on, indecision is one of the things
that in his judgement will keep a man outside the Kingdom of God,
that make him unfit for it. The matter deserves more study than we
commonly give it. You must have a righteousness, he says, which
exceeds the righteousness of the Pharisees (Matt. 5:20)--and the
Pharisees were professionals in righteousness. His tests of
discipleship illumine his ideal of character--Theocentric
thinking--negation of self--the thought-out life. He will have his
disciples count the cost, reckon their forces, calculate quietly the
risks before them--right up to the cross (Luke 14:27-33)--like John
Bunyan in Bedford Gaol, where he thought things out to the pillory
and thence to the gallows, so that, if it came to the gallows, he
should be ready, as he says, to leap off the ladder blindfold into
eternity. That is the energy of mind that Jesus asks of men, that he
admires in men.

On the other side, he is always against the life of drift, the
half-thought-out life. There they were, he says, in the days of
Noah, eating and drinking, marrying, dreaming--and the floods came
and destroyed them (Luke 17:27). So ran the old familiar story, and,
says Jesus, it is always true; men will drift and dream for ever,
heedless of fact, heedless of God--and then ruin, life gone, the
soul lost, the Son of Man come, and "you yourselves thrust out"
(Luke 13:28, with Matt. 25:10-13). It is quite striking with what a
variety of impressive pictures Jesus drives home his lesson. There
is the person who everlastingly says and does not do (Matt.
23:3)--who promises to work and does not work (Matt. 21:28)--who
receives a new idea with enthusiasm, but has not depth enough of
nature for it to root itself (Mark 4:6)--who builds on sand, the
"Mr. Anything" of Bunyan's allegory; nor these alone, for Jesus is
as plain on the unpunctual (Luke 13:25), the easy-going (Luke
12:47), the sort that compromises, that tries to serve God and
Mammon (Matt. 6:24)--all the practical half-and-half people that
take their bills quickly and write fifty, that offer God and man
about half what they owe them of thought and character and action,
and bid others do the same, and count themselves men of the world
for their acuteness (Luke 16:1-8). And to do them justice, Jesus
commends them; they have taken the exact measure of things "in their
generation." Their mistake lies in their equation of the fugitive
and the eternal; and it is the final and fatal mista