THE PRICE OF THE BEST

BACCALAUREATE SERMON, PREACHED BY THE REVEREND GAINS GLENN ATKINS, D.D. 1906, OF DETROIT; SUNDAY, JUNE 23, 1907

Text-—" Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchantman seeking goodly pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it." Matthew 13: 45 and 46.

Here, Jesus Christ comes down into the market place and stands alongside men in their buying and their selling. He adds the bid of the Kingdom to all the other competing forces which bid for life. He says to the shrewd, the eager, the insatiable, "Come, let me define your values; come, let me suggest your profits; come let me tell you that the kingdom of God is, after all, the thing of supremest worth, and that all the processes of investment and re-investment out of which your markets are woven shall find their perfect fulfillment as you seek the Kingdom of God."

"For the Kingdom of God is as a merchant seeking goodly pearls, who, when he hath found one pearl of great price, selleth all that he hath and buyeth that.''

In all this the Master is making a specific application of one of his most constant and consistent methods. Jesus Christ always sought to avail himself of the great compelling impulses of life. He did not come to discharge the motives by which men are strongly moved, he came to enlist them. He knew that a motiveless life is impossible; he knew that desire is implicit power; he knew that want is the prophesy of capacity; he knew that all the great motives by which men are moved in the conduct of living are implanted of God and have divine value; he knew that even in the saddest failures of life, the fault is not so much in the motive as in the misdirection of motive; he knew that if He were master of the desires and aspirations and eagernesses of men, he would be master of men themselves. He sought constantly, therefore, to reach and control the major motives of human action.

The instinct to which he here appeals, the instinct for investment, is, beyond all question, one of the great controlling and compelling forces of life. The man who thus offered the kingdom of God as the permanent opportunity of a supremely safe and profitable investment, knew His own people, and knew the human heart. If anyone could come into your presence this morning and indicate with the utmost assurance of success, safe and profitable investments, he would immediately command your undivided attention. Every one of you would be following him in thought today; every one of you would follow in action tomorrow, for the question of investment is as great as it is manysided, and as many-sided as it is great.

The question of the investment of one's' money is a very considerable question. The difference between financial failure and financial success is as likely to lie right here as anywhere else.

The whole secret of money making does not lie in investment, but a very considerable part of the secret of money making does lie in investment. There is a sense in which a man having once invested his fortune, is able to avail himself of all the co-operative forces of his fellows. There is a sense in which an investment means the compelling of all the social forces which are about you, to serve you. Directly a man has invested his money in the real estate of any city, that whole city begins to work for him. There is no factory built, nor home constructed, nor industry contemplated, nor improvement projected, nor touch of beauty, order, or power sought or achieved, which does not, in some way, serve and enrich him.

It has been said, and very wisely and discriminatingly said, that one's investments become a kind of harness, by which one fastens the whole fortune of the State to his own individual fortune. The men who invest in the fundamentals of life are enriched by the increase of society. There are men who invest in land and grow wealthy with the growth of the cities. There are men who invest in the limited stores of raw material, at whose feet the whole industrial life of the future begins even now to wait in supplication. The very magic of for tunes like Harriman's; fortunes of the order of Melchesedek, vast, menacing and half-inexplicable, is the magic of incessant investment and re-investment.

Men of this stamp have the shrewdest sagacity for the movements in the market. Its advances and retreats are alike the ministers of their enrichment. They are better served by an inconstant than a constant market. The restless movement of industrial forces, the rise and fall of values, are the forges in which their fortunes are welded out of countless particles, the hammers by which their possessions are wrought compact together.

But there are things of mightier concern than the investment of what one owns. The greatest investment in the world is the investment of what one is. A man is worth more than all that which he possesses. Life itself is the most valuable asset in the universe of God. When Jesus Christ, the master of spiritual values, undertakes to tell a man how much he is worth, he says, in substance, that if you put the worth of a human soul against the whole world, the soul outweighs the universe.

You shall get some sense of the Immense worth of life if you try to understand what it has cost. Here we are directly debtors to the whole conception of evolution which has so immensely broadened our horizon, and deepened our sense of that endless endeavor of which human life is the crown and manifestation. Who shall appraise the processes of creation ? Who shall translate into terms of intelligible value the travail into ages ? Who shall coin the aspiration of the spirit, dumbly struggling upward through its flesh? Who shall mint the blood by which the dust of the battlefields of humanity has been dyed red in the agony of humanity's battles? Who shall compute the worth of sacrifice ? Who shall take the long travail of history, the weary unfolding of the years, the vast outgoings of the spirit, the resultant of which is life as we know and love it, and say what all this is worth? And we are worth just so much as this, because we. have cost it all.

Against what will you compute the liberty of the citizen, the vision of the scholar, and all that integrity and splendor of social life into which, as the dower of the centuries, we are brokenly beginning to come? How shall you easily estimate the value of men, trained as you have been in institutions which have gathered and incarnated for a century the sacrificial endowment of ministering friends, who have been taught by teachers, themselves the redaction of the scholarship of the ages, and who have come as to a birthright into all that inheritance of sound learning and liberty of thought, which has, more than once, cost a martyr's agony or a scholar's life. More widely and definitely still, who shall compute the love of God, or estimate the sacrifice of Christ? In terms of what value shall we state the cross ? But each man's soul has cost all of that.

Know the value of life, not only by what it has cost, but by what potentialities it holds. Who shall estimate the worth of the outgoing of a single personality? What was Saul of Tarsus worth, scarred and broken and bent? He was worth the very emancipation of the Christian faith, the vast extension of the possibilities of Christian discipleship, the foundations of Christian theology, the spiritualization of two continents. How much was Augustine worth, scourged of 'his own clay, crucified of his own sins? Just as much as the restatement of great practical reaches of conduct and spiritual imperative has been worth to the church; just as much as it has been worth to Latin and western Europe to be broken of self-conceit and to. be thrown back upon the saving grace of God. How much was St. Bernard worth, ascetic, intense, imperious? He was worth just as much as the heroic endeavor of the crusades was worth to Europe and to Asia. How much was Savaranola worth, mystic, monk, orator, martyr? He was worth just as much as the inspiration of all heroic souls, hold, ing fast to hopeless causes by the example of the saint and the hero, has been worth to the children of men. What was Cromwell worth, awkward and inarticulate English farmer? He was worth the subjugation of the inveracious Divine Right of Kings, and the exaltation of the wholly veracious Divine Right of the sons of God. Here is Cavour, what shall he be worth? United Italy! Here is Abraham Lincoln, ungainly, awkward, and untaught. Who shall say how much Abraham Lincoln would be worth ? He will be worth the emancipation of a downtrodden people; he will be worth the unity of a nation ; he will be worth the triumph of a holy cause; he will be worth the vindication of democracy. Here is Pasteur, the scientist, how much is he worth? He is worth the redemption of great industries; the wholesome clarification of unwholesome sides of physical life, and the conquest of the dread shadow of madness itself.

All these are, I grant you, exceptional cases, but they simply lift into dramatic light the-unexceptional and the permanent. When one estimates the value of life by what it has cost, by its possibilities, by its indwelling power, by its unbroken continuity, then one stands to declare that the master question for every man is the question of the investment of himself.

For we are committed to an hundred forms of self investment. About that we have no choice. You invested yes- terday ; you could not help it. No will of yours could stop the procession of the hours. You invested every moment of it from dawn until dark. You invested your strength, it went somewhere. You invested your thoughts, you could not hold them back. You invested your love; it found outside your life some lodgement. You have always been investing the claims and opportunities of life, and if God gives you grace and years, you will be investing them still. You will be selling time and buying life. You will be selling strength and buying realization. You will be selling thought and buying comprehension. You will be selling love and buying fellowship. You will be selling endeavor and buying pleasure.

We cannot escape the exchange, but we may choose our goods. Sometimes we drive shameful bargains. We stand at the booths of Vanity Fair and exchange the highest for the lowest. We squander strength in prodigality of debauch, and pay for a moment's pleasure with a lifetime's,degradation. We spend possibility in the caprice of appetite, and gather ashes at the end of life. We spend ourselves in caprice and aimlessness. The days go past and we are still poor.

We invest ourselves in the conduct of great businesses. I went, a while ago, into the storage vaults beneath the old Stock Exchange in New York City, while a friend of mine piled my arms full of his securities, and said, "there are forty years of my life in your hands." Pray God, that was not so. Pray God that no forty years of any man's life go into any sort of thing which another man can hold in his arms. One hopes rather that that man had builded better than he knew, he had added to the Commonwealth,and that he himself and his whole fellowship were the better for his endeavor. If that were not so, he is poor indeed.

Men invest themselves in great causes. When Wendell Phillips was a struggling lawyer in Boston, and the clients did not come, he said, I will try this for a little longer, and then, if there is no return, I shall ally myself to a cause. We all know the cause to which Wendell Phillips lent the splendid reinforcement of his personality, and how that speech of his, like fire, subdued and restrained, had its immense and compelling part in the creation of all that moral instinct, that moral passion, which presently swept the stain of slavery from the life of our nation. So, one may call the roll of history, cause after cause, and find its final glory and fulfillment in the lives of men who have invested themselves in causes.

Men invest themselves in the sanctities and holinesses of life, and walk in the fellowship of the saints. Men invest themselves in the cause of truth, and walk in the fellowship of scholars. Men invest themselves in the causes of sacrifice and walk in the fellowship of the martyrs. And all these have found themselves, because wisely they did invest themselves.

But Jesus Christ, the master of values, comes to us who are compelled, whether or not, to the investment of life, to us men and women holding in ourselves the master values of the universe, to us men and women investing sometimes foolishly, and sometimes, at the best, with broken vision, commending and exalting the Kingdom of God as the lasting investment of human life. Sell all that you have and invest yourself and the entirety of your lives in that. He asks first that we invest the entirety of our lives in his kingdom. We do not find it too easy to do that. We are willing to invest part of our strength, part of our capacity, part of our loyalty, part of our possibility in the kingdom, but, when the King asks for the whole of us, we stand reluctant and hesitant, and too many of us turn back. We are coming now to the central contention of this morning's service. The thing which I am trying to urge is that the investment of one's life is the. master concern of life, that the kingdom of God is the supreme opportunity for self-investment, and that we have no right to offer to the kingdom of God, that is, to the great causes of unselfishness, righteousness, and of brotherhood, anything else than the uncalculated and sacrificial entirety of our lives. We have no right to hesitate when we.are called upon to pay the price of the best. The price of the best is the entire consecration of the entire possibility of our lives to the cause of the best, and if we are going lame any. where or anyhow in the conduct of the business of. living, whether in the solitude of our own souls, the populous fellowship of great cities, or the inclusive fellowship of the State, it is because we are not willing to pay the price of the best. We conceive ourselves to be living in a time of problems, the burden and clamor of their statement fills our ears. I have no mind to tabulate them. They are familiar, commonplace and sordid, because they reduce . themselves to this ultimate fact in the conduct of life; we are trying to get the best without paying for it. .We are demanding redeemed cities for men who will not pay in terms of sacrificial citizenship, the price of redeemed cities. We are demanding cleansed industries for the sake of men who will not pay the price of honesty and fair dealing, and inherent justice, which cleansed industries always have and always will cost. We are demanding peace for States which will not pay, even in the minutest abatement of national greed, the price of peace. We are trying to drive 'sharp bargains with God, and when he refuses our clamor, our reproach reaches towards his very stars. The day of our redemption will begin to dawn when we are willing to say, "I will pay the price of the best," and having found the pearl of great price will go and sell all that we have and buy it.

The price of the best is always great. The best always demands all that man has, and all that he is. It is never content with anything less than that. We are always losing what we should like to keep. There are a good many of us here who would like, out of the restlessness and weariness of life, to go back and be boys again; but we were compelled to give all that up. Manhood came along and said, up want everything that you are, and I want everything that you have. Give up the. shelter of your father's home. Give up your open and unstained and eager vision of an untried world. Give it all up and take upon yourself the sense of burden and restraintand you gave it all up. You had no choice. You took the sterner strife, the added sense of weariness, anxious days, and sleepless nights. You had your content of belief, and something came along and took from you the serene certitudes of faith, and gave you instead, spiritual struggle and travail.

You had the peace of an unbroken home, and the shadows came to darken it and to take into their depths pres. ences for whose return you ceaselessly hunger. Your life has always been a series of movements in which the things that were good to you were taken away, and something else given in their stead. If the unfolding of your life has been an answering touch to the providences of God, I tell you that the things which you have been getting are always better than the things which have been taken way. The best, which has'demanded all, has been always worth its price. Young manhood is better than youth, and mature manhood holds a grace and power which young manhood does not possess. The sense of responsibility and struggle by which we become compact of our kind and allied to the travail of the human spirit is better than ease and irresponsibility. The shock of battle is better than the dustless, smokeless days of peace. For one who walks in the fellowship of God, by the deepening of life and the discipline of life, gained at whatever cost of lesser goods, He has His own divine compensation. It is God teaching us how to live. It is better to go through the . travail of searching after faith, into a new certainty of faith which is set upon a rock, than to wait without question and with out doubt, in that which one does not half believe. God never takes anything away but he gives something better in the stead of it. No man has ever won fulfillment or victory who has not paid the whole compass of his power. No man has ever painted a picture which has become permanently a part of the imperishable possessions of humanity, who did not color it with his life's blood. No man ever begot music which echoes with undying harmony, who did not create it out of the deeper harmony of his own soul, learning in the vibrant echoes of life, the pain and struggle and meaning of music. When you cross the Brooklyn bridge, you wonder at the glory of its span, the marvel of its achievement, and then read upon its bronze tablets set on one of its great piers, that it is the price of a man's life. There has been no bridge between the past and the future;no uniting of that which has been separated; no great constructive unification of the broken fragments of human life, which has not cost the lives of men.

But it is all divinely worth while. Nothing is worth while in this world but the best. And more than that, as one seeks the best, nothing is lost, nothing is taken away. It is only absorption. The merchant who sold all that he had to hold one perfect jewel in his grasp was not impoverished, he was enriched. We carry with us through the unfolding years the enduring values of every aspect of life. We have not lost the peace and serene memory of boyhood, or the eagerness and searching vision of young manhood, or the confidence of noon, or the long gathering peace of the afternoon shadows. It belongs to every man who has lived through the day and will belong to him forever. God drives no hard bargains. When He offers the best, he gives us back not only His treasure, but our own treasures interwrought and transformed.

Now, all this becomes concrete and imperative in our relation to the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is God's best, his best within, and his best without. We have no choice, if we are to be at all wise or effectual in our living, but to take all that we are and all we hope to be and invest it in the kingdom. lam sure we would not hesitate to do that if only some one would rightly translate the quality and the value of the kingdom into intelligible terms of value which we could understand. When once we have come to see clearly the peace and inspiration of its discipleship, the integrity of its endeavor, the sweep of its compass, the lift of its possibilities, the joy and splendor of its struggle, the compensations of its indwelling; if some Michael Angelo of the spirit would carve it, or some Raphael paint it, or some Beethoven sing it, until its spendor flamed before us, until we saw that here is the only right end of life, the only right definition of brotherhood, the only entirely adequate end of search, the only compensating pursuit, then we would gladly enough lay upon its altars, and dedicate to its loyalties the entirety of our lives. When we have done that we shall solve our problems. Honesty is always attainable for men who are willing to pay what it costs to be honest. Justice is not a fugitive ideal for men who are willing to be just. Brotherhood will not long escape men who really desire to be brothers; and peace will come like the glory of the morning to men who are seeking peace. Our discords will be subdued by God's abiding harmonies when we are willing to pay the price of harmony. Life will unfold its heart of mystery and its divine compensations to the man who will accept life upon God's terms. The best is ours if we will pay its price, and its price is only the entirety of consecration and sacrifice of subordination, a price so great that the saints and the martyrs and the heroes can do no more than pay it; a price so simple that' every one of us holds its coin in our hearts this morning.

Young gentlemen of the graduating class, it is with the utmost hesitation that I take upon myself this conclusion of the task which it has been my joy thus to render you. I know what presence you miss, and what words unspoken you desire. An address to a graduating class gains its supremest value, its carrying power, from the associations and the services of the academic year.

No outsider can possibly cross those frontiers which are created by alien conditions, but I may possibly speak to you as a comrade, as a man who has a little further ventured- into the fuller and more complex imperative of life, and, by a little, preceded you. The word I want to bring to you is that there is but one condition upon which life is worth living, the condition, that is, that you seek the best; find its definition of values in the teaching of Jesus Christ, and pay its price. If you are willing to do that life is golden beyond your dreams, and its opportunities splendid beyond your expectations. The world is waiting for you, if you are willing to do that. The whole complex of life is shouting aloud for the man with the vision of the best in his mind, the love of the best in his heart, the determination of the best in his will, the consecration of the best in his soul. In this temper you shall enter no fellowships which do not eagerly await you, and join no causes which shall not be glorified by your reinforcement.