File:The culture of Christian manhood; Sunday mornings in Battell chapel, Yale university (1897) (14576727138).jpg

Identifier: cultureofchristi00sall (find matches)
Title: The culture of Christian manhood; Sunday mornings in Battell chapel, Yale university
Year: 1897 (1890s)
Authors: Sallmon, Henry William, 1866-1938, ed
Subjects: Universities and colleges Sermons, American
Publisher: New York, Chicago (etc.) Fleming H. Revell company
Contributing Library: Princeton Theological Seminary Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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Text Appearing Before Image:
ope-
fulness of your young manhood. That is a
prayer you need not fear to offer in Christ's
name; it is a Christian prayer. If God will
put enough strong, positive Christian purpose
into your heart and life you will be safe from
the Philistines, I think; but in no other way.
If you are walking in the Spirit you will not
fulfil the lusts of the flesh.

137

The Meaning of Manhood
By
Henry van Dyke, D.D.
Pastor of the Brick Church, New York

How much, then, is a man better than a sheep!—
Matt. xii. 12.

ON the lips of Christ these noble words
were an exclamation. He knew, as no
one else has ever known, what was in man.
But to us who repeat them they often seem
like a question. We are so ignorant of the
deepest meaning of manhood, that we find
ourselves at the point to ask in perplexity,
How much, after all, is a man better than a
sheep? It is evident that the answer to this ques-
tion must depend upon our general view of
life. There are two very common ways of
looking at existence that settle our judgment

138

Text Appearing After Image:
Henry van Dyke, D.D.

The View of Materialism

of the comparative value of a man and a
sheep, at once and inevitably.
Suppose, in the first place, that we take a
materialistic view of life. Looking at the
world from this standpoint, we shall see in it a
great mass of matter, curiously regulated by
laws which have results, but no purposes, and
agitated into various modes of motion by a
secret force whose origin is, and forever must
be, unknown. Life, in man as in other ani-
mals, is but one form of this force. Rising
through many subtle gradations, from the
first tremor that passes through the gastric
nerve of a jellyfish to the most delicate vibra-
tion of gray matter in the brain of a Plato or
a Shakespeare, it is really the same from the
beginning to the end—physical in its birth
among the kindred forces of heat and electri-
city, physical in its death in cold ashes and
dust. The only difference between man and
the other animals is a difference of degree.
The ape takes his place in our ancestral tree,
and the sheep becomes our distant cousin.
It is true that we have somewhat the ad

139

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