| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 11 |
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Responsibilities encircle us about. They make solemn all of life’s relations. They charge even our lightest acts and our unconscious influence with the most weighty seriousness. We can only fulfill life’s grand meaning when we accept every responsibility with glad welcome and reverent self confidence. There is a wide difference between self conceit and that proper estimate of one’s own powers that rates them justly and fairly and is not afraid to put them to the test. That self confidence is not wrong which leads us to accept without distrust the responsibilities which God lays at our feet. Humility is not meant to make dwarfs out of giants. A man of great gifts, in order to be humble, is not required to esteem himself a poor ungifted and good for nothing man. We need to revise our ideas of humility. It we must give account to God for every gift of usefulness, and for its fullest possible exercise, we must honor our redeemed powers, appreciate their true value, and then devote them to the service of Christ and of our fellow men. We are not put into this world for idle ease, but for most earnest work. They misunderstood the meaning of Christian life who in olden days fled away to the deserts and dwelt in huts and caves and lonely cells, far from the noise and strife of the world, and they misread the divine writing also who think these days to serve Christ only in prayer and devotion, while they go not out to toil for him.
“Hark, hark! A voice amid the quiet intense!
It is thy duty waiting thee without:
Open thy door straightway and get thee hence;
Go forth into the tumult and the shout;
Work, love, with workers, lovers, all about.
Then, weary, go thou back with failing breath,
And in thy chamber make thy prayer and moan;
One day upon his bosom, all thine own,
Thou shalt lie still, embraced in holy death.”
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