| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 10 |
Page 5 |
There is a story of a good woman who said she found a great deal of comfort in the doctrine of total depravity. We seem to find a great deal of comfort in this teaching, that every one has faults and failings. It makes a fine, broad cloak which covers many shortcomings. The result is in too many cases that we live on altogether too low a plane. As good orthodox Christians we have the privilege of denying that perfection is possible, and we self indulgently make altogether too little effort to reach the unattainable goal.
We are too tolerant of our own failures and sins. We are not so tolerant of the failings and sins of others. We hold our neighbors to a very rigid account. We make small allowance for their infirmities and for the sharpness of their temptations. We set a high standard for them and expect them to reach it. It would be more Christ like if we would reverse this course, showing charity to others in their weakness and failure, and being intolerant of fault and shortcomings in ourselves. No discovered sin should ever be allowed to remain for an hour; to give it hospitality is disloyalty to Christ and to truth. We should keep before us continually the highest ideal, the perfect life of Christ himself, that in the beauty and whiteness of his faultless character we may ever detect the flaws in ourselves and be stimulated toward whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely.
Thus, too, our standard will ever be advancing, so that what satisfies us today will not satisfy us a year hence. We shall see, each new day, something hitherto tolerated, perhaps loved and cherished, which must be given up and left out. St. Paul gives us certain lists of traits, qualities, and habits belonging to the “old man,” which he exhorts us to put off in the culture of the new life. Browning demands,
“Get you behind the man I am now, you man that I used to be.”
A true life ever reaches upward and strives toward better things. It leaves behind the things that are imperfect as it presses toward perfection. It puts away childish things as it grows toward manhood. It leaves undone the things that are not right or beautiful, the things that are not essential, and gives all its energy to the attaining and achieving of the things that are excellent, the things that belong to the imperishable and eternal life.
Page 5
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