I call it misplaced because Amaziah's fault, and the fault of a great
many of us, was, not that he took consequences into account, but that
he took them into account at the wrong time. The question should have
come second, not first. Amaziah's first business should have been to
see clearly what was duty; and then, and not till then, the next
business should have been to consider consequences.
Consider the right place and way of putting this question. Many of us
make shipwreck of our lives because, with our eyes shut, we determine
upon some grand design, and fall under the condemnation of the man
that 'began to build, and was not able to finish.' He drew a great
plan of a stately mansion; and then found that he had neither money in
the bank, nor stones in his quarry, to finish it, and so it stood--a
ruin. All through our Lord's life He was engaged rather in repressing
volunteers than in soliciting recruits, and He from time to time
poured a douche of cold water upon swiftly effervescing desires to go
after Him. When the multitudes followed Him, He turned and said to
them, 'If you are counting on being My disciples, understand what it
means: take up the cross and follow Me.' When an enthusiastic man, who
had not looked consequences in the face, came rushing to Him and said:
'Lord, I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest,' His answer to him
was another pull at the string of the shower bath: 'The Son of Man
hath not where to lay His head.' When the two disciples came to him
and said: 'Grant that we may sit, the one on Thy right hand and the
other on Thy left, when Thou comest into Thy kingdom,' He said: 'Are
ye able to drink of the cup that I drink of, and to be baptized with
the baptism that I am baptized withal?' Look the facts in the face
before you make your election. Jesus Christ will enlist no man under
false pretences. Recruiting-sergeants tell country bumpkins or city
louts wonderful stories of what they will get if they take the
shilling and put on the king's uniform; but Jesus Christ does not
recruit His soldiers in that fashion. If a man does not open his eyes
to a clear vision of the consequences of his actions, his life will go
to water in all directions. And there is no region in which such clear
insight into what is going to follow upon my determinations and the
part that I take is more necessary than in the Christian life. It is
just because in certain types of character, 'the word is received with
joy,' and springs up immediately, that when 'the sun is risen with a
burning heat'--that is, as Christ explains, when the pinch of
difficulty comes--'immediately they fall away,' and all their grand
resolutions go to nothing. 'Lightly come, lightly go.' Let us face the
facts of what is involved, in the way of sacrifice, surrender, loss,
if we determine to be on Christ's side; and then, when the anticipated
difficulties come, we shall neither be perplexed nor swept away, but
be able quietly to say, 'I discounted it all beforehand; I knew it was
coming.' The storm catches the ship that is carrying full sail and
expecting nothing but light and favourable breezes; while the captain
that looked into the weather quarter and saw the black cloud beginning
to rise above the horizon, and took in his sails and made his vessel
snug and tight, rides out the gale. It is wisdom that becomes a man,
to ask this question, if first of all he has asked, 'What ought I to
do?'
But we have here an instance of a right thing in a wrong place. It was
right to ask the question, but wrong to ask it at that point. Amaziah
thought nothing about duty. There sprang up in his mind at once the
cowardly and ignoble thought: 'I cannot afford to do what is right,
because it will cost me a hundred talents,' and that was his sin.
Consequences may be, must be, faced in anticipation, or a man is a
fool. He that allows the clearest perception of disagreeable
consequences, such as pain, loss of ease, loss of reputation, loss of
money, or any other harmful results that may follow, to frighten him
out of the road that he knows he ought to take, is a worse fool still,
for he is a coward and recreant to his own conscience.
We have to look into our own hearts for the most solemn and pressing
illustrations of this sin, and I daresay we all of us can remember
clear duties that we have neglected, because we did not like to face
what would come from them. A man in business will say, 'I cannot
afford to have such a high standard of morality; I shall be hopelessly
run over in the race with my competitors if I do not do as they do,'
or he will say, 'I durst not take a stand as an out-and-out Christian;
I shall lose connections, I shall lose position. People will laugh at
me. What am I to do for the hundred talents?'
But we can find the same thing in Churches. I do not mean to enter
upon controversial questions, but as an instance, I may remind you
that one great argument that our friends who believe in an Established
Church are always bringing forward, is just a modern form of Amaziah's
question, 'What shall we do for the hundred talents? How could the
Church be maintained, how could its ministrations be continued, if its
State-provided revenues were withdrawn or given up?' But it is not
only Anglicans who put the consideration of the consequences of
obedience in the wrong place. All the Churches are but too apt to let
their eyes wander from reading the plain precepts of the New Testament
to looking for the damaging results to be expected from keeping them.
Do we not sometimes hear, as answer to would-be reformers, 'We cannot
afford to give up this, that, or the other practice? We should not be
able to hold our ground, unless we did so-and-so and so-and-so.'
But not only individuals or Churches are guilty in this matter. The
nation takes a leaf out of Amaziah's book, and puts aside many plain
duties, for no better reason than that it would cost too much to do
them. 'What is the use of talking about suppressing the liquor traffic
or housing the poor? Think of the cost.' The 'hundred talents' block
the way and bribe the national conscience. For instance, the opium
traffic; how is it defended? Some attempt is made to prove either that
we did not force it upon China, or that the talk about the evils of
opium is missionary fanaticism, but the sheet-anchor is: 'How are we
ever to raise the Indian revenue if we give up the traffic?' That is
exactly Amaziah over again, come from the dead, and resurrected in a
very ugly shape.
So national policy and Church action, and--what is of far more
importance to you and me than either the one or the other,--our own
personal relation to Jesus Christ and discipleship to Him, have been
hampered, and are being hampered, just by that persistent and unworthy
attitude of looking at the consequences of doing plain duties, and
permitting ourselves to be frightened from the duties because the
consequences are unwelcome to us.
Prudence is all right, but when prudence takes command and presumes to
guide conscience, then it is all wrong. In some courts of law and in
certain cases, the judge has an assessor sitting beside him, an expert
about some of the questions that are involved. Conscience is the
judge, prudence the assessor. But if the assessor ventures up on the
judgment-seat, and begins to give the decisions which it is not his
business to give--for _his_ only business is to give advice--then
the only thing to do with the assessor is to tell him to hold his
tongue and let the judge speak. It is no answer to the prophet's
prohibition to say, 'But what shall I do for the hundred talents?' A
yet better answer than the prophet gave Amaziah would have been,
'Never mind about the hundred talents; do what is right, and leave the
rest to God.' However, that was not the answer.