The Master Secret E-Book

Albert Boynton Storms

• Herausgeber: Andura Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Experience the life-changing power of Albert Boynton Storms with this unforgettable book.

Leseprobe

The Master Secret

Albert Boynton Storms

Contents

Foreword

If the Christian revelation had no other consequence than to impress us that in the sight of Heaven all that is essentially hu­man is infinitely precious, that result alone would leave the Christian religion of ines­timable value to the world.

Could any teaching be more explicit than the teaching of Jesus upon this mat­ter? “The very hairs of your head are numbered. Fear not, ye are of more value than many sparrows,” and “not one of them is forgotten in the sight of God.” Jesus took a “little child and set him in the midst” of His disciples, and from the child taught at once the simplest and the deepest truth—the ultimate worth in the sight of God of unspoiled human trust and human love. Humanity becomes skeptical as to its own worthfulness, and cynical and cruel. Jesus brings us back to an apprecia­tion of the value of whatever is essentially human. In contrast with the cynical in­difference with which pharisaical hardness of heart looked upon a “woman that was a sinner,” Jesus with chivalrous courtesy and delicacy lifted into esteem for evermore the value of a person. Humanity can never forget His word, “Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no more.”

The watchword of humanity in its progress towards the light of a new day is taken from the lips of Jesus, “Ye are of value.”

There is no argument for the greatness of man like the fact of the greatness of his need. The humblest of men, kicked and buffeted by his fellows and by his fate, little esteemed, and finding it difficult to lift his head in self-respect, nevertheless needs for the satisfaction of his life, truth and immortality, love and God. His need has imperial proportions. Nothing less than Heaven and divinity can appease his hunger of soul. No values less than eternal can satisfy him.

Some years in the ministry and other years in contact with student life in college work have led me through an increasingly sympathetic study of the “problem of human life” to appreciate the incomparable value of the method of the Master in dis­covering the values of life.

In part the thoughts contained in these pages have found expression in college chapel talks and in the pulpit of Central Avenue Church. The reception they have there received leads me to hope that they may find an equally generous and kindly reception by the larger audience to which they are now addressed.

One chapter, “An Ancient Psalm of Life/’ takes up an Old Testament char­acter and a psalm as showing the funda­mental harmony between the old and new dispensations.

The chapter on “Christianity and the Supernatural” is republished by permis­sion from the Methodist Review.

Albert Boynton Storms. Central Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church, Indianapolis, Ind.

Chapter 1 – The Master Secret

“All alone—alone,

God shall speak to thee out of the sky.

The years will bring us hastening to their goal, A little more of calmness, and of trust,

With still the old, old doubt of death and dust, And still the expectancy within the soul.

O  Father, as we go to meet the years,

We ask not joy that fame or pleasure brings, But some calm knowledge of the sum of things—

A hint of glory glimmering over tears;

That he, who walks with sanction from Thy hand Some token of its presence may have seen, Beneath which we may tread the path serene *nto the stillness of the unknown land.” (Sill.)

“ I have trodden the winepress alone.” — Isaiah 63:3.

This is the cry of a soul that reaches us out of the far past. “I have trodden the wine press alone.” The cry has in it the pathos of a great sorrow, and strikes the deepest chord in the human heart. A human voice, rich and resonant, may awaken sympathetic response from the chords of a harp, thus creating its own ac­companiment. And so the appeal of a noble grief is profound and universal.

It is one of the paradoxes of life that Sorrow, which we treat as an enemy, from which we shrink, and which we seek to banish, counting ourselves happy only when Sorrow is absent—that unwelcome Sorrow is yet the angel that opens the heart to life’s most precious treasures.

The memory of a great sorrow is cher­ished.

The literature that is immortal strikes this deep note. Priam’s grief as sung by Homer, David’s lament for his son, Riz- pah’s sleepless vigilance as she frightened away the beasts of prey in the night and the vultures by day in her lonely .watch upon the rock of Gilboa, where her sons hung in judicial expiation for the sins of Saul; Job’s soul-cry in the anguish of un­certainty as to the goodness of God, never lose the power of their appeal to the human heart. It is the appeal of Sorrow. “Deep calleth unto deep.”

The vision recorded in Isaiah is set in the time of the captivity. No people, ever identified themselves with the ideals and the future of their nation more absolutely than the Hebrews. That the citizen ex­isted for the State was a familiar and a commanding idea among the ancients. The Greek found his personal worthful- ness, his individual definition, in his citi­zenship. Apart from his city or his State he would have lost significance. He lived for the State. There was an elegance, a splendor about Greek patriotism that has never been equaled elsewhere. The Ro­man, too, with his stoical devotion to the State as the embodiment of law and au­thority, developed a patriotism not unlike that of the modern Japanese. Patriotism thus becomes a kind of stern religion. The individual counts not his life dear unto himself if its sacrifice will add to the glory of the State or help to maintain and to vindicate the political ideals of his State. Modern Western peoples have developed a similar passionate patriotism for the State as the expression of the ideals of liberty.

The Hebrews, the race chosen to bring to humanity its noblest religious ideas, the race with a genius for God, conceived the State as a theocracy. Jehovah was their super-sovereign. And Jehovah had a great purpose to be achieved through His chosen people. The humblest Hebrew shared in the glory of the divine purpose. Through this people God was to shine upon the nations. Inevitably they came to identify the national life, the stability and power of their government with the in­tegrity and strength of the divine purpose. To them it was incredible that their nation should not be preserved. Their prophets had one supreme and never-ending task— it was to hold this people to humility of spirit and to their religious ideals. The tendency was strong to become fanatically over-confident, nationally selfish, politi­cally arrogant, and religiously as intolerant as superficial.

When the Hebrew nation was humil­iated before the nations and left crushed and bleeding in the dust, her great prophets saw in this the discipline of Jehovah. The ideals of the Hebrews should not perish. The nation should be purged and purified. A “remnant” should carry forward the divine purpose. The prophets had the saving salt of “idealism.” They conceived the nation vividly as a person, as a “suf­fering servant of Jehovah.”

There then arose before Israel’s great prophet the sublimest ideal vision that ever filled the soul of a seer with divine afflatus. Out of the bruised nation there arises be­fore his vision One whose “face was so marred, more than the face of any man,” that men were “astonied” at Him. They “esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.” And it seemed as though He should be “cut off” with none left to perpetuate Him or “to declare His gener­ation.” Yet a more marvelous conception supersedes this, of One “despised and re­jected of men; a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief:      and      as One from

whom men hide their faces.” The piteous and repulsive and even hideous becomes glorious in beauty and power.

A new truth is coming to view. This Silent Sufferer, who “as a sheep before his shearers is dumb,” opening not His mouth, has saving power. It pleased the Lord to “bruise Him,” to “put Him to grief.” Out of this deep humiliation shall spring an immortal power that shall make the kings of the earth “shut their mouths” before Him in awe. “He shall see of the travail of His soul and shall be satisfied.” “Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.  He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed. All we, like sheep, have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” This one shall indeed “divide” a “portion with the great, and the spoil with the strong.”

So the vision in the sixty-third of Isaiah is of one that cometh from Edom with dyed garments from Bozrah. Out from the South the prophet sees a Deliverer coming, not with an army, but alone. From the ruins of Jerusalem with desolated temple and cruel humiliation the seer be­holds a Redeemer approaching, swaying forward not as one who staggers in weak­ness, but as one who is invincible in power.

And the One is heard to say, “I have trodden the wine press alone.”

There is here not alone the boast of single-handed victory, but the. cry of a great and noble sorrow. This Man of the prophet’s vision has entered the Great Solitude where the soul must meet Duty and Destiny and God alone.

The noblest of the redmen used to send their youth singly and alone into the soli­tudes and the silences, there for days and nights to remain silent under the stars that they might become aware of the Great Spirit and of their own souls.

It would be well if, far more than we do, we, too, could send our youth into the solitude and the silence. In the desire for seclusion, often interpreted as moodiness of young people as they come face to face with the great change from youth to maturity, in facing the mystery of life, there should be opportunity for self-knowl­edge, self-reverence, and self-mastery.

The secret that lies deeply in the Method of the Master is the secret of rever­ence for one’s own soul, and reverence for God. Out of these reverences springs the complementary reverence for other people’s souls. All hopeful and sound social phi­losophy must take up this principle of reverence for the person. And it is in the Sinaitic solitudes and silences that men grow reverent and independent and suf­ficient. Only as men become aware of God and of their own souls can they stand upon their own feet and hear intelligently the voice of the Lord.