'With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you,'
enlightened Christians that you are, or by the outside world. Now,
Paul's letters give ample evidence that he was keenly alive to the
hostile and malevolent criticisms and slanders of his untiring
opponents. Many a flash of sarcasm out of the cloud like a lightning
bolt, many a burst of wounded affection like rain from summer skies,
tell us this. But I need not quote these. Such a character as his
could not but be quick to feel the surrounding atmosphere, whether it
was of love or of suspicion. So, he had to harden himself against
what naturally had a great effect upon him, the estimate which he
felt that people round him were making of him. There was nothing
brusque, rough, contemptuous in his brushing aside these popular
judgments. He gave them all due weight, and yet he felt, 'From all
that this lowest tribunal may decide, there are two appeals, one to
my own conscience, and one to my Master in heaven.'
Now, I suppose I need not say a word about the power which that
terrible court which is always sitting, and which passes judgment
upon every one of us, though we do not always hear the sentences
read, has upon us all. There is a power which it is meant to have. It
is not good for a man to stand constantly in the attitude of defying
whatever anybody else chooses to say or to think about him. But the
danger to which we are all exposed, far more than that other extreme,
is of deferring too completely and slavishly to, and being far too
subtly influenced in all that we do by, the thought of what A, B, or
C, may have to say or to think about it. 'The last infirmity of noble
minds,' says Milton about the love of fame. It is an infirmity to
love it, and long for it, and live by it. It is a weakening of
humanity, even where men are spurred to great efforts by the thought
of the reverberation of these in the ear of the world, and of the
honour and glory that may come therefrom.
But not only in these higher forms of seeking after reputation, but
in lower forms, this trembling before, and seeking to conciliate, the
tribunal of what we call 'general opinion,' which means the voices of
the half-dozen people that are beside us and know about us, besets us
all, and weakens us all in a thousand ways. How many men would lose
all the motive that they have for living reputable lives, if nobody
knew anything about it? How many of you, when you go to London, and
are strangers, frequent places that you would not be seen in in
Manchester? How many of us are hindered, in courses which we know
that we ought to pursue, because we are afraid of this or that man or
woman, and of what they may look or speak? There is a regard to man's
judgment, which is separated by the very thinnest partition from
hypocrisy. There is a very shadowy distinction between the man who,
consciously or unconsciously, does a thing with an eye to what people
may say about it, and the man who pretends to be what he is not for
the sake of the reputation that he may thereby win.
Now, the direct tendency of Christian faith and principle is to
dwindle into wholesome insignificance the multitudinous voice of
men's judgments. For, if I understand at all what Christianity means,
it means centrally and essentially this, that I am brought into
loving personal relation with Jesus Christ, and draw from Him the
power of my life, and from Him the law of my life, and from Him the
stimulus of my life, and from Him the reward of my life. If there is
a direct communication between me and Him, and if I am deriving from
Him the life that He gives, which is 'free from the law of sin and
death,' I shall have little need or desire to heed the judgment that
men, who see only the surface, may pass upon me, and upon my doings,
and I shall refer myself to Him instead of to them. Those who can go
straight to Christ, whose lives are steeped in Him, who feel that
they draw all from Him, and that their actions and character are
moulded by His touch and His Spirit, are responsible to no other
tribunal. And the less they think about what men have to say of them
the stronger, the nobler, the more Christ-like they will be.
There is no need for any contempt or roughness to blend with such a
putting aside of men's judgments. The velvet glove may be worn upon
the iron hand. All meekness and lowliness may go with this wholesome
independence, and must go with it unless that independence is false
and distorted. 'With me it is a very small thing to be judged of you,
or of man's judgment,' need not be said in such a tone as to mean 'I
do not care a rush what you think about me'; but it must be said in
such a tone as to mean 'I care supremely for one approbation, and if
I have that I can bear anything besides.'
Let me appeal to you to cultivate more distinctly, as a plain
Christian duty, this wholesome independence of men's judgment. I
suppose there never was a day when it was more needed that men should
be themselves, seeing with their own eyes what God may reveal
to them and they are capable of receiving, and walking with their own
feet on the path that fits them, whatsoever other people may say
about it. For the multiplication of daily literature, the way in
which we are all living in glass houses nowadays--everybody knowing
everything about everybody else, and delighting in the gossip which
takes the place of literature in so many quarters--and the tendency
of society to a more democratic form give the many-headed monster and
its many tongues far more power than is wholesome, in the shaping of
the lives and character and conduct of most men. The evil of
democracy is that it levels down all to one plane, and that it tends
to turn out millions of people, as like each other as if they had
been made in a machine. And so we need, I believe, even more than our
fathers did, to lay to heart this lesson, that the direct result of a
deep and strong Christian faith is the production of intensely
individual character. And if there are plenty of angles in it,
perhaps so much the better. We are apt to be rounded by being rubbed
against each other, like the stones on the beach, till there is not a
sharp corner or a point that can prick anywhere. So society becomes
utterly monotonous, and is insipid and profitless because of that.
You Christian people, be yourselves, after your own pattern. And
whilst you accept all help from surrounding suggestions and hints,
make it 'a very small thing that you be judged of men.' And you,
young men, in warehouses and shops, and you, students, and you, boys
and girls, that are budding into life, never mind what other people
say. 'Let thine eyes look right onwards,' and let all the clatter on
either side of you go on as it will. The voices are very loud, but if
we go up high enough on the hill-top, to the secret place of the Most
High, we shall look down and see, but not hear, the bustle and the
buzz; and in the great silence Christ will whisper to us, 'Well done!
good and faithful servant.' That praise is worth getting, and one way
to get it is to put aside the hindrance of anxious seeking to
conciliate the good opinion of men.