The lowest instance is in regard to material possessions. It is a
complaint that is made against the present social arrangements and
distribution of wealth, that money makes money; that wealth has a
tendency to clot; the rich man to get richer, and the poor man to
get poorer. Just as in a basin of water when the plug is out, and
circular motion is set up, the little bits of foreign matter that
may be there all tend to get together, so it is in regard to these
external possessions. 'To him that hath shall be given'; and people
grumble about that and say, 'It never rains but it pours, and the
man that needs more money least gets it most easily.' Of course.
Treasure used grows; treasure hoarded rusts and dwindles. The
millionaire will double his fortune by a successful speculation. The
man with half a dozen large shops drives the poor little tradesman
out of the field. So it is all round: 'To him that hath shall be
given; but from him that hath not shall be taken even that he hath.'
Next, go a step higher. Look at how this law works in regard to
powers of body. That is a threadbare old illustration. The
blacksmith's arm we have all heard about; the sailor's eye, the
pianist's wrist, the juggler's fingers, the surgeon's deft hand--all
these come by use. 'To him that hath shall be given.' And the same
man who has cultivated one set of organs to an almost miraculous
fineness or delicacy or strength will, by the operation of the other
half of the same principle, have all but atrophied another set. So
with the blacksmith's arm, which has grown muscular at the expense
of his legs. Part of the physical frame has monopolised what might
have been distributed throughout the whole. Use is strength; use
makes growth. We have what we employ. And even in regard to our
bodily frame the organs that we do not use we carry about with us
rather as a weight attached to us than as a possession.
Again, come a little higher. This great principle largely goes to
determine our position in the world and our work. The man that can do
a thing gets it to do. In the long run the tools come to the hand that
can use them. So here is one medical man's consulting-room crammed
full of patients, and his neighbour next door has scarcely one. The
whole world runs to read A's, B's, or C's books. The briefless
barrister complains that there is no middle course between having
nothing to do and being overwhelmed with briefs. 'To him that hath
shall be given'--the man can do a thing, and he gets it to do--'and
from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath,'
That law largely settles every man's place in the world.
Let us come still higher. The same law has much--not all, but much--to
do in making men's characters. For it operates in its most intense
fashion, and with results most blessed or most disastrous, in the
inner life. The great example that I would adduce is conscience. Use
it, obey it, listen for its voice, never thwart it, and it grows and
grows and grows, and becomes more and more sensitive, more and more
educated, more and more sovereign in its decisions. Neglect it, still
more, go in its teeth, and it dwindles and dwindles and dwindles; and
I suppose it is possible--though one would fain hope that it is a very
exceptional case--for a man, by long-continued indifference to the
voice within that says 'Thou shalt' or 'Thou shalt not,' to come at
last to never hearing it at all, or to its never speaking at all. It
is 'seared as with a hot iron,' says one of the Apostles; and in
seared flesh there is no feeling any more. Are any of you, dear
friends, bringing about such a state? Are you doing what you know you
ought not to do? Then you will be less and less troubled as the days
go on; and, by neglecting the voice, you will come at last to be like
the profligate woman in the book of Proverbs, who, after her sin,
'wipes her mouth and says, I have done no harm.' Do you think _that_
is a desirable state--to put out the eyes of your soul, to stifle
what is the truest echo of God's voice that you will ever hear? Do
you not think that it would be wiser to get the blessed half of this
law on your side, instead of the dreadful one? Listen to that voice.
Never, as you value yourselves, neglect it. Cultivate the habit of
waiting for its monitions, its counsels prohibitory or commendatory,
and then you will have done much to secure that your spirit shall be
enriched by the operations of this wide-spread law.
Take another illustration. People who, by circumstances, are placed
in some position of dependence and subordination, where they have
seldom to exercise the initiative of choice, but just to do what
they are bid, by degrees all but lose the power of making up their
minds about anything. And so a slave set free is proverbially a
helpless creature, like a bit of driftwood; and children who have
been too long kept in a position of pupilage and subordination, when
they are sent into the world are apt to turn out very feeble men,
for want of a good, strong backbone of will in them. So, many a
woman that has been accustomed to leave everything in her husband's
hands, when the clods fall on his coffin finds herself utterly
helpless and bewildered, just because in the long, happy years she
never found it necessary to exercise her own judgment or her own
will about practical matters.
So do not get into the habit of letting circumstances settle what
you are to do, or you will lose the power of dominating them, before
very long. And if a man for years leaves himself, as it were, to be
guided by the stream of circumstances, like long green weeds in a
river, he will lose the power of determining his own fate, and the
Will will die clean out of him. Cultivate it, and it will grow.
Again, this same principle largely settles our knowledge, our
convictions, the operations and the furniture of our understandings.
If a man holds any truth slackly, or in the case of truths that are
meant to influence life and conduct, does not let it influence these,
then that is a kind of having truth that is sure to end in losing it.
If you want to lose your convictions grasp them loosely--do not act
upon them, do not take them for guides of your life--and they will
soon relieve you of their unwelcome presence. If you wish mind and
knowledge to grow, grip with a grip of iron what you do know, and
let it dominate you, as it ought. He that truly _has_ his
learning will learn more and pile by slow degrees stone upon stone,
until the building is complete.
So, dear friends, here, in these illustrations, which might have
been indefinitely enlarged, we see the working of a principle which
has much to do in making men what they are. What you use you
increase, what you leave unused you lose. There are grey heads in my
present audience who, when they were young men, had dreams and
aspirations that they bitterly smile at now. There are men here who
began life with possibilities that have never blossomed or fruited,
but have died on the stem. Why? Because they were so much occupied
with the vulpine craft of making their position and their 'pile'
that generous emotions and noble sympathies and lofty aspirations,
intellectual or otherwise, were all neglected, and so they are dead;
and the men are the poorer incalculably, because of what has thus
been shed away from them. You make your characters by the parts of
yourselves that you choose to cultivate and employ. Do you think
that God gave us whatever of an intellectual and emotional and moral
kind is in us, in order that it might be all used up in our daily
business? A very much scantier outfit would have done for all that
is wanted for that. But there are abortive and dormant organs in
your spiritual nature, as there are in the corporeal, which tell you
what you were meant for, and which it is your sin to leave
undeveloped. Brethren, the law of my text shapes us in the two ways,
that whatever we cultivate, be it noble or be it bestial, will grow,
and whatever we repress or neglect will die. Choose which of the two
halves of yourselves you will foster, and on which you will frown.
So much, then, for the first general application of these words. Now
let me turn for a moment to another.
II. I would note, secondly, the application of this two-fold law in
regard to God's revelation of Himself.
That is the bearing of it in the immediate context from which our
text is taken. Our Lord explains that teaching by parable--a
transparent veil over a truth--was adopted in order that the veiled
truth might be a test as well as a revelation. And although I do not
believe that the Christian revelation has been made in any degree
less plain and obvious than it could have been made, I cannot but
recognise the fact that the necessities of the case demand that,
when God speaks to us, He should speak in such a fashion as that it
is possible to say, 'Tush! It is not God that is speaking; it is
only Eli!' and so to turn about the young Samuel's mistake the other
way. I do not believe that God has diminished the evidence of His
Revelation in order to try us; but I do maintain that the Revelation
which He has made does come to us, and must come to us, in such a
form as that, not by mathematical demonstration but by moral
affinity, we shall be led to recognise and to bow to it. He that
will be ignorant, let him be ignorant, and he that will come asking
for truth, it will flood his eyeballs with a blessed illumination.
The veil will but make more attractive to some eyes the outlines of
the fair form beneath it, whilst others are offended at it and say,
'Unless we see the truth undraped, we will not believe that it is
truth at all.'
So, brethren, let me remind you--what is really but a repetition in
reference to another subject of what I have already said,--that in
regard to God's speech to men, and especially in regard to what I,
for my part, believe to be the complete and ultimate and perfect
speech of God to men, in Jesus Christ our Saviour, the principle of
my text holds good.
'To him that hath shall be given.' If you will make that truth your
own by loyal faith and honest obedience, if you will grapple it to
your heart, then you will learn more and more. Whatever tiny corner
of the great whole you have grasped, hold on by that and draw it
into yourselves, and you will by degrees get the entire, glorious,
golden web to wrap round you. 'If any man wills to do His will he
shall know.' That is Christ's promise; and it will be fulfilled to
us all. 'To him that hath shall be given.'
If, on the other hand, you 'have' Christian truth and Christ, who is
the Truth, in the fashion in which so many of us have it and Him, as
a form, as a mere intellectual possession, so that we can, when we
go to church, repeat the creed without feeling that we are telling a
lie, but that when we go to market we do not carry the Commandments
with us--if that is our Christianity, then it will dribble away into
nothing. We shall not be much the poorer for the loss of such a sham
possession, but it will go. It drops out of the hands that are not
clasped to hold it. It is just that a thing so neglected shall some
day be a thing withdrawn. So in regard to Revelation and a man's
perception and reception of it, my text holds good in both its
halves.