A man cannot be established through
wickedness, but the righteous cannot be uprooted. Proverbs 12:3
One
marked difference between the faith of our fathers as conceived by the fathers
and the same faith as understood and lived by their children is that the
fathers were concerned with the root of the matter, while their present-day
descendants seem concerned only with the fruit.
This
appears In our attitude toward certain great Christian souls whose names are
honored among the churches, as, for instance, Augustine and Bernard in earlier
times, or Luther and Wesley in times more recent.
Today we
write the biographies of such as these and celebrate their fruit, but the
tendency is to ignore the root out of which the fruit sprang.
"The
root of the righteous yields fruit," said the wise man in the
Proverbs, Our fathers looked well to the root of the tree and were willing to
wait with patience for the fruit to appear.
We demand
the fruit immediately even though the root may be weak and knobby or missing
altogether. Impatient Christians today explain away the simple beliefs of the
saints of other days and smile off their serious-minded approach to God and
sacred things. They were victims of their own limited religious outlook, but
great and sturdy souls withal who managed to achieve a satisfying spiritual
experience and do a lot of good in the world in spite of their handicaps. So
we'll imitate their fruit with-out accepting their theology or inconveniencing
our-selves too greatly by adopting their all-or- nothing attitude toward
religion.
So we say
(or more likely think without saying), and every voice of wisdom, every datum
of religious experience, every law of nature tells us how wrong we are. The
bough that breaks off from the tree in a storm may bloom briefly and give to
the unthinking passerby the impression that it is a healthy and fruitful
branch, but its tender blossoms will soon perish and the bough itself wither
and die. There is no lasting life apart from the root.
Much that
passes for Christianity today is the brief bright effort of the severed branch
to bring forth its fruit in its season. But the deep laws of life are against
it. Preoccupation with appearances and a corresponding neglect of the
out-of-sight root of the true spiritual life are prophetic signs which go
un-heeded. Immediate "results" are all that matter, quick proofs of
present success without a thought of next week or next year. Religious
pragmatism is running wild among the orthodox. Truth is whatever works.
If it
gets results it is good. There is but one test for the religious leader:
success. Everything is forgiven him except failure.
A tree
can weather almost any storm if its root is sound, but when the fig tree which
our Lord cursed "dried up from the roots" it immediately
"withered away." A church that is soundly rooted cannot be destroyed,
but nothing can save a church whose root is dried up. No stimulation, no
advertising campaigns, no gifts of money and no beautiful edifice can bring
back life to the rootless tree.
With a
happy disregard for consistency of metaphor the Apostle Paul exhorts us to look
to our sources. "Rooted and grounded in love," he says in
what is obviously a confusion of figure; and again he urges his readers to
be "rooted and built up in him," which envisages the
Christian both as a tree to be well rooted and as a temple to rise on a solid
foundation.
The whole
Bible and all the great saints of the past join to tell us the same thing.
"Take nothing for granted," they say to us. "Go back to the
grass roots. Open your hearts and search the Scriptures. Bear your cross,
follow your Lord and pay no heed to the passing religious vogue. The masses are
always wrong. In every generation the number of the righteous is small. Be sure
you are among them."
"A man shall not be established by
wickedness: but the root of the righteous shall not be moved."
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