 File 21 of the LibriVox Recording of the Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond. Address No. 5. Pax Phobiscum. Section 3. What Yokes Are For There is still one doubt to clear up. After the statement, learn of me, Christ throws in the disconcerting qualification. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me. Why, if all this be true, does he call it a yoke? Why does he, with the next breath, whisper, burden? Is the Christian life, after all, what its enemies take it for? An additional weight to the already great woe of life? Some extra punctiliousness about duty? Some painful devotion to observances? Some heavy restriction and trampling of all that is joyous and free in the world? Is life not hard and sorrowful enough without being fettered with yet another yoke? It is astounding how so glaring a misunderstanding of this plain sentence should ever have passed into currency. Did you ever stop to ask what a yoke is really for? Is it to be a burden to the animal which wears it? It is just the opposite. It is to make its burden light. Attached to the oxen in any other way than by a yoke, the plow would be intolerable. Worked by means of a yoke, it is light. A yoke is not an instrument of torture. It is an instrument of mercy. It is not a malicious contrivance for making work hard. It is a gentle device to make hard labor light. It is not meant to give pain but to save pain. And yet men speak of the yoke of Christ as if it were a slavery, and look upon those who wear it as objects of compassion. For generations we have had homilies on the yoke of Christ, some delighting in portraying its narrow exactions, some seeking in these exactions the marks of its divinity, others apologizing for it and toning it down, still others assuring us that, although it be very bad, it is not to be compared with the positive blessings of Christianity. How many, especially among the young, has this one mistaken phrase driven forever away from the kingdom of God? Instead of making Christ attractive, it makes him out a task-master, narrowing life by petty restrictions, calling for self-denial where none is necessary, making misery a virtue under the plea that it is the yoke of Christ, and happiness criminal, because now and then it evades it. According to this conception Christians are at best the victims of a depressing fate. Their life is a penance, and their hope for the next world purchased by a slow martyrdom in this. The mistake has arisen from taking the word yoke here in the same sense as in the expressions under the yoke, or where the yoke in his youth. But in Christ's illustration it is not the yokem of the Roman soldier, but the simple harness or ox-collar of the eastern peasant. It is the literal wooden yoke which he, with his own hands in the carpenter's shop, had probably often made. He knew the difference between a smooth yoke and a rough one, a bad fit and a good fit. The difference also it made to the patient animal which had to wear it. The rough yoke galled, and the burden was heavy. The smooth yoke caused no pain, and the load was lightly drawn. The badly fitted harness was a misery. The well fitted collar was easy. And what was the burden? It was not some special burden laid upon the Christian, some unique inflection which he alone must bear. It was what all men bear. It was simply life, human life itself, the general burden of life which all must carry with them from the cradle to the grave. Christ saw that men took life painfully, to some it was a weariness, to others a failure, to many a tragedy, to all a struggle and a pain. How to carry this burden of life had been the whole world's problem. It is still the whole world's problem. And here is Christ's solution. Carry it as I do. Take life as I take it. Look at it from my point of view. Interpret it upon my principles. Take my yoke and learn of me, and you will find it easy. For my yoke is easy, works easily, sits right upon the shoulders, and therefore my burden is light. There is no suggestion here that religion will absolve any man from bearing burdens. That would be to absolve him from living, since it is life itself that is the burden. What Christianity does propose is to make it tolerable. Christ's yoke is simply his secret for the alleviation of human life, his prescription for the best and happiest method of living. Men harness themselves to the work and stress of the world in clumsy and unnatural ways. The harness they put on is antiquated, a rough, ill-fitted collar at the best. They make its strain and friction past enduring by placing it where the neck is most sensitive, and by mere continuous irritation this sensitiveness increases until the whole nature is quick and sore. This is the origin, among other things, of a disease called touchiness. A disease which, in spite of its innocent name, is one of the gravest sources of restlessness in the world. Touchiness, when it becomes chronic, is a morbid condition of the inner disposition. It is self-love, inflamed to the acute point, conceit with a hair trigger. The cure is to shift the yoke to some other place, to let men and things touch us through some new and perhaps as yet unused part of our nature. To become meek and lowly in heart, while the old nature is becoming numb from want of use. It is the beautiful work of Christianity everywhere to adjust the burden of life to those who bear it and them to it. It has a perfectly miraculous gift of healing. Without doing any violence to human nature, it sets it right with life, harmonizing it with all surrounding things and restoring those who are jaded with the fatigue and dust of the world to a new grace of living. In the mere matter of altering the perspective of life and changing the proportions of things, its function in lightening the care of man is altogether its own. The weight of a load depends upon the attraction of the earth, but suppose the attraction of the earth were removed. A ton on some other planet where the attraction of gravity is less does not weigh half a ton. Now Christianity removes the attraction of the earth, and this is one way in which it diminishes men's burden. It makes them citizens of another world. What was a ton yesterday is not half a ton today. So, without changing one's circumstances merely by offering a wider horizon and a different standard, it alters the whole aspect of the world. Christianity, as Christ taught it, is the truest philosophy of life ever spoken. But let us be quite sure, when we speak of Christianity, that we mean Christ's Christianity. Other versions are either caricatures or exaggerations or misunderstandings or short-sighted and surface readings. For the most part, their attainment is hopeless and the results wretched. But I care not who the person is or through what veil of tears he has passed or is about to pass. There is a new life waiting for him along this path. End of File 21 File 22 of The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond. Address number 5. Paxphobiscum. Section 4. How Fruits Grow. How Fruits Grow. Were rest my subject, there are other things I should wish to say about it, and other kinds of rest of which I should like to speak. But that is not my subject. My theme is that the Christian experiences are not the work of magic, but come under the law of cause and effect. And I have chosen rest only as a single illustration of the working of that principle. If there were time, I might next run over all the Christian experiences in turn and show how the same wide law applies to each. But I think it may serve the better purpose if I leave this further exercise to yourselves. I know no Bible study that you will find more full of fruit, or that will take you nearer to the ways of God, or make the Christian life itself more solid or more sure. I shall add only a single other illustration of what I mean before I close. Where does joy come from? I knew a Sunday scholar whose conception of joy was that it was a thing made in lumps and kept somewhere in heaven, and that when people prayed for it, pieces were somehow let down and fitted into their souls. I am not sure that views as gross and material are not often held by people who ought to be wiser. In reality, joy is as much a matter of cause and effect as pain. No one can get joy merely by asking for it. It is one of the ripest fruits of the Christian life, and like all fruits, must be grown. There is a very clever trick in India called the mango trick. A seed is put into the ground and covered up, and after diverse incantations, a full-blown mango bush appears within five minutes. I never met anyone who knew how the thing was done, but I never met anyone who believed it to be anything else than a conjuring trick. The world is pretty unanimous now in its belief in the orderliness of nature. Men may not know how fruits grow, but they do know that they cannot grow in five minutes. Some lives have not even planted a stalk on which fruits could hang, even if they did grow in five minutes. Some have never planted one sound seed of joy in all their lives, and others who may have planted a germ or two have lived so little in sunshine that they never could come to maturity. Whence then is joy? Christ put his teaching on this subject into one of the most exquisite of his parables. I should in any instance have appealed to his teaching here, as in the case of rest, for I do not wish you to think I am speaking words of my own. But it so happens that he has dealt with it in a passage of unusual fullness. I need not recall the whole illustration. It is the parable of the vine. Did you ever think why Christ spoke that parable? He did not merely throw it into space as a fine illustration of general truths. It was not simply a statement of the mystical union and the doctrine of an indwelling Christ. It was that, but it was more. After he had said it, he did what was not an unusual thing when he was teaching his greatest lessons. He turned to the disciples and said he would tell them why he had spoken it. It was to tell them how to get joy. These things I have spoken unto you, he said, that my joy might remain in you and that your joy might be full. It was a purposed and deliberate communication of his secret of happiness. Go back over these verses then and you will find the causes of this effect. The spring and the only spring out of which true happiness comes. I am not going to analyze them in detail. I ask you to enter into the words for yourselves. Remember, in the first place, that the vine was the eastern symbol of joy. It was its fruit that made glad the heart of man. Yet, however innocent that gladness, for the expressed juice of the grape, was the common drink at every peasant's board. The gladness was only a gross and passing thing. It was not true happiness, and the vine of the Palestine vineyards was not the true vine. Christ was the true vine. Here, then, is the ultimate source of joy. Through whatever media it reaches us, all true joy and gladness find their source in Christ. By this, of course, is not meant that the actual joy experienced is transferred from Christ's nature, or is something passed on from Him to us. What is passed on is His method of getting it. There is indeed a sense in which we can share another's joy or another's sorrow, but that is another matter. Christ is the source of joy to men, in the sense in which He is the source of rest. His people share His life, and therefore share its consequences, and one of these is joy. His method of living is one that in the nature of things produces joy. When He spoke of His joy remaining with us, He meant in part that the causes which produced it should continue to act. His followers, that is to say, by repeating His life would experience its accompaniments. His joy, His kind of joy, would remain with them. The medium through which this joy comes is next explained. He that abideth in me, the same bringeth forth much fruit. Fruit first, joy next, the one the cause or medium of the other. Fruit bearing is the necessary antecedent. Joy, both the necessary consequent and the necessary accompaniment. It lies partly in the bearing of fruit, partly in the fellowship, which makes that possible. Partly that is to say, joy lies in mere, constant living in Christ's presence, with all that that implies of peace, of shelter, and of love. Partly in the influence of that life upon mind and character and will. And partly in the inspiration to live and work for others, with all that that brings of self-riddance and joy in others' gain. All these in different ways and at different times are sources of pure happiness. Even the simplest of them, to do good to other people, is an instant and infallible specific. There is no mystery about happiness whatever, put in the right ingredients, and it must come out. He that abideth in him will bring forth much fruit, and bringing forth much fruit is happiness. The infallible receipt for happiness then is to do good, and the infallible receipt for doing good is to abide in Christ. The surest proof that all this is a plain matter of cause and effect is that men may try every other conceivable way of finding happiness, and they will fail. Only the right cause, in each case, can produce the right effect. Then the Christian experiences are of our own making, in the same sense in which grapes are of our own making, and no more. All fruits grow, whether they grow in the soil or in the soul, whether they are fruits of the wild grape or of the true vine. No man can make things grow. He can get them to grow by arranging all the circumstances and fulfilling all the conditions, but the growing is done by God. Causes and effects are eternal arrangements set in the constitution of the world, fixed beyond man's ordering. What man can do is to place himself in the midst of a chain of sequences. Thus he can get things to grow. Thus he himself can grow, but the grower is the spirit of God. What more need I add but this? Test the method by experiment. Do not imagine that you have got these things because you know how to get them, as well try to feed upon a cookery book. But I think I can promise that if you try, in this simple and natural way, you will not fail. Spend the time you have spent in sighing for fruits in fulfilling the conditions of their growth. The fruits will come, must come. We have hitherto paid immense attention to effects, to the mere experiences themselves. We have described them, extolled them, advised them, prayed for them, done everything but find out what caused them. Henceforth let us deal with causes. To be, says Lotzi, is to be in relations. About every other method of living the Christian life, there is an uncertainty. About every other method of acquiring the Christian experiences, there is a perhaps. But insofar as this method is the way of nature, it cannot fail. Its guarantee is the laws of the universe. And these are the hands of the living God. End of Paxphobiscum, section 4. End of The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond.