whole class or city-full of poor men who seem to themselves to be wronged by the rich man’s ignorant and stupid use of wealth, to rage and violence. There is certainly another way of looking at it in which it is most pathetic. For what can be more pitiable than the condition of a blunderer who holds in his hands the power of such happiness and good and usefulness as money gives, and knows not what to do with it? The failure may take various forms. It may deck itself with gaudy tinsel, and shine in the extravagance of gold and diamonds; or it may clothe itself in the false sackcloth of miserliness. It may affect frivolity, or affect severity. The failure is the same in either case. In either case an infinitely pathetic object is the rich man who has not known how to be rich. And now what is the lacking knowledge? Certainly not something which any schools to which the man might have gone could possibly have taught. We not merely cannot find, we cannot picture to our imagination, any college which among its other courses should have one course which should teach men how to be rich, how to live worthily in wealth. Only the college of life could teach that fine and difficult and lofty art; and in the college of life more than in any other university everything depends upon the spirit and teachableness of the student himself. But in that college there is one lesson which every right-spirited and docile student ought to learn. It is the mystery of living, and the supremacy of some great power on which life depends, and the need of obedience to God. That lesson is the purpose for which the college of life exists. Its professors are the solemn events which come to every man. Its text-books are the histories of men, whose leaves and chapters are the passing years. Its halls are the several businesses and relationships in which men are engaged. In that great college, sacred with the accumulations of generations of learning men, the great central lesson must be learned that humanity is not its own, but God’s; and that to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever is the chief end of man. We may not say that sympathy with fellow-man and the desire to help him is the world’s lesson. That is one of its subordinate sciences, one of its necessary departments, but only one. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; a good understanding have all they that do His commandments." That is the testimony of one of the profoundest students of this university of life, one of its most finished graduates, — David, the King of Israel, in his hundredth and eleventh Psalm. His son, King Solomon, a student of a different temper, but also no slight or superficial scholar, bore the same testimony in the same words in the first chapter of his Book of Proverbs. And what shall we say who stand by and look at rich men and their failures? What will some of you who are rich men say, over whom as you are growing older there is creeping a most depressing sense that you have been all your life playing with your riches as a child plays with diamonds? Are you not ready to say that if you could have carried from the first a deep strong sense of God, it would have been a point around which all your great melancholy, aimless, useless fortune, all your inherited wealth which has simply kept you all these years from doing anything in this busy world, would have crystallized into the most vigorous shapes of character and usefulness. If your whole soul had been full of that knowledge all these years, how you would have been the master of your money, and lifted your little corner of the world with it as a lever, instead of its being your master as it has been, and either crushing you down with the anxious care of it, or wearing you out with the aimless spending of it; and it is hard to tell which of those two is worst. When Jesus said to the rich young man "Go and sell all that thou hast and give to the poor," he had simply found a man who did not know how to be rich. There was nothing to do with that man but to send him back to the preparatory school of poverty. To make that special treatment of a single man the universal rule of human life would be to shut up one of the great higher schools of human character in sheer despair. Sometimes perhaps a rich man feels that if he could get rid of his money he could be a strong and unselfish man. It is the old delusion. The sinner in the tropics thinks he could be a saint at the North Pole. It is only that he knows how the sun burns, but has never felt how the frost freezes. There is a special strength and a particular unselfishness which the rich man’s wealth makes possible for him. It is his duty to seek after them, and never rest till he has found them; not to make himself poor, but to know how to be rich is the problem of his life.

These thoughts rise up in us with every outcry of poor men at the anomaly, — almost, some of the poor would call it, the atrocity, — of some men being rich while other men are very poor. Such outcry there will always be; but at its heart that which makes such an outcry pathetic, and that alone which makes it dangerous, is that, often blindly and not able to understand or to define itself, it is an outcry not against rich men, but against rich men who do not know how to be rich. Always there will be angry protests against any man holding in any way, even the highest and most unselfish, wealth which the man who protests has failed to reach; but it is not this, — it is not wealth simply in itself, — it is the pride of wealth, the indifference of wealth, the cruelty of wealth, the vulgarity of wealth, in one great word the selfishness of wealth, which really makes the poor man’s heart ache, and the poor man’s blood boil, and constitutes the danger of a community where poor men and rich men live side by side. Let riches know "how to abound" and poverty will not lose its self-respect, and so will not struggle after the self-respect which it feels that it is losing, with frantic and tumultuous struggles. Oh, that every rich man and woman here might know this truth, and use it when their lives touch the sad and sore and hopeless lives of poor men at their side.

I must pass rapidly on and say what little there is time to say upon the other three divisions of my subject. I said that there were other kinds of abundance besides wealth. Think, if you will, for a few moments, about the abundance of knowledge. How clearly we discover as we watch the lives of learned men that there is something else needed besides the knowledge of truths; there is the knowledge of how to know truths, without which a very large part of learning is a waste and failure. Do you see what I mean? Here is a scholar who has accumulated all the facts which it is possible for him to know about his special science. He knows them all. You cannot ask him for one of them that he does not instantly hold it out to you in his ready hand. Why is it that you do not feel any enrichment of mind, any enlargement of nature or character with all his wonderful acquirements? Why is it that as he has grown more and more of an encyclopedia, he has grown less and less perhaps, certainly not more and more, of a man? Why is it that with your ever-increasing wonder at what he knows, you have no increased respect for him? He has no deep convictions. He has no strengthened reason. Knowledge has come to him but wisdom has lingered; not in a technical or special meaning, but in a deep and human sense he has no faith! Or perhaps what strikes you still more is that his best and most helpful relations to his fellow-men have faded away in the thin air of his study. He has grown less human as his learning has increased. His sympathies have dried up. He values his knowledge as the botanist values his flower, — for the curiousness of its structure; not as the gardener values his flower, — for the richness of life which it contains. He prefers to press his flower in a heavy book, rather than to plant it in the warm and fructifying earth.

What can we say of such a scholar but that he does not know how to know. There is a science of knowledge, as well as a science of fossils, and a science of stars. The sacredness of all knowledge as the gift of God; the unity of all knowledge as the utterance of God; the purpose of all knowledge as the food of character in the knower and the helper of humanity through him, — these are the great departments of that science. Sometimes we see a scholar who has learned them all, and what a new vision he gives us of the glory of scholarship! Men who know less than he do not begrudge or disparage his knowledge. The light that is in him is not darkness; it lightens all his world. And oh, my friends, boys studying at college, men and women reading books and struggling so restlessly for culture, there is no way to fully win this highest knowledge, — the knowledge of how to know, — but in the service of the God of Light, who is also the God of Love, the God of Character, the God of Man. Any industrious man with a good brain and a good memory can know things if he will; only the reverent and devoted man can know how to know. Or turn your thoughts to another sort of abundance — the abundance of friendship and acquaintances. "Happy the man of many friends," we say; but hardly have we said it when we stop ourselves. So many of the men of many friends whom we have known have run to waste. So many of the popular men have been tyrannized over and ruined by their popularity. Their principles have crumbled; their selfhood has melted away; they have become mere stocks and stones for foolish men to hang garlands on, not real men, real utterances of divine life, leading their fellow-men, rebuking sins, inspiring struggles, saving souls.

Ah, yes! Not merely to make men love you and honor you, but to know how to be loved and honored without losing yourself and growing weak, — that is the problem of many of the sweetest, richest, most attractive lives; and there is only one solution for it, which blessed indeed is he who has discovered! To stiffen yourself against the praise and honor of your fellow-men, to make yourself insensible, to be a stoic and insist you will not care what men think of you, that is the base way of escape; that is as if a rich man escaped avarice by throwing his money in the sea, or as if a scholar escaped pedantry by laboriously forgetting all he knew. But if the much-beloved man can look up and demand the love of God; if, catching sight of that, he can crave it and covet it infinitely above all other love; if, laying hold of its great freedom, he can make it his, and know that he loves God, and know that God loves him, — then he is free. Then let him come back and take into a glowing heart the warmest admiration and affection of his brethren; let him walk the earth with hosts of friends, the heaven that he carries in his heart preserves him. They cannot make him conceited, for he who lives with God must be humble. They cannot drown his selfhood, for the God he loves and serves is always laying upon him his own personal duties, and bringing the soul before its own judgment-seat every day. He who knows that God loves and honors him may freely take all other love and honor, however abundant they may be, and he will get no harm. All that is weak and foolish and unworthy in them, he will cast aside; all that is worthy he will take worthily. And now I come to the last sort of abundance of which I wish to speak. It is that which belongs to the Christian experience. I speak to Christian men, — to those men who are living in the acknowledged and recognized obedience of Christ. Sad is the Christian life to which there do not come times when the soul seems to be living in great spiritual abundance. The world of the soul grows rich; doubts disappear; faith becomes easy; the assurance of God is on every side; the church overruns with helpfulness; trust is the happy instinct of the heart; peace, like a great sun-lit ocean, receives the soul and soothes its anxieties and pains, and makes it think itself almost in heaven. Oh, those are very sacred days! No other soul may know in what abundance you are living; but, in a joy too deep for songs, you live on, and no sorrow has the power to make you sorrowful. Then is the time, my friend, my Christian friend, when you do indeed need to know how to abound. For such times have their very deep and subtle dangers. Spiritual content, self-satisfaction, idleness, are waiting at the door; and at the other door the powers of reaction, — fear which will feed upon the triumph of this very hope, distrust which will be all the stronger for this earnest faith, they too are waiting for their chance. Oh, critical moment of a Christian life! Then everything depends on whether you are wise enough to know that only by duty, only by some brave, self-sacrificing service of this Christ of whose love all your soul is full, can Christ’s love come to be your permanent possession, and this peace and exaltation be made more than mere spiritual luxuries, — be made indeed a true new life. Many a Christian has failed just there. Soon the great light, unused, has faded away and left the soul in darkness. Soon peace which was not vitalized to power has decayed to pride. Something of this kind has come, I think, to whole generations, to whole periods of Christianity. But see! If you lift up your head, if you put out your hand and take your task, which certainly is waiting for you, then instantly your high emotions know their place. They turn themselves to motives. They become the necessary habits of the life. They prove their reality by what they can make you strong to do. No cloud can hide them from you, no Satan’s hand can rob you of them, for they have entered in through the open door of your will, and have become a true part of you.

If there are any of you, dear friends, to whom to-day, by the kind grace of God, peace and faith and vision are thus rich and real, I beg you to bestir yourself and make them yours forever by doing some great hard duty in their strength. That is the only way to keep them. Let no spiritual exaltation come to you without your lifting yourself up in its present power, and doing some work for God which in your weaker moments and lower moods has scared you with its difficulty. For duty is the only tabernacle within which a man can always make his home upon the transfiguration mountain. And so in each of these several departments of our life it is not enough that a man shall have attained abundance, he must also know how to abound in riches, in learning, in friendship, in spiritual privilege; there is a deeper knowledge -which alone can fasten the treasure which you have won, and make it truly yours, and draw out its best use. What a great principle that is! Under that principle, as I said, a man may even be the master of the heart and soul of some possessions whose form he does not own. I know that Jesus, the poor man who walked through rich Jerusalem and had not where to lay his head, had still the key of all that wealth. He knew how to be rich, and so He was more master of the heart of riches than any of the rich men in the great houses, whose wealth was crushing them into misers, or dissipating their powers in frivolity. And so with you and me; we cannot attain to all abundance in this one short life which is our only one, but if we can come to God and be His servants, the knowledge of how to be things which we shall never be may enter into us. In poverty we may have the blessing of riches; in enforced ignorance the blessing of knowledge; in loneliness the blessing of friendship; and in suspense and doubt the blessing of peace and rest.

Let me close all that I have said this morning with two exhortations.

There are struggling men here, — men working day and night for the precious things which make life full and rich. Go on and struggle; only remember that your struggle will be worthless, however you may get the things you seek, unless you can get not merely the bodies of those things but their souls. This was Christ’s exhortation, "Not for the meat which perisheth but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life." Be satisfied with no gain unless you can carry into its possession such a soul and spirit that it can make of you a better, a truer, and a larger man. And oh, my young friends, prosperous and happy, with life all full of hope and chance and light, go on and take the great abundance which God is offering you; only do not dare to go on into it all until first you have prayed to God that He will make you know how to abound. Pray for new hearts, large hearts which shall be worthy of your privileges, and then go on and without a fear take them all; for no lot is too rich for a soul that enters into it full of humility before God, and love for fellow-man, and a deep desire for holiness. So may you go on to all the blessings of full and happy lives.