IX.

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE CRUST.

"Let no man deceive himself. If any man thinketh that he is wise among you in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise." I. COR. iii. 18.

THERE must have been plenty of people in Corinth to whom these words came home. The conceit of Greece was wisdom, and Corinth was one of the eyes of Greece. There were the scholars of the schools. There, in that bright transparent air, everything quivering and blazing in the sunshine, the passion of knowing was the great dominant emotion; the pride of knowing was the complacent satisfaction of men's lives.

And there is no satisfaction so subtle and insidious as the conceit of knowledge no other possession so becomes a very part of the possessor. The money which you hold in your hand, the laurel which men wreathe around your brow, both of these may disappear and you are still the same, but the thing you know is part of you. No man can take it from you. Its subtle essence is in your heart and character. You are something different because of it. And so, as a man loves what he is more than what he has, self-love lends all its intensity to the pride of learning, and no man is so proud as he who "thinketh that he is wise " among men in the world.

To such men writes St. Paul. St. Paul, himself the wise man, the lover of wisdom, and he says that there come times when the great need of life is to put aside what seems our wisdom, to give it no value, to make no account of it, to seem to ourselves to know nothing, and in his strong words, to "become a fool," and this with the distinct purpose that we may really get the wisdom which we have thought ourselves to possess. Surely there is enough of strangeness in such exhortation to excite our curiosity, and set us to studying to see what the great apostle, who always means something weighty and timely and interesting, means here.

And at the very outset we cannot help feeling how his words have the same tone with which a good many other words in the New Testament, and especially in the Gospels, make us familiar. We think about those words of Jesus when He said, “Whosoever loseth his life shall save it; or those other words to the young rich man, "Go and sell all that thou hast; " or yet those others, "Except ye be converted and become as little children." And of a general spirit which runs through all His teaching, that very much which the world has been elaborately building up must be pulled down, before the true city of God, the new Jerusalem, can be established in the earth. No one can read the New Testament and not catch that spirit, and whoever catches it, sees the far-off hope of a perfected humanity only through falling systems and the ruin of the vicious and imperfect conditions which must take place first. Whoever has thoroughly accepted and been filled

with that spirit, is ready to feel how like it is to what Paul teaches in this text, and that the man who calls himself wise must become a fool to gain true wisdom.

It is no mere abuse of earthly wisdom, such as religious teachers sometimes have allowed themselves. It goes more deep. It comes more down to fundamental principles than that. Let me try to state the principle which seems to me to be involved in it. If I gave it a name I should almost venture to call it the Principle of the Crust. What I mean is this: There are two sorts of hindrance or obstacle which may settle around any object and prevent a power from outside from reaching it. One of them is a purely external obstacle, built round it like a wall, of stuff and nature different from the object itself. The other is simply its own substance, hardened upon the surface and shutting up the body of the object, as it were, behind and within itself. This latter is the Crust. The river freezes, and it is the river's self, grown hard and stiff, which shuts the river's water out from the sunshine and the rain. The ground is trodden hard, and it is the very substance of the ground that lies rigid and impenetrable and catches the seed, and will not let it enter in and claim the soil and do its fruitful work. The loaf hardens its surface, and the Crust which confines the bread is bread itself. This is the notion of the Crust. It is of the very substance of the thing which it imprisons. It is not a foreign material; but the thing itself, grown hard and rigid, shuts the soft and tender and receptive portions of the thing away. The in

fluences from outside are powerless to reach it. Not until the Crust is broken, and the ice melts once more into the stream, and the hardened ground is crumbled into the general system of the soil again. Not until then can power and influence easily find their way in and permeate the whole.

Is not the parable plain? Can we not recognize how that which takes place in the lake or on the road-side takes place also in the ordinary intellectual and moral life of man. Out of the very substance of a man's life, out of the very stuff of what he is and does, comes the hindrance which binds itself about his being, and will not let the better influences out. His occupations, his acquirements, his habits, his standards of action and of thoughts, make Crusts out of their own material, so that, beside whatever foreign barrier may stand between them and the higher food they need, there is this barrier which they have made out of themselves. That self-made barrier must be broken up, must be restored to its first condition and become again part of the substance out of which it was evolved, before the life can be fed with the dews of first principles and the rain of the immediate descent of God.

Let us see what all this means in special illustrations. What is it that we mean by Prejudice? Simply the premature hardening of opinion. A man is thinking and studying, seeking after truth. He is open to all light and influence. He is ready to be taught on every side. Knowledge is welcome whencesoever it may come. The surface of his life is

free.

But suddenly or gradually the man stops.

As if a cold wind touched the stream and froze it, the water turns itself into a wall of ice. The degree of thought and truth which has been reached becomes a stopping-place. It is no longer a promise and prophecy of more beyond. It is an end— hard, stiff, impenetrable, nothing can break through it. . What is it but a Crust? It is itself made of the thought which it imprisons. It is the toughened surface of the student's study, making it impossible for any further light to enter in and play upon the thought imprisoned in itself.

This is the essence of all prejudice: my tyrant says to me, "You shall not learn," and shuts me up behind a wall of brass or iron. My own nature says to me, "You shall not learn," and throws out its armor of prejudice, made of its own crude conceptions and half-mastered learning, and within that I am as helpless as behind the iron or the brass. Those crude conceptions must be broken up and turned again into good truth-learning capability before I can once more lie open to the light.

Another kind of crust is formalism.

itself in outward symbols.

declare themselves in forms.

Truth utters Belief and resolution It is the natural law of

expression, and so long as the form remains soft and pliant, full of the spirit of the belief or resolution it expresses, all is right. Form and belief are like body and soul to one another. But when form hardens into formalism, when the real substance of belief, instead of remaining soft and pliant, grows stiff, and will not let belief grow and enlarge, will not let the food of belief which is new truth come