The Ideal Man

It is a solemn moment when the soul awakens to a sense of its spiritual possibilities. Something of awe attends every beginning - whether the launching of a ship about to venture forth amid the measureless dangers of unknown seas; or the first shot of battle, warning men that mighty interests and precious lives have been destined for sacrifice; or the faint little cry of a new-born infant setting out on that most perilous of all adventures called "life." And whatever suggestion of sublimity there is in any of these beginnings, it recurs - in intense degree - at the solemn hour of a soul's moral awakening, in the moments

"Sure though seldom,
When the spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,
And apprise it, if pursuing
Or the right way or the wrong way,
To its triumph or undoing."

These, indeed, are the awful moments of life; they are fraught with terrible dangers and immense responsibilities; they determine whether God's image in a man shall be made or marred.

Whatever the occasion may be, therefore - the turning of an unbeliever toward the God he has denied, or the entrance of a convert into the Church he has ignored, or the first strong, new resolve in the heart of one on whom the true ideals of life are at last commencing to dawn - whatever the occasion be, it is a solemn crisis when we heed the trumpet-call, gird ourselves, and step forth to the making of a God-like man.

It would truly be a hard fate, had we to carve out the pathway of progress alone, and to guess unaided at God's ideal; or had we only ordinary men and women to reveal to us the high possibilities of human nature. Every creature we meet falls short of that perfection which the least of us is justified in striving for; from no man do we get the full measure of inspiration that we need. But God has given us in Christ a model about whom all agree - One without defect. Every noble life is a needle pointing to Him; every pure soul an image of His; every good deed a gem that gleams and sparkles in the shining of-His light. Our homes are radiant with the glow of a beauty He created; His peace is in our hearts; His holiness is beaming from our innocent children's eyes. He is God; He is perfect as God; and still behind His forehead throbs a human brain, and a human-heart is beating in His bosom. In each impulse of ours He can recognize some emotion of His own; deep in His heart there echoes a response to every noble aspiration of mankind. Yes; if it be possible to receive what we looked and hoped for, if it be, indeed, the plan of Providence to "come and lead us Godward," our hearts assure us that Jesus Christ is God's Ideal of a Man.

Very striking in the life of Christ is the vivid contrast between the Jews' anticipations and the reality. The chosen people had learned to cherish a vision of physical majesty as the picture of the Messias. Purple and cloth of gold and jewels and fine linen would adorn His person. He would ride forth to battle at the head of an army of kings and conquer all the earth, beating down the nations under His horse's hoofs and blinding them with the glory of His brightness; He would reign from sea to sea, so that the dwellers of the wilderness would bow low before Him and all peoples serve Him; He would rule over the nations with an iron scepter, and dash them in pieces as a potter's vessel; He would restore Israel's greatness and give heavenly splendor to a new Jerusalem, the mistress of the world. Neither for Him nor for His people would there be weakness or tribulation any more.

With this expectation contrast the fact. Christ brought no material comforts, no adornments, and steadily refused to secure or to accept them. Though faint with fasting, he scorned to supply Himself with food. Homeless, penniless, rigidly austere, He laid the heavy burden of absolute self-denial on every one who wished to follow in His footsteps. He would win no mind by the display of magnificence; he would teach men that the kingdoms of all the world were but a petty end of ambition when set over against the fulfilling of the will of the Father. The only cause He strove for was that of the Kingdom of God within the soul. Wearing no crown and holding no scepter, he received spittle by way of homage and thorns in place of a diadem. His triumphal procession was a weary march under His own cross up the hill of Calvary; his retinue was not the legions of Michael, but the mocking soldiers of brutal Rome. When His foes came upon Him, there was no miraculous crushing of their battalions; there was simply submission to insult and scourging and death.

The contrast was intensified by the fact that Christ evidently possessed a secret divine power. He himself said that He had but to ask, and whatsoever He desired would be granted Him. Already, as was clear, the resources of nature lay at His command. From a few loaves He gave food to five thousand; with a word He stilled the tempest; at will He burst the bars of death and brought forth the buried from the tomb. So striking, indeed, was the contrast of expectation and reality in Christ's life, that did we not know John the Baptist better, we would almost be led to fancy we could detect an echo of the popular disappointment in the blunt question his messengers put to Jesus: "Art Thou He that art to come; or look we for another?" But while that question did not express the disappointment of John, it did furnish the providential opportunity for an answer which was a key to the enigma of Christ's life, and the solution of the problem already beginning to puzzle earnest minds among the Jews: "Go and relate to John what you have heard and seen: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise again, the poor have the Gospel preached to them."

When men heard this, they could understand the mission of the Savior as never before: He had come in human form that they might have a visible image of the gracious God to study and love and fashion themselves upon. He revealed the divine perfection in an aspect and with a clearness which rendered mistake impossible; which made it plain that to be like God, man must, first of all, love his fellow-man - neighbor, beggar, stranger, enemy. "Love your enemies," He said, "that you may be the children of your Father whois in heaven." Those who were closest to Him during life caught that lesson and gave it forth again as the distinguishing mark of the Gospel message:

"Religion pure and undefiled before God the Father is this, to visit the widow and the orphan and to keep oneself unspotted from this world."

"If we love not our brethren, whom we have seen, how can we love God whom we have not seen?"

"If any man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar."

What did it all mean? What but this - that as we must be religious before being Christian, so we must love man before we can love God! Who will venture to state such a principle? Who will dare affirm that a man offering his gift at the altar and remembering that his brother has something against him, should leave there his gift before the altar and go first to be reconciled with his brother, and then come and offer his gift? Who will dare say that? Who, indeed, but the Lord Christ? Upon His lips the words are found. O Man! force your way into the treasure-house, with its locks of brass and bars of triple steel; storm a modern fortress, with its mines and entrenchments and monster guns; defy and overcome the very laws of nature if you can; but never suppose that the love of God can be driven into a heart where the love of man does not dwell. O Priest! preach the need of intellectual training and external forms; but remember that he who loves his neighbor is not far from the kingdom of heaven, not altogether unlike God's ideal of a man. The heart and center of religion, the heart and center of humanity, is love. God is love. And man can resemble God only when his life is a life of love.

Wondrous pictures of such love do we receive from Christ! When shall time dim the beauty of the scenes He stamped so deeply on the memory of the human race! - The Good Shepherd traversing hill and dale in search of the lost sheep and carrying it home in His arms; the Good Samaritan, lifting up the helpless traveler that Priest and Levite had passed by, binding his wounds and caring for him at the inn; the Father of the Prodigal Son, receiving back again the reckless boy whose health and youth and fortune had been wasted in the ways of sin, welcoming him home with a loving kiss, killing for him the fatted calf, robing him in splendid vestments, and circling his finger with the ring of peace and joy.

When shall the human heart cease to thrill at the echo of the words Christ spoke to those who listened for His revelation of the ideal!

"Blessed are the poor!"

"Unto these least!"'

"As one that serveth!"

"Not to be ministered unto, but to minister."

"Receive ye the Kingdom of God as a little child."

Have we forgotten - can we ever forget - the story of the Magdalen and of those who spurned her? Men had pointed the finger of scorn as she passed through the market-place; women had swept by with a rustle of skirts, then as now loathing the sin and the sinner! Ah! the grace and the tenderness of Him who went to this creature, and made of her a glorious saint of God! And then, the thing He did and the words He said when, at another day, they set Him up to judge a woman taken in adultery! See His face shine as He is kissed by the traitor Judas! Bring back to mind the pardon He gave the penitent thief in the hour when His own body was shattered and His soul wrung with torture! Hear Him whisper a prayer for His executioners. In truth, it is one long, uninterrupted lesson of love for man that we learn from the whole story of His goings out and His comings in; His healings and His cleansings; His comfortings and His pardonings. O Christ! if Thou art indeed He Who is to come, and Thy name is indeed Messias, then truly art Thou the strangest king that ever reigned - and the hardest to dethrone. Thou savest others; Thyself Thou wilt not save. From Thee we learn that to live and die for another is always nobler than to live and die for self. To do things tor men; to do hard things; to serve the worst and the meanest of humanity - this is the burden of Thy message, the bidding of Thy example. Service unremitting and unto death - this is Thy measure of nobleness. This then, is God's ideal of the relation between man and man.

It is almost needless to say that such an ideal could scarcely have found a lodging place in the breasts of the Israelites of olden time, whose conduct offers so strong a contrast to that of Christian saints. The records of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their contemporaries, leave us, if not puzzled and dismayed, at least convinced that such men could not easily have assimilated Christian ideals. Their conception of duty toward neighbor and wife and brother and fellow-townsmen, and especially their view of the attitude to be adopted toward stranger and enemy, indicate the great development that had to precede their acceptance of the standard of Christ. As we go along through the centuries we see, like occasional gleams of light, intimations that this growth is taking place. The days of the Philistine wars give place to the sympathetic relations of the captivity and the restoration; the savage necessities of early settlement-life to the high ideals prevailing in the schools of the prophets. Ruth and Tobias and Elias and Eleazar appear like glimmering rays that precede the dawn. As the whims of the wandering tribes fade into oblivion, we have the noble conceptions of Job and the Psalms and the last chapters of Isaias. The road was a long one and hard to travel; many fell by the wayside during the march, and not a few forgot the new lessons soon after learning them. Selfishness and sensuality worked against the leaven wherewith God was leavening the mass. But in the end the leaven prevailed. When the time was ripe, and the people ready, the heart of the Jew was made into the heart of the Christian, and the zealots of the law became the vessels of election of Christ.

That slow process of growth showed how incapable gross, sensual minds must ever be of appreciating the teachings of Christ; and the same incapability holds now among us. Never is a selfish soul the fit material to make a Christian. The nobler a soul, the fitter it is to receive and to develop the seed of the Gospel message. The religion of Jesus Christ strikes root only in a heart harrowed by self-denial, worked over by slow, painful attempts that dig up and loosen the hard soil of the natural man. He who would be a Christian must be no slave of food and drink, but the master of all sensual passion; he must be energetic and vigilant, and industrious and brave; his soul must be weeded free of the love of money, the root of all evil. As the man begins to be Christ-like, the ape and the tiger die; the wild beasts that prowled about within him are tamed, if need be, even with fire. The neophyte learns that though all creatures are for man's enjoyment, yet the temperate use of them is a precept of the moral law. He goes through an education similar to that by which the race has been taught the necessity of sternly prohibiting the coarser forms of self-indulgence, of basing the higher social institutions upon the restraint of primal appetites. As the wild excesses of youth, the first mad fling of freedom, must settle down into the grave carriage and sane speech of the mature man ere one will be trusted by his fellows, so must the heart be purified before it can become the dwelling-place of God. All in all, it seems we can truly say that the interval between animal standards and human laws is hardly so great as that which separates the Christian from the pagan.

But who shall deny that we men of today are still children in selfishness, still savages in cruelty; that we must grow much before we can in very truth be Christians? Must not a sense of shame sweep over us as we review the incidents of each day's history in this age of exultant worldliness; as we read the sins listed in our daily press; as we pass by the homes of our city poor; as we observe frequent instances of cynical hardness and monstrous oppression too plain to disbelieve. Let us not forget that we are members of the society that commits or tolerates these misdeeds. We are not aliens to the civilization in which we live; we are its beneficiaries on the one hand, its supporters on the other. And each man of us has his own share of eternal responsibility for its every crime. God's ideal of a man - the selfless Christ! How strange and far away from it are we; and how deeply we feel this in the moments when our better nature is stirred. The head of the nation is shot down by an assassin and expires with a prayer on his lips; the fire demon leaps forth in a crowded theater and, while men are hurrying to the rescue, five hundred die - an awful holocaust; an excursion steamer, with its freight of singing children and light-hearted parents, meets with a sudden mishap, and a thousand perish miserably under the very eyes of the mother city out of whose womb they all came forth. These things shock us into being Christian. Great pity chokes a man; the tears well up; the human heart asserts itself in the worst of us. We go so far as, for a moment, to suspend our business, to devote our goods recklessly, to forego opportunities of gain, to risk our very lives. For one divine instant we sound the note of charity; the music of Christ's love reechoes in our souls as the dead are cared for or the moaning victims are carried by. It is good for us thus to be moved, even though at such dreadful cost. It tells us what we could be, what we ought to be. It remains a help to us all our lives, even though, after a day or two, the lesson seems to be forgotten. We shall do well to recall such experiences, to multiply the moments which make us feel as we felt then, to extend something of the same spirit into the smaller and more frequent events of life; for just as truly as a surrender to our brutal instincts is a checking of Christianity's progress, so surely, to be pitiful, sympathetic, kindly, is to bring the spirit of Christ among men, and to strengthen His presence in souls. To turn away from an inviting opportunity for evil-doing, to relinquish the chance of sinful pleasure, to resist a seductive temptation, though with a pain at the heart and a groan on the lips; and to do all this because we are unwilling to hurt neighbor, countryman, enemy, any fellow-creature, born or unborn - this is to begin to be for the moment, and in some little measure, like Christ's Ideal of a Man.

Yes; the love of mankind is a preparation, a necessary preparation, for Christianity. It is a sentiment which measures by its development all growth of the soul; which, by its increasing purity, reveals each advance from the selfish passion of youth to the matchless sacrifice of a mother's love; which registered the progress of the Israelites from the beginning to the end of sacred history; which has marked every stage of man's evolution from sin to sanctity, from savagery to civilization. It is a sentiment which must, at least in some degree, always be present in order that a soul may obtain even the first weak grasp of Christianity; and it must grow strong and deep before any real and hearty assimilation of Christ's spirit can take place.

What would the prevalence of such love among us not imply? At its coming dishonesty and corruption would disappear, and unjust trials and unfair legislation as well. The systematic and legal oppression of the poor would cease; so too, the crime of the betrayer who purchases a moment of pleasure at the cost of a woman's soul, and the selfishness that degrades marriage into a mere means of sensual satisfaction. At its coming would flower forth the spirit which calls it wicked to save oneself at the cost of another, and lays upon the best of men the obligation to die for the sake of the meanest and weakest - the spirit, so essentially Christian, which has kept pace with the progress of Christianity, grown with its growth, strengthened with its strength, and taught us that the measure of a nation's advance from barbarism, is its acceptance of the law that women and children must be looked after first in fire or shipwreck, before the great ones, most valuable to humanity, dare even think of saving themselves.

We may not say that the study of the spirit of Christ will at once render us able to pursue all these ideals faithfully and successfully, nor may we say that any one of us alone can do much toward making them prevail; but this is true, that only in proportion as men earnestly strive after these ideals can they hope to be fashioned into the image of God and-recognized by Christ as the children of His inspiration.

But all this will interfere with our comfort, says some one, Why of course it will interfere - undoubtedly and most seriously. And therefore Christ gave us not only an ideal of service, but an example of renunciation. He taught us that the Christian ideal can be attempted only by those who are willing to deny themselves. He made us understand that Christianity can easily be lost by souls not tempered like fine steel in the furnace of renunciation. To do all Christ bids us do, we must be as children, indeed, but we must have more than the strength of children; for to be a Christian is a great life-work, no mere child's play. It is a crown to be won by effort, a pearl to be bought with a great price. Much physical comfort must be renounced by him who strives for an ideal which is divine. We should never forget the disappointment and failure of the materialistic Jews, brought face to face with our Lord, but having nothing in their selfish souls wherewith to lay hold of the treasure He proffered them. The same opportunity, the same danger, is always ours. We can have Mammon it we wish - that is many of us can, and for a time at least - but we cannot have God and Mammon. The bread of angels will not be savory to him who has been feeding on the husks of swine.

Every nation has its symbol: England, its Lion and Unicorn; Russia, its Great Bear; France, its Fair Lilies; America, its Bird of Freedom. 'The symbol of Christianity has ever been the Cross. It is no longer a sign of shame to be hidden and concealed. In the life of every day it meets us again and again; it jingles at the wrist of fashion, it dangles from the golden watch-chain of wealth, it hangs upon the bosom of young-hearted beauty, it stands clear-cut against the sky as it crowns the spire under which people meet to kneel and pray. But unless it be branded into the mind and seared into the heart, then has the soul not yet begun to be Christian.

We must remember this as we seek to grow in the knowledge of Christ; as we pray for the grace to assimilate His spirit and to imitate His conduct. 'The true symbol of Christianity is the Cross. And the figure that hangs upon it, naked and suffering for the sins of others, is God's Ideal of a Man.

- text taken from The Sacrament of Duty by Father Joseph McSorley, C.S.P.