have to guard their tongues, as this psalmist says. Men who blurt out whatever they think under all conditions, no matter who is about, like to call themselves honest and outspoken; they miss the adjectives; they are foolish and uncontrolled. Half the meaning of anything we ever say is in the hearing of it. There are judgments which will be understood in one group which will be wholly misunderstood in another. Older people cannot always say all that is in their minds when certain younger ones are around, without doing a damage to the social group for which they are responsible. We have to learn to care more for our group than for the sound of our own voices. Fourth Week, Sixth Day Jehovah is my portion: I have said that I would observe thy words. And turned my feet unto thy testimonies. To observe thy commandments. ... I am a companion of all them that fear thee, The earth, O Jehovah, is full of thy lovingkindness: -Psalm 119:57-60, 63, 64. The resolution to be one's best self is generally made in a measure of solitude. We face a situation and determine that our duty is thus and so. Then we brace ourselves to take our stand even if we have to do it alone, and many times we have reason to think we will be alone in it. One of our pleasantest surprises is finding that other people are getting ready to do the same thing or have already done it. Sometimes they are merely waiting for a leader, sometimes they have already taken their stand quietly. You have noticed how often in a discussion a motion seems suddenly to crystallize a wholly unsuspected sentiment in a group. You made the motion feeling that it would be defeated at once, but that you must do at least that much to square yourself with your conscience, and you found that most of the group were thinking the same way, but no one had made the start. Elijah in the desert thought he was the only man left for God in Israel, but he was happily surprised when he learned of a good number like himself whose presence he had not suspected, and also learned of a prophet who would be ready to carry on the enterprise after he himself was dead. Trying to help our group, we are not alone, but companions to all who are trying to do the same thing. Fourth Week, Seventh Day Our American Revised Bibles give the 15th psalm a happy title: Description of a Citizen of Zion. It is an account of the Man who Ought to Be. Jehovah, who shall sojourn in thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell in thy holy hill? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, And speaketh truth in his heart; He that slandereth not with his tongue, Nor doeth evil to his friend, Nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbor; In whose eyes a reprobate is despised, But who honoreth them that fear Jehovah; He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not; He that doeth these things shall never be moved. -Psalm 15. Study the eleven elements of character in this citizen of God's world and see that they are all social. They have to do with the way in which he gets along with his fellows. To be sure, they are not surface matters. Character is an inner matter. Truthful words carry us a long way, but they break down if they are not from the heart. Until we learn to think truthfully, we are not safe in speaking truthfully. We trip up soon or late. Nor are these traits negative alone. Reprobates cannot be let alone. Good men cannot get away from despising them. The soft nature that tries to regard all men alike is poor stuff for making a social order. Nor are they easy traits. It costs to be consistent. Finding ourselves bound in honor to personal sacrifice is not a pleas ant experience, but it gives no excuse for failing the group which has depended on us. The group is more than the self, and when it gains, the self asks no more. That is high doctrine, but the coming society will be built on it. COMMENT FOR THE WEEK For weal or for woe we are in social groups and we cannot get out of them. We leave one group only to go to another. It may be our duty to change or it may be our duty to abide where we are. But we are always abnormal and a bit absurd when we pretend to get along without a group. The writers of the psalms seem never to be out of sight of their relation to a social group. Some of their hardest experiences came from it. In the group were men who loved to do them mischief, selfish men, careless, indifferent to the things that meant most to themselves, and brighter in many cases than themselves. They actually did get on with their evil plans. One of the problems of the psalmists was to find and keep the right attitude toward the group and these men. They were not of the sort that could let purely personal feelings determine their attitude. As moral beings in a moral world they could not pretend that moral differences need not be considered. They knew they had to be considered in the long run and that God in the nature of things puts them first. Loving bad men is entirely feasible and under the teaching of Christ we have learned it as a duty. But it does not blind honest men to the fact that badness is doomed and the social order that puts up with it is doomed also. Most of us would hardly dare to voice the attitude toward evil men that is expressed in some of the psalms, such as the 35th, 69th, 109th, and occasional verses in others, because it would involve personal antagonism in our own hearts.. But we would be vastly stronger as members of our social group if we could be as deeply stirred over moral conditions. as those psalms indicate. What we are afraid of is that we may be resenting mere personal differences between ourselves. and other men who may be as good as we are, and whose evil we have no right to presume. If we could keep the moral issue clear, there are times when the psalms which we have just listed are as logical as the moral law. As Dr. Hitchcock said: "When a thoroughly bad man stands revealed, only lightning is logical." These psalms are lightning, but most of us are safer with penny candles. I But it is not healthy-minded to think of the group as filled with evil. It is the only place where good has its chance. No man comes to his best self except in the social group. There are in the psalms plenty of instances of the solitary feeling, but it is always felt to be abnormal. The kind of character that grows in solitude or that demands persistent solitude for its exercise is not worth much in life. What God thinks of monasticism is shown by the abnormal men monastics turn out to be. They are "good," no doubt, but the men Christianity means to make must be good-for something. These men of the psalms count themselves part of their social group; they leave it with pain, they stand against it with regret, they stand for it with joy. In the broad sense, while no man is forced to the level of his group, yet we rise or fall together. We can be better or worse than the group to which we belong, but our betterness or our worseness will be sure to affect the level of the whole group in some degree. Even Jesus, who seemed miles above the moral level around him, set out from the very first to pull up toward his own level a small group of twelve, with others less formally included, and through them began immediately to affect the general level. No office man ever stood up decently and manfully for the thing that is right without changing the level of the office in some measure. No man ever went the pace of evil in a college, unresisted by the student forces, without lowering the general level. Conscious resistance can, of course, isolate one from the general movement for a time. Think out why it is that in times of religious revival some people seem all the more inclined to the wrong thing; can you understand that in your own life? On the other hand, how is it that when the moral level of a village is peculiarly low an occasional fine character appears and is steadily maintained? Is that generally the case, however? Does it not hold true that a college or a village rises or falls together? It is this close interweaving of interests that brings out the unselfish vein in us all. We learn to pray God to visit us with his salvation (106:1-5), not for our own sakes alone, but because we are eager to see the group share the blessing. We want it for ourselves, but as members of a group. Many a man has set himself to build up the character of the college of which he is part, not for his own sake, but because of other students who will be cheered by it. When a man from a small college won a graduate fellowship, he declared that he valued it less for his own sake than for the sake of the little college and the fellows who were there getting their education, and who would be reassured as to the value of the training they were getting. Many a man has been kept from courses of conduct because the traditions of his college are against them. He feels bound in the same bundle of life with the fellows who are gone. And every generation of students ought to give careful thought before they change college traditions, specially those that have entered into the fiber of the institution. Its play traditions may have little value; its trick traditions may have less; but its real educational traditions, of honesty and reliability, of squareness and steadiness, are among its assets of which no generation of students can deprive it without doing despite to the hard labor by which such traditions are always built up in the first place. They have come into the inheritance and they are not to trifle with it. So David Livingstone remembered his father's telling him as a lad that the Livingstone family had never been rich or famous, but it had always been honest; there had never been a liar in it, so far as the records were known. If any of the new generation became liars or dishonest they would be betraying the generations that had gone before them. we become companions of those that fear God in all generations (119:63) and we learn the meaning of dwelling together with our fellows in unity (133) by which blessing flows down from the higher levels to the lower ones, as dew descends from higher Hermon to lower Zion in Palestine. Being so fully part of the social group, we keep our wide interest in men. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe wanted Charles Sumner to see and know Edwin Booth. When she proposed a meeting, however, Sumner replied: "I don't know that I should care to meet him. I have outlived my interest in individuals." In her diary, Mrs. Howe adds, “Fortunately, God Almighty had not, by last accounts, got so far." Most |