University of Virginia Library

XXXIX
AT THE PAN-AMERICAN MISSIONARY SERVICE,
CATHEDRAL OF SAINT PETER AND SAINT
PAUL, MOUNT SAINT ALBAN, WASHINGTON,
D. C., OCTOBER 25, 1903

Bishop Satterlee, and to you, representatives of the Church,
both at home and abroad, and to all of you, my friends
and fellow-citizens:

I extend greeting, and in your name I especially welcome
those who are in a sense the guests of the nation
to-day. In what I am about to say to you, I wish to
dwell upon certain thoughts suggested by three different
quotations: In the first place, "Thou shalt serve the
Lord with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all
thy mind"; the next, "Be ye therefore wise as serpents
and harmless as doves"; and finally, in the Collect which
you, Bishop Doane, just read, "that we being ready,
both in body and soul, may cheerfully accomplish those
things which Thou commandest."

To an audience such as this I do not have to say anything
as to serving the cause of decency with heart and
with soul. I want to dwell, however, upon the fact that
we have the right to claim from you not merely that you
shall have heart in your work, not merely that you shall
put your souls into it, but that you shall give the best
that your minds have to it also. In the eternal, the unending
warfare for righteousness and against evil, the
friends of what is good need to remember that in addition

to being decent they must be efficient; that good intentions,
high purposes, cannot be in themselves effective,
that they are in no sense a substitute for power to make
those purposes, those intentions felt in action. Of course
we must first have the purpose and the intention. If
our powers are not guided aright, it is better that we
should not have them at all; but we must have the power
itself before we can guide it aright.

In the second text we are told not merely to be harmless
as doves, but also to be wise as serpents. One of our
American humorists who veils under jocular phrases
much deep wisdom—one of those men has remarked that
it is much easier to be a harmless dove than a wise serpent.
Now, we are not to be excused if we do not show
both qualities. It is not very much praise to give a man
to say that he is harmless. We have a right to ask that
in addition to the fact that he does no harm to anyone
he shall possess the wisdom and the strength to do good
to his neighbor; that together with innocence, together
with purity of motive, shall be joined the wisdom and
strength to make that purity effective, that motive translated
into substantial result.

Finally, in the quotation from the Collect, we ask that
we may be made ready both in body and in soul that we
may cheerfully accomplish those things that we are commanded
to do. Ready both in body and in soul: that
means that we must fit ourselves physically and mentally,
fit ourselves to work with the weapons necessary for dealing
with this life no less than with the higher, spiritual
weapons; fit ourselves thus to do the work commanded,
and, moreover, to do it cheerfully. Small is our use for
the man who individually helps any of us and shows that
he does it grudgingly. We would rather not be helped
than be helped in such fashion. A favor extended in a
manner which shows that the man is sorry that he has to
grant it is robbed, sometimes of all, and sometimes of

more than all, its benefit. So, in serving the Lord, if we
serve Him, if we serve the cause of decency, the cause of
righteousness, in a way that impresses others with the fact
that we are sad in doing it, our service is robbed of an
immense proportion of its efficacy. We have a right
to ask a cheerful heart, a right to ask a buoyant and
cheerful spirit among those to whom is granted the
inestimable privilege of doing the Lord's work in this
world. The chance to do work, the duty to do work,
is not a penalty, it is a privilege. Let me quote a
sentence that I have quoted once before: "In this life
the man who wins to any goal worth winning almost
always comes to that goal with a burden bound on his
shoulders. The man who does best in this world, the
woman who does best, almost invariably does it because
he or she carries some burden. Life is so constituted
that the man or the woman who has not some responsibility
is thereby deprived of the deepest happiness that
can come to mankind, because each and every one of us,
if he or she is fit to live in the world, must be conscious
that responsibility always rests on him or on her—the
responsibility of duty toward those dependent upon us:
toward our families, toward our friends, toward our fellow-citizens;
the responsibility of duty to wife and child,
to the State, to the Church. Not only can no man shirk
some or all of those responsibilities, but no man worth his
salt will wish to shirk them. On the contrary, he will
welcome, thrice over, the fortune that puts them upon
him.

In closing I want to call your attention to something
that is especially my business for the time being, and
that is measurably your business all the time, or else you
are unfit to be citizens of this republic: In the seventh
hymn which we sung, in the last line, you all joined in
singing "God save the State." Do you intend merely to
sing that, or to try to do it? If you intend merely to sing

it, your part in doing it will be but small. The State will
be saved if the Lord puts it into the heart of the average
man so to shape his life that the State shall be worth saving;
and only on those terms. We need civic righteousness.
The best constitution that the wit of man has ever
devised, the best institutions that the ablest statesmen in
the world ever have reduced to practice by law or by custom,
will be of no avail if they are not vivified by the
spirit which makes a State great by making its citizens
honest, just, and brave. I do not ask you as practical
believers in applied Christianity to take part one way or
the other in matters that are merely partisan. There are
plenty of questions about which honest men can and do
differ very greatly and very intensely, but as to which the
triumph of either side may be compatible with the welfare
of the State—a lesser degree of welfare or a greater degree
of welfare—but compatible with the welfare of the State.
But there are certain great principles, such as those which
Cromwell would have called "fundamentals," concerning
which no man has a right to have more than one opinion.
Such a principle is honesty. If you have not honesty in
the average private citizen, or public servant, then all else
goes for nothing. The abler a man is, the more dexterous,
the shrewder, the bolder, why, the more dangerous
he is if he has not the root of right living and right
thinking in him—and that in private life, and even more in
public life. Exactly as in time of war, although you need
in each fighting man far more than courage, yet all else
counts for nothing if there is not that courage upon which
to base it; so in our civil life, although we need that the
average man in private life, that the average public servant,
shall have far more than honesty, yet all other
qualities go for nothing or for worse than nothing unless
honesty underlie them—not only the honesty that keeps
its skirts technically clear, but the honesty that is such
according to the spirit as well as the letter of the law; the
honesty that is aggressive, the honesty that not merely
deplores corruption,—it is easy enough to deplore corruption,—but
that wars against it and tramples it under foot.
I ask for that type of honesty, I ask for militant honesty,
for the honesty of the kind that makes those who have it
discontented with themselves as long as they have failed
to do everything that in them lies to stamp out dishonesty
wherever it can be found, in high place or in low.
And let us not flatter ourselves, we who live in countries
where the people rule, that it is ultimately possible for
the people to cast upon any but themselves the responsibilities
for the shape the government and the social and
political life of the community assume. I ask, then,
that our people feel quickened within them indignation
against wrong in every shape, and condemnation of that
wrong, whether found in private or in public life. We
have a right to demand courage of every man who wears
the uniform; it is not so much a credit to him to have
it as it is shame unutterable to him if he lacks it. So
when we demand honesty we demand it not as entitling
the possessor to praise, but as warranting the heartiest
condemnation possible if he lacks it. Surely in every
movement for the betterment of our life, our life social in
the truest and deepest sense, our life political, we have a
special right to ask not merely support, but leadership
from those of the Church. We ask that you here to whom
much has been given will remember that from you rightly
much will be expected in return. For all of us here the
lines have been cast in pleasant places. Each of us has
been given one talent, or five, or ten talents, and each of
us is in honor bound to use that talent or those talents
aright, and to show at the end that he is entitled to the
praise of having done well as a faithful servant.

I greet you this afternoon, and am glad to see you
here, and I trust and believe that after this service
every one of us will go home feeling that he or she

has been warranted in coming here by the way in which
he or she, after going home, takes up with fresh heart,
with fresh courage, and with fresh and higher purpose the
burden of life as that burden has been given to him or to
her to carry.