illustration of spiritual truth. Yet the story has its obvious lessons
about the uses of money itself. The five-talent man is the rich man;
and his way of service makes the Christian doctrine of wealth. And,
first of all, the parable evidently permits wealth to exist. It does
not prohibit accumulation. Jesus is not a social leveler. His words
are full of tenderness to the poor, but when a certain rich young man
came to him, Jesus loved him also; and when one man asked him, saying:
"Master, speak to my brother that he divide the inheritance with me,"
Jesus disclaimed the office of a social agitator, saying: "Man, who
made me a judge or a divider over you." Thus Jesus cannot be claimed
for any pet scheme which one may have of the distribution of wealth.
But let not the Christian {130} think that on this account the
Christian theory of wealth is less sweeping or radical than some modern
programme. The fact is that it asks more of a man, be he rich or poor,
than any modern agitator dares to propose. For it demands not a part
of one's possessions as the property of others, but the whole of them.
The Christian holds all his talents as a trust. There is in the
Christian belief no absolute ownership of property. A man has no
justification in saying: "May I not do what I will with mine own?" He
does not own his wealth; he owes it. The Christian principle does not
divide the rich from the poor; it divides the faithful use of whatever
one has from its unfaithful use. Wealth is a fund of five talents of
which one is the trusted agent; and to some five-talent men who have
been faithful in their grave responsibilities, the word of Jesus would
be given to-day as gladly as to any poor man: "Well done, faithful
servant, enter into the joy of thy Lord."
{131}
LIII
THE AVERAGE MAN[1]
_Matthew_ xxv. 22.
In the parable of the talents the man that gets least general attention
is the man that stands in the middle. The five-talent man gets
distinction, and the one-talent man gets rebuke, but the two-talent
man, the man with ordinary gifts and ordinary returns from them, seems
to be an unexciting character. And yet this is the man of the
majority, the average man, the man most like ourselves,--not very bad,
and not very remarkable. As has been said: "God must have a special
fondness for average people, for He has made so many of them." Now,
the average man stands in special need of encouragement. One of the
most serious moments of life is when a man discovers that he is this
sort of man. It comes over most of us some day that we are not going
{132} to do anything extraordinary; that we are never likely to shine;
that we are simply people of the crowd. Nothing seems to take the
ambition and enthusiasm out of one more than this recognition of
oneself as an average man. Then comes Jesus with his word of courage.
"Your work," he says, "is just as significant, and rewarded with
precisely the same commendation as the work of the five-talent man."
The same "Well done" is spoken to both, and it may be that the more
heroic qualities are in the man with fewer gifts. To make great gifts
effective may be easy, but to take common gifts and make them yield
their best returns--that is what helps us all. There is not a more
inspiring sight in life than to see a man start with ordinary capacity
and to see his power grow out of his consecration. Looking back on
life from middle age, that would be the story one would tell of many a
success. One sees five-talent men fail and two-talent men take their
place; average gifts persistently used yielding rich returns, and the
promise of usefulness lying, not in abundant endowments of nature, but
in the using to the utmost what moderate capacities one has soberly
accepted as trusts from God.
[1] Read also, on this and the following subject, the kindling sermons
of Phillips Brooks: "The Man with Two Talents," vol. iv. p. 192; "The
Man with One Talent," vol. i. p. 138.
{133}
LIV
THE OVERCOMING OF INSIGNIFICANCE
_Matthew_ xxv. 24.
The parable of the talents was specially given to teach Christians not
to be discouraged because Christ's kingdom was delayed. The one-talent
man is its real object, and the lessons of larger endowment are only by
the way. The one-talent man is not the bad man, for to him also God
gives a trust, but this man is given so little to do that he thinks it
not worth while to do anything. He is not the many-gifted five-talent
man, or even the average two-talent man, but he is simply the man of no
account. The risk of the five-talent man is his conceit; the risk of
the two-talent man is his envy; the risk of the one-talent man is his
hopelessness. Why should this insignificant bubble on the great stream
of life inflate itself with self-importance? Why should it not just
drift along with the current and be lost in the first rapids of the
stream? Now Christ's first appeal to this sense of insignificance is
{134} this,--that in the sight of God there is no such thing as an
insignificant life. Taken by itself, looked at in its own independent
personality, many a life is insignificant enough. But when we look at
life religiously and recognize that it is a trusted agent of God, then
the doctrine of the trust redeems it from insignificance. You have not
much, but what you have is essential to the whole. The
lighthouse-keeper on his rock sits in his solitude and watches his
little flame. Why does he not let it die away as other lights in the
distance die when the night comes on? Because it is not his light. He
is its keeper, not its owner. The great Power that watches that stormy
coast has set him there, and he must be true. The insignificant
service becomes full of dignity and importance when it is accepted as a
post of honor and trust. So the unimportant life gets its significance
not by its own dimensions, but by its place in God's great order, and
the most wretched moment of one's life must be when he discovers that
he has been trusted by God to do even a little part and has thrown his
chance away. The one-talent man thought his trust not worth investing,
and behold, the account of it was called for with the rest. He {135}
had in his hands a trust from God and had wasted it, and there was
nothing left for him but the weeping of regret and the gnashing of
teeth of indignant self-reproach.
{136}
LV
CAPACITY EXTIRPATED BY DISUSE
_Matthew_ xxv. 29.
The parable of the talents begins with its splendid encouragement to
those who have done their best, but it ends with a solemn warning and
with the stern announcement of a universal law. It is this,--that from
him who does not use his powers there is taken away even the power that
he has. The gift is lost by the lack of exercise, or as Horace
Bushnell stated the principle, the "capacity is extirpated by disuse."
This principle has manifold illustrations. The hand or muscle disused
withers in power. The fishes of the Mammoth Cave, having no use for
their eyes, lose them. Mr. Darwin in an impressive passage of his
biography testifies that he began life with a taste for poetry and
music, but that by disuse this aesthetic taste grew atrophied so that
at last he did not care to read a poem or to hear a musical note. So
it is, says Jesus, with spiritual insight and power. Sometimes we see
a man of intellectual {137} gifts lose his grasp on spiritual
realities, and we ask: "How is it that so learned a man can find little
in these things? Does not he testify that these things are illusions?"
Not at all. It is simply that he has not kept his life trained on that
side. His capacity has been extirpated by disuse. He may know much of
science or language, but he has lost his ideals. We hear a young man
sometimes say that he has grown soft by lack of exercise. Well, if you
live a few years you will see people who have grown soft in soul, and
you will see some great blow of fate smite them and crush them because
their spiritual muscle is flabby and weak. Ignatius Loyola laid down
for his followers certain methods of prayer which he called "Spiritual
Exercises." So in one sense they were. They kept souls in training.
The exercise of the religious nature is the gymnastics of the soul, and
the disuse of the religious nature extirpates its capacity. That is
the solemn ending of the parable of the talents. From him who does not
use his power there is taken away even the power that he hath.
{138}
LVI
THE PARABLE OF THE VACUUM
_Matthew_ xii. 38-45.
It is easy to see where the emphasis of this parable lies. It is on
the impossible emptiness of this man's house. A man casts out the
devil of his life and turns the key on his empty soul and feels safe.
But he cannot thus find safety. That is not the way to deal with evil
spirits. Back they come, crowding into his life through the windows if
not through the doors, and the last state of that man is worse than the
first. If the parable had been told in modern times it might have been
called the parable of the vacuum. A man's life is a space which
refuses to be empty. If it is not tenanted by good the evil knocks and
enters it. There is no such thing as an unoccupied life. Nature
abhors a vacuum.
Here is one of the most common mistakes of human experience. A man
often thinks that the less occupied his life is the safer it is. He
casts out his passions, he denies his {139} desires, he abandons his
ambitions, and so seeks safety. But his life is attacked by new
perils. The lusts and conceits of life cannot be barred out of life;
they must be crowded out. The old passion must be supplanted by a new
and better one. The very same qualities which go to make a great
sinner are needed to make a true saint. A man's soul is not safe when
the vigor and force are taken out of it. It is safe only when the same
passion which once threatened ruin is converted to generous service;
and the same physical life that seemed an enemy of the soul has become
the instrument of the soul. The saved life is not the empty life, but
the full life. Jesus comes not to destroy men's natures, but to fill
their capacities full of better aims. The only way to overcome evil is
to have the life preoccupied by good.
{140}
LVII
CHRISTIANITY AND BUSINESS
_Luke_ xvi. 1-12.
This is a difficult parable. There is a quality of daring about it
which at first sight perplexes many people. It is the story of a
steward who cheats his master, and of debtors who are in collusion with
the fraud, and of a master praising his servant even while he punishes
him, as though he said: "Well, at least you are a shrewd and clever
fellow." It uses, that is to say, the bad people to teach a lesson to
the good, and one might fancy that it praises the bad people at the
expense of the good. But this is not its intention. It simply goes
its way into the midst of a group of people who are cheating and
defrauding each other and says: "Even such people as these have
something to teach to the children of light."
I once heard of a father whose son was sentenced to the Concord
Reformatory for burglary. The father stood by the bars of the cell and
heard the boy's story, and then {141} with tears in his eyes he turned
to the jailer and said: "It is a terrible sorrow to have one's boy thus
disgraced, but"--and his face brightened a little--"after all he was
monstrous plucky." So Jesus, out of the heart of this petty group of
persons snatches a lesson for Christians. It is this: "Why should not
the children of light be as sagacious as these rascals were? Why
should pious people be so stupid?" Jesus looks on to the needs that
must occur in his religion for sagacity, prudence, discretion, and the
perils that will come to it from sentimentalism, mysticism, silliness,
and he asks: "Why is it that the children of this world are so much
shrewder than the children of light?"
How closely his question comes to the needs of our own time! Why is it
that in our moral agitations and reforms the bad people seem so much
cleverer than the good ones; that political self-seeking gets the
better of unselfish statesmanship; that the liquor dealers defeat the
temperance people; that competition in business is so often cleverer
than coöperation in business? What does Christianity need to-day so
much as wisdom? It has soft-heartedness, but it lacks {142}
hard-headedness. It has sweetness, but it lacks light. It has
sentiment, but it needs sense. How often a man of affairs is tempted
to feel a certain contempt for the Church of Christ, when he turns from
the intensely real issues of his week-day world to the abstractness and
unreality of religious questions! How fictitious, how unbusiness-like,
how preposterous in the sight of God is this internecine sectarianism
and impotent sentimentalism where there might be the triumphant march
of one army under one flag! Let us learn the lesson which even the
grasping, unscrupulous world has to teach,--the lesson of an absorbed
and disciplined mind giving its entire sagacity to the chief business
of life.
{143}
LVIII
MAKING FRIENDS OF MAMMON
_Luke_ xvi. 1-10.
Mammon means money, and the purpose of this parable is to teach
Christians their relations to that world of which Mammon is the
centre,--the world of business interests and cares. Jesus says that
this world is neither very good nor very bad. It is simply
unrighteous. It has no specific moral quality about it. He says
further that you cannot serve this world of Mammon and serve God also.
You must choose. What then can you do in your relation to Mammon? You
can do one of three things. You may, first, make an enemy of Mammon;
or secondly, make a master of Mammon, or thirdly, make a friend of
Mammon. Many people in Christian history have made an enemy of Mammon.
They have regarded the world of business as a godless world which
should be shunned. They have run away from it to the ascetic,
unworldly life. That is the spirit of the whole monastic retreat from
the battle of {144} practical life,--a reaction full of the beauty of
self-denial, but still a retreat. The battle of life has to go on, and
the best troops have run away. On the other hand, a great many persons
have made a master of Mammon. They are simply the slaves of money.
That is the vulgar materialism of the modern world. But Jesus says
that neither of these attitudes towards Mammon is the Christian
relation. The Christian is to make a friend of Mammon; to welcome it,
and to use it, to discover the good in it and learn its lessons; to
mould it into the higher uses of life. Here is a potter working in his
clay. It is a coarse material which he uses and his hands grow soiled
as he works; but it is not for him to reject it because it is not
clean, but for him to work out through it the shapes of beauty which
are possible within the limits of the clay. Just such a material is
the modern world. It is not very clean and not very beautiful; but the
problem of life is to mould out of its uncleanness the shapes of beauty
which it contains. To run away from life--that is easy enough; to
yield to its evil--that is still easier; but to be in the world and to
mould it--that is the {145} real problem of the Christian life. And
here is the real test of Christian character. The saints of the past
have been for the most part men who fled from the world, but the saint
of to-day is the man who can use the world. He is the man of business
who amid looseness of standards keeps himself clean. He is the youth
in college who without the least retreat from its influences moulds
them to good. He is not the runaway from the world of Mammon, nor yet
its slave; he makes a friend of Mammon for the service of God.
{146}
LIX
COMING TO ONE'S SELF
_Luke_ xv. 17.
When he came to himself he said: "I will arise and go to my father."
This is one of those gospel sentences which contains within itself a
whole system of theology, a doctrine of man and of God and of the
relation of the one to the other. He came to himself. It was not then
himself that had gone away into a far country. It was an unreal,
fictitious self. He had been insane, beside himself, and now, as his
better life starts up in him, he comes to himself. As his father said
of him, he had been dead and was alive again. The renewal of the good
self in him was the resurrection of his true personality.
How deep that goes into one's doctrine of human nature! Never believe
that the sinning self is the true self. Your real personality is the
potential good in you. The moment that good springs into life you have
a right to say: "Now I know what I was {147} made for. I have come to
life. I have discovered myself." And then there is the religious
aspect of this same self-discovery. No sooner does this boy come to
himself than he says, "I will arise and go to my father." The
religious need follows at once from the self-awakening. Nay, was not
the religious need the source of the self-awakening? What was it that
brought him to himself but just the homesickness of the child for his
father's house? His self-discovery was but the answer of his soul to
the continuous love of God. Before he ever came to himself the father
was waiting for him. Antecedent to the ethical return was the
religious quickening. That is the relation of religion to conduct.
You make your resolutions, but it is God that prompts them. Your
self-discovery is the drawing of the Father. Your true self is his
son. How natural it all is,--an infinite law of love at the heart of
the universe--that is the centre of theology; a world that permits
moral alienation through the free will of man,--that is the problem of
philosophy; he came to himself,--that is the heart of ethics; I will go
to my Father,--that is the soul of religion.
{148}
LX
POPULARITY
_Luke_ xix. 37-43; _Matthew_ xxi. 17-23.
(PASSION WEEK--MONDAY)
The ministry of Jesus is as a whole not easy to arrange in any fixed
chronology. The order of events seems often to vary in the different
gospels, and sometimes these unstudied narratives seem in positive
conflict. But as the story draws to its close the paths of narrative
begin to converge, and as we approach the last days and enter on the
last week the incidents of each day become perfectly distinct, and one
can trace the life of Jesus as it moves on from his triumph of Palm
Sunday to his tragedy of the cross. As we enter then to-day on the
anniversary of the last week of the life of Jesus, the week before
Easter Sunday, let us glance at some of the hurrying events. And for
today consider the contrast which presents itself between the entrance
of Jesus at Jerusalem on Sunday morning, and his return to the city by
the same road on this Monday {149} morning of his last week. Yesterday
he came over the brow of the Mount of Olives, surrounded by an
enthusiastic throng, the centre of their popularity. To-day he comes
along the same road, unattended and alone, the crowd slinking away from
him, his popularity gone. And how does he bear himself through these
shillings of opinion? He simply does not manifest any consciousness of
change. He is as undisturbed by neglect as he was yesterday by
success. On Sunday, while the people were spreading their branches
beneath his feet, he looked across the valley to the city and wept as
he looked; and to-day, coming with no popular applause, he enters
straight into the city and asserts to its leaders his supreme
authority. In the midst of popularity he seems saddened, and in the
midst of neglect he seems stirred to a defiant boldness. In short, he
is unscathed alike by what seems to be success and what seems to be
failure. He goes his way through it all with his eye on that great end
which gives him peace amid the throng, and courage amid the solitude.
That is the only way in which one can maintain himself among the
shifting currents {150} of popularity. It comes and goes like a tide.
The man who tries to lean on it is simply swept by the rising tide into
self-conceit, and then stranded by the ebb of that same tide on the
flats of despair. Popularity is as fickle as the April winds, and one
can trust it as little as he dare trust the New England climate. It is
only he who can be wholly self-controlled amid the triumphs of his Palm
Sunday who can move on with equal self-control to the bearing of the
cross with which that same week may close.
{151}
LXI
TWO QUESTIONS ABOUT CHRISTIANITY
_Luke_ xx. 19-38.
(PASSION WEEK--TUESDAY)
The Sunday of the last week of Jesus was all triumph, the Monday was
all neglect, the Tuesday was all controversy. He returns once more
from Bethany to the city, and he finds the opposition at its height.
At once he is set upon by two kinds of people and asked two kinds of
questions as to his mission and aim. One question was political, or as
we now are saying sociological. What did he think about taxation?
What was his attitude toward the government? Was he encouraging social
revolt? Was he an anarchist or a socialist? The other question was
theological. What did he think about the future life? How would
marriage be arranged in heaven? Was his theology orthodox? All this
must have seemed to Jesus malicious enough, but I think that the
deepest impression he had of such questions {152} must have been of
their stupidity. How was it possible that after months of public
teaching any one could suppose that such problems were in the line of
his intention. Here he was, trying to bring spiritual life among his
people,--the life of God to the souls of men,--and here were people
still trying to find in him a political schemer or a metaphysical
theologian.
Yet there are questions of much this nature still being asked of Jesus.
Some honest persons are still insisting that Christ's religion is a
system of theology, and some are trying to make of it a course in
social science, and neither of them seem to notice that the last day of
general teaching which was permitted to him on earth was largely
devoted to demonstrating that he was neither a social agitator nor a
theological professor. Christianity is not a scheme or arrangement,
social or theological, like a railway which men might build either to
accelerate the business of life or to take one straight to heaven.
Christianity provides that which all such mechanism needs. It is a
power, like that electric force which makes the equipment of a railway
move. A church is a power-house for the {153} development and the
transmission of the power that makes things go. Cut off the power, and
the theological creeds and social programmes of the day stand there
paralyzed or dead. Communicate to them the dynamic of the Christian
life, and the power goes singing over all the wires of life and sets
its mechanism in motion, as though it sang upon its way: "I am come
that these may have my life, and may have it abundantly."
{154}
LXII
AN UNRECORDED DAY
(PASSION WEEK--WEDNESDAY)
We have traced from day to day the life of Jesus through the earlier
days of its last week, its triumph of Sunday, its solitude of Monday,
its controversies of Tuesday. On each of these days Jesus has come
over the hill from Bethany into the city, and has returned to the
village at night. And now we come to the last day before the Passover
and the betrayal; the last chance to meet his enemies and to enforce
his cause. What then does Jesus do on this last Wednesday of his life?
So far as we know, he does nothing at all. It is a day without record.
There is no New Testament passage from which I can read about it. He
appears to have stayed at Bethany, perhaps with his friends, perhaps
for a part of the day alone. His work was done, and he used this last
day for quiet withdrawal.
What self-control and reserve are here! How would one of us have been
inclined to conduct himself, if he found himself with just {155} one
more day for active service? "One more day," he would have said; "then
fill it with the best works and the best words; let me stamp my message
on my time; let me fulfil the work which was given me to do." But
Jesus has no such lust of finishing. He simply commits his spirit to
his Father, and awaits the trial and the cross. And perhaps on that
unrecorded day his real agony was met, and his real cross borne.
Perhaps as he went up on that hillside, which still overlooks the
little village of Bethany, and looked at his past and at his future,
the real spiritual conquest was attained; for he comes back again to
Jerusalem on Thursday morning, not with the demeanor of a martyr but
with the air of a conqueror; and when Pilate asks him if he is a king
he answers him: "Thou hast said it."
So it is with many a life. It has its great days,--its Palm Sundays of
triumphs, its Good Fridays of cross-bearing, and these seem the epochs
of its experience; but when one searches for the sources of its
strength, they lie--do they not?--in some unrecorded day, as the
sources of an abundant river lie hidden in some nook among the hills.
{156}
LXIII
THE ANSWER TO PRAYER
_Luke_ xxii. 39-48.
(PASSION WEEK--THURSDAY)