The Trunk That Makes the Tree
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32.
(EDITORS NOTE: ABOVE HE QUOTES THE VERSE AS IT’S FOUND IN THE BIBLE TODAY. READ DOWN TOWARDS THE MIDDLE OF THE ARTICLE AND YOU’LL SEE HE QUOTES THE VERSE AS IT USED TO BE!)
Each one of us starts out on his journey through this world bound hand and foot by ignorance and inexperience. We have muscles but we have only the most rudimentary control over them. We have senses but we know not what their report signifies. The gradual conscious correspondence of the child’s senses and will to the truth of the world about him begins the lifelong process of setting his spirit free to move as a self-conscious agent upon the world of persons and things in which his lot is cast. But his emergence out of the dark is only partial. Illusion and error surround him; surround all of us. His senses-our senses-deliver only a vague report of the real world.
Education is the process of training sight, hearing and touch to give a correct report of what is going on. In whatever branch we study, we are learning always to come closer to the heart of truth, and to express ourselves by creating real instruments of comfort, expressing real thoughts of inspiration for the use of the pilgrim soul. He whose eye correctly reports what he sees, whose hand can move in some sort of accordance with the will that sets it going, who has lived over in his own imagination, tempered by the records of the past, what man has experienced before him, who is aware of the wonders that science unfolds, and who has shared with the world’s best souls the wisdom and humor they have recorded in books, and who can still live as a man among men—a factor in the life of his day—such a man is in the lifelong process of being educated.
But it was not primarily prudential and philosophical principles in which Jesus was interested. He had a profound meaning that attached itself to the very spring of being. There is one form of bondage on which all others depend. The bondage of the diseased will is sin. Sin refuses to let us see things as they are; it is always clamoring for things which please its morbid longings, and will not accept unpleasant facts. Sin wilfully keeps the darkened mind in error, preferring not to know rather than to pay the price of knowledge in hard work.
The spirit of man is impatient of limitations of time and space; it answers them with good roads, giant locomotives, automobiles, airplanes, wireless; trying in every way to shake off these limitations. What is the greatest hindrance? Sin. The swiftest transportation, strictest housing regulations, ideal hours of labor, all are helpless before vice, greed and lust. Sin is saddled upon man’s efforts at every point. It is only as the sublime spirit of service sets us free can we conquer it.
There is a remedy; the case is not hopeless. Jesus says, “If the Son therefore shall set you free, ye shall be free indeed.” See yourself as God sees you, recognize that you are his child : render your service, make no provision for the vagrant desire that seeks unhallowed pleasures, see life as duty, look upon all as interpreted by God, and you will find yourself walking a free, joyful path that ascends ever to the uplands where life is filled with light. If we look upon the glorious’ face of Christ, we shall be “transformed into the same image, from glory to glory.”
If religion be a function by which either God’s cause or man’s cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however much. Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another-William James.
The average Christian fails to attain the higher reaches of the Christian life because he fails in the initial stage. He never learns to be a disciple. St. Peter understood the matter, by sweet and dearly bought experience, when he spoke of “growing in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ,” as if the two things were necessarily combined and conditioned one by the other, and when he commended the building up on the foundation of faith, knowledge, and out of them all those Christian virtues in which the Master was pre-eminent.”-J. G. Greenough.
