revealer of all this, "Here I am, fulfil my manhood."
And do not you see how immediately this sweeps aside, as one gush of the
sunlight sweeps aside the darkness, do not you see how it sweeps aside
all the foolish and little things that people are saying? I say to my
friend, "Be a Christian." That means to be a full man. And he says to
me, "I have not time to be a Christian. I have not room. If my life was
not so full. You don't know how hard I work from morning to night. What
time is there for me to be a Christian? What time is there, what room is
there for Christianity in such a life as mine?" But does not it come to
seem to us so strange, so absurd, if it was not so melancholy, that man
should say such a thing as that? It is as if the engine had said it had
no room for the steam. It is as if the tree had said it had no room for
the sap. It is as if the ocean had said it had no room for the tide. It
is as if the man said that he had no room for his soul. It is as if life
said that it had no time to live, when it is life. It is not something
that is added to life. It is life. A man is not living without it. And
for a man to say that "I am so full in life that I have no room for
life," you see immediately to what absurdity it reduces itself. And how
a man knows what he is called upon by God's voice, speaking to him every
hour, speaking to him every moment, speaking to him out of everything,
that which the man is called upon to do because it is the man's only
life! Therefore time, room, that is what time, that is what room is
for--life. Life is the thing we seek, and man finds it in the fulfilment
of his life by Jesus Christ.
Now, until we understand this and take it in its richness, all religion
seems, becomes to us such a little thing that it is not religion at all.
You have got to know that religion, the service of Christ, is not
something to be taken in in addition to your life; it is your life. It
is not a ribbon that you shall tie in your hat, and go down the street
declaring yourself that you have accepted something in addition to the
life which your fellow-men are living. It is something which, taken into
your heart, shall glow in every action so that your fellow-men shall
say, "Lo, how he lives! What new life has come into him?" It is that
insistence upon the great essentialness of the religious life, it is the
insistence that religion is not a lot of things that a man does, but is
a new life that a man lives,
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