| Show BELIEVE IN COD REV BROWN CONSIDERS THE GREAT QUESTION he asks does it spring from the surface or from the deeps of human life what does it mean to believe in god Is it a little thing or Is it a great thing to have and to express such a faith does it spring from the surface or from the deeps of human alfo Is it like ripples which the wind makes on the surface of the water or Is it like the great lift of the tide which neither wind nor storm can create or dispel can a belief in god be expressed in wards or songs or prayers or architecture in vestments or creeds or bables are any of these symbols which are often associated with that belief adequate to iho confession of it can I 1 express the tact of my belief in god if it is a fact by any fixed symbol in any stated creed through any established rite in any song or church or sect for our own sakes and for the sake of our children and all whom wo love for the sake of mankind we can be interested in nothing so deeply or earnestly as in finding outly we can what this confession means and how it may really be expressed call up before your minds another picture the picture let us say of men and women who have made discovery of that wondrous thing we call love here is as universal a fact or experience as religion the faces of this multitude of people who in church or temple or cathedral or are saying 1 I believe in god are not more luminous their eyes do not shine with a brighten luster their souls do not feel the thrill of a greater joy than that which glows in the faces and shines in the eyes and stirs tho souls of these men and women who have learned for the first almo to say 1 I love far be it from me to take from this picture one ray of light one tint of beauty one touch of truth life knows no relationship into which more 01 beauty or sacredness may come none upon which more solemn issues depend but neither those first pledges of undying love nor the solemnity of a religious ceremony consummating marriage can bo the adequate symbols of this supreme human an ever increasing percentages of divorces to aay nothing of the uncounted bligh tings of every cherished hope 0 dream in marriage that are borne in silence to the grave testify to the fact that something more than the warmest words of affection are necessary to prove the existence of a real and enduring love by a changeless law of our being wo can love only that which is lovable no matter what wo promise we can give the wealth of our devotion to that only which is capable of receiving it and is worthy of it by as unvarying law we have found god and gained a real faith only when wo have found that which call forth in us all the possibilities of service and sacrifice no words no gifts of material things or possessions can be the measure or confession of human love much less the burning words of adolescence or temporary of mind only a life of fidelity honor truth method womanhood only a life which blossoms under the shine of that lovo into all generous thought and gracious service can prove its verity so neither temple nor altar nor rite nor song nor prayer nor confession can evidence a real belief in god god dwells in no temple no form of architecture no book no song no emotion god dwells supremely in life in struggle in the process af unfolding toward the over higher achievements of moral character it Is not by virtue of any faith in god that men and women while away their days on the earth utterly oblivious of the great soul making man inspiring tasks that are beckoning the human out of the animal it is not by virtue of any belief in god that men make their existence one long game using the instruments of human service as playthings tp satisfy a mere craving for new sensations ic Is not by virtue of their faith in god that men and women regard the world as a mere prize to be won a personal ascendancy to bo gained and it Is the varnest vainest folly to suppose that you and bican confess our belief in god in ono place only on one day in the only in one sort of building only belief in god all the day s of all the years ones life may measure are alone sufficient to compass such a confession where shall we find the men and women who are really and effectually proving their belief in god there are such men and women as there always have been were it not so faith ana hope and love and fidelity would perish from the earth AU over the earth today are such men and women to be found and whatever their creed or lack of creed they are beaconing the world toward better things they are the exemplars of religion let me tell you who they are and how they are proving such belief in god let me tell you of such a belief in god as the people of wales did not find in any religious revival such confession of faith as this worshipping wor shipping world Is not making and cannot make in all its temples and churches sixty four years ago a baby girl came into the home of a russian nobleman it was no more eventful than hundreds of other births this child came into existence within the ati mo sphere of what Is called religion to 0 Is not a nation in christendom with a larger percentage of worship pers than russia its church has an unbroken lineage back to the apostles and jesus himself and no class in russia Is more loyal to the forms and rites of the church than the nobility As this girl grew to womanhood and saw what thousands of her fellow countrymen ad tho same chance to see the conditions in which millions of peasants lived her brothers and sisters according to the teaching of him whom the religion of russia declares to be the supreme embodiment of god himself she found what she had not been able to find anywhere in the religion of her country these brothers and sisters were missing all that makes life worth living theirs was the existence of ill treated beasts their lot was poverty falth ignorance slavery the divine promise and prophecy stamped unmistakably upon the possibilities and aspirations of every human soul were being denied in the life to which those peasants doomed and the church of russia without one dissenting voice was willing these peasants should remain forever in that condition consciously or unconsciously this girl turned her back on all that her fellows called or regarded as religion but she turned her face toward god she rejected all that her countrymen regarded as the symbols of religion churches altars rites prayers priesthood everything but she found what was infinitely better she found the reality which those symbols have lost all power to express she began to do gods work if there be a god she entered upon a service which alone can make it possible for belief in a god to survive in that desolate empire she devoted herself to the task of awak ing the human in that mass of stolid ignorant peasants she started 1 school immediately she found the ichols power of the russian government arrayed against her what should she i do what dp you think a woman of russia who yh ad any belief in god would do how would such a person find expression for such a belief bould the churches of russia afford any chance alkali for expressing that berfet to believe in a god for that woman or any other was not to say some formula to sing some hymn to offer some prayer to submit to some rite t ancient sacrament or even dilate upon the beauties and sublimate nature the one sacrament possible to her or any of her brothers or sisters lay in precisely the course seq took in accepting a plain as a foundation stone upon which to build the structure of her alf abe fact of her intimate vital ln jip to that vast multitude of ignorant depraved abandoned peasants and then devoting herself and all she had to their liberation civil mental moral spiritual and what she did and she raid the price the same price that every man and women has to pay in order to possess so divine a thing as the sense of god she had married a young landowner land owner but when it became evident that a man or woman who would prove the possessions of a belief in god could do so only at the cost of opposition to the government and consequent danger of arrest imprisonment and exile her husband quailed qu ailed he had no such faith as that no such belief in god had any place in his mind but she had not taken up her task as a fad it was her faith her religion it alono made life worth living it transcended every other tie and because of that she left her husband and joined the ranks 0 those to whom this sublime faith in human brotherhood and democracy hail also come and then these men and women who had accepted as a fact that truth which millions today profess in song and prayer and sacraments and words became at once nameless homeless hunted wanderers tracked by government spies and with the certain prospect of imprisonment and exile they had not long to wait two hundred and ninety three of them were arrested at one time this woman among the number so vile are the prisons and so awful the conditions prescribed that before they were oven brought to trial one hundred of them haj either died or gone insane the rest sentenced to siberia this young woman the daughter of a nobleman was sentenced to five years hard labor in siberian mines and after that exile for life in that frozen country the cruelties cruel ties of that life are beyond description only a handful can hope to survive and yet what is the one thought by which those exiles are possessed the one thing that makes their lot tolerable Is it regret for their course Is it a longing for the ease and security which they have forfeited not at all their one hope la to get back to russia to resume the work from which they were driven after twentythree years of imprisonment and eulle this woman escaped and returned to russia only to bogin at once the work she had left and this woman madame Is now in a russian prison waiting for a trial which may come too lato to save her from the common fate which dungeons mete out her story is not atall at all an exceptional one among the revolutionists of russia there are hundreds who are doing the same thing and it illustrates clearly what belief in a god menus the men and women who are doing ahat sho is doing in russia are the believers of that empire the rest arc no matter how numerous or ancient their religious symbols these men and women who arc taking their lives in their hands and counting them of worth only as they can help to strike the fetters of physical aid mental slavery from tho lives of those peasant millions aro in god and they alone are entitled to that description for ahey alone be allevo in brotherhood they alone be hove that this world Is a family they alone accept simply and utterly the ethics of that fact they therefore alone believe in a divine fatherhood no matter what their opinions of any theology may be it is easy to sing songs easy to perform the rites of any church easy to experience emotions of wonder and awe and sublimity in the presence of the beautiful or the sublime in nature easy to repeat even that tre tenuous prayer of jeans A child can do some ot these things an imbecile can do them a phonograph a man or woman whose life is barren and morally rotten can do all chese things can perform every sacrament our churches prescribe can do all that they call sacramental but a man or woman of that sort cannot and will not 0 o what those russian revolutionists are doing it takes faith to do that it requires a deep seated be in god such a belief as no words are adequate to expresses to do that the truth is millions of men and women arc entirely mistaking the symbols of religion and are attempting to express this deepest demand of our life this noblest expression of it in ways which have nothing to do with a real belief in god no form of words of any kind can express such a belief no form of architecture can symbolize it wo express our belief in god by what we do with our lives by our relation to this human world and in no other way probably no words better suggest the idea of belief in a god than those which stand at the end of the confession of faith 1 believe in the progress of mankind onward and upward forever but such words are meaningless on the lips of any man who is not devoting himself to exactly that end who Is not in the thick of every human struggle onward and upward who Is willing or consents that great masses of people shall bo treated as mere refuse and wreckage that la your faith and alno only as wo actually put ourselves into whatever movement Is on foot for making the life of men richer and freer and nobler than it is today it Is not by word of any sort but by deed not by profession or confession fes sion but by actual striving after some truth or condition or opportunity of alfe for all which we do not now possess but all that Is most sacred in our natures demands that we give evidence of our belief in god this world Is one family we say very well then they who are acting upon that principle are the real believers in it god Is the father of all wo have been saying for all these centuries very well then they who are acting as it that wore true and aiming at the realization of human brotherhood are the representatives of religion not they who are content with things as they are men and women are the sons and daughters of god say the religious world very well alien we arc not content and cannot be that any human being any son or daughter of god should be a beast of burden there arc all the possibilities of spring and summer of balmy air and budding flowers and singing birds and growing crops in tho earth and tho sunshine but these possibilities will become realities realties real ties only as our earth reaches such a point in its orbit that the sunshine shall begin to fall more directly upon this part of its surface there are all the possibilities of divine and joyous life in the least and lowest of these human creatures our brothers and sisters but there ia no earth movement outside the control and direction of human life itself the collective human life that will change these possibilities into realities those conditions of social soil and moral sunshine wa men and women must our ourselves fix such an orbit for this human life that no soul shall miss the chance of its spring and summer Us time of ikpe and fruition that is what these heroic souls of russia are doing that Is what every heroic soul in all the ages has striven to dp and that is the task in which alone we men and women can prove ourselves believers in a god bees laxative cough syrup for coughs colds croup and whooping cough grows in favor daily mothers should keep it on hand for children it is prompt relief to croup it Is gently laxative delving the poison and phlegm from the system it gives immediate relief guaranteed sold by geo F cave drug store cor st and washington ave |
