There are two forms of disloyalty. One is flinching, the other is
compromise. Of course, the compromiser will never allow that he is
disloyal. He is a practical man who realizes that theories and ideals
have to be adapted to a practical world, and he gives up a part, and
as unimportant a part as possible, in order that he may gain the rest.
He feels himself quite capable of judging how much to give up and what
part may rightly be given up. He will simply abate the unreason of
a God who demands all righteousness, and to Whom the whole truth is
truth. Let us set up against such men the uncompromising principle of
the duty of non-compromise. It is a principle from which the wisest
and best of men are sometimes won away in the supposed interest of
the great ends which they seek, and for which they feel that they may
rightly sacrifice subordinate issues. There is what some regard as a
striking incident of this character in the life of that uncompromising
man, Saint Paul. It is an exciting and instructive story. This is the
way it is told in the twenty-first chapter of Acts (vs. 17–30):
“And when we were come to Jerusalem, the brethren received
us gladly. And the day following Paul went in with us unto
James; and all the elders were present. And when he had saluted
them, he rehearsed one by one the things which God had wrought
among the Gentiles through his ministry. And they, when they
heard it, glorified God; and they said unto him, Thou seest,
brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of them
that have believed; and they are all zealous for the law: and
they have been informed concerning thee, that thou teachest all
the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling
them not to circumcise their children, neither to walk after
the customs. What is it therefore? they will certainly hear
that thou art come. Do therefore this that we say to thee: We
have four men that have a vow on them; these take, and purify
thyself with them, and be at charges for them, that they may
shave their heads: and all shall know that there is no truth
in the things whereof they have been informed concerning
thee; but that thou thyself also walkest orderly, keeping
the law. But as touching the Gentiles that have believed, we
wrote, giving judgment that they should keep themselves from
things sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what is
strangled, and from fornication. Then Paul took the men, and
the next day purifying himself with them went into the temple,
declaring the fulfillment of the days of purification, until
the offering was offered for every one of them.
“And when the seven days were almost completed, the Jews from
Asia, when they saw him in the temple, stirred up all the
multitude and laid hands on him, crying out, Men of Israel,
help: This is the man that teacheth all men everywhere against
the people, and the law, and this place; and moreover he
brought Greeks also into the temple, and hath defiled this holy
place. For they had before seen with him in the city Trophimus
the Ephesian, whom they supposed that Paul had brought into
the temple. And all the city was moved, and the people ran
together; and they laid hold on Paul, and dragged him out of
the temple: and straightway the doors were shut.”
And that was the disastrous end of this conscientious experiment. Paul
never tried another like it. Perhaps there is a construction of the
story which forbids the idea that it was compromise but it suffices
at any rate to raise the whole question of the wisdom of compromise
as a principle of action. It is the one incident in Paul’s life
where he might be thought even for a moment to have embarked on that
course. Wherever else we see him, he is a man of firm and unflinching
principles, who made no concealment of what he believed, and did not
try to adjust his convictions and practices to other convictions and
practices that were at variance with them.
In the second chapter of Galatians, you will remember, Paul is telling
of a visit he made to Jerusalem some time before with Barnabas and
Titus, in which they went up to consider these very questions. Some
of the brethren in Jerusalem had endeavoured to persuade Paul to have
Titus, who was a Gentile, circumcised, and Paul says, “To whom we
gave place ... no, not for an hour.” And then he tells of the time
when Peter came to Antioch and he withstood him to his face because he
had been a trimmer and compromiser; for Peter, acting on the generous
impulse of his own heart as to what was right, had indeed bravely eaten
with the converted Gentiles, but when some men came down from Jerusalem
who were close to James, he withdrew himself from the Gentiles,
fearing, no doubt, that it might injure him in Jerusalem.
Paul does not say anything in any letter about this particular
incident in Jerusalem, in which, for the one time in his life, he
was overpersuaded by his friends and put in a position where he was
very much misunderstood, and where he appeared to be compromising the
great principles in which he earnestly believed. We know what the
far-reaching consequences were. A great deal of trouble was brought
into his life by this act. It was out of it that all those succeeding
events came which took him at last to Rome to be tried before Cæsar.
Some may say that these results were good. Undoubtedly God led Paul’s
course on, but we may believe that God might have had even greater
things for him to do if only he had in this incident pursued his
customary course.
But we want to go far beyond the question as to whether the consequences
may ever appear to justify acts of compromise. A course of action is
right or wrong, not according to the consequences, but according to its
conformity or unconformity to the character of God. And the point now
raised is whether it is ever right for us to compromise our own firm
convictions of truth and principle.
Now, the world tells us that such compromise is to-day absolutely
unavoidable. Men and women, we are assured, cannot get along in a world
like this without adaptations. If it is meant by this only that we are
often obliged to adapt ourselves to that with which we do not agree,
why, of course, we have to assent, because we are in a world of give
and take of which we have to be a part, and it is necessary for us
to live our life and do our work in this world. Here in many of our
communities, for example, the saloons flourish. There is not one of
us here in this audience who believes that it is wise that the saloon
should exist under the protection of the government, but we have to
live in a land where the principle with which we disagree prevails,
and the only way we can escape is to go to some other land, and we
would only find there some other principle with which we could not
agree. We cannot live at all unless we are willing to adjust ourselves
to an actual world. “Compromise” when used as the principle of such
adjustment means simply that we must of necessity find room for
ourselves among the crossing strands of life. “All government,” says
Burke, “indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every vital and every
prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.” “It cannot be too
emphatically asserted,” says Spencer, “that this policy of compromise
alike in institution, in action and in belief which especially
characterizes English life is a policy essential to a society going
through the transition caused by continuous growth and development.”
And Emerson remarks, “Almost all people descend to meet. All
association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower
and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as
they approach each other.”
If it is meant by compromise that we have to live under conditions
with which we do not agree and to which we must adjust ourselves,
why, of course, we must assent to that――it is perfectly obvious; but
we do not need to live under those conditions assenting to them. We
can bear our testimony against whatever we morally disapprove. We
can assert our conviction by word or by the silent protest of life
that those conditions are not right, and so to live in the midst of
conditions in which we do not believe, but from which we cannot escape,
is not compromise. It is compromise when we surrender our principles
so that others do not understand what those principles are, or when
we hold back something that is vital, or cover over deceptively or
misleadingly something essential. When we take before men a position
that is inconsistent with the position that in our hearts we are taking
before God, that is compromise, and that is wrong. Regarding the truth
in which we believe, the principles by which we know life ought to be
lived, regarding these things there cannot be compromise, in our lives
or in the Christian Church.
There is a noble essay by Mr. John Morley, as he once was, on this
subject of compromise, its nature and limits, of which Scott Holland
says in “Lux Mundi” that “no one can read that book without being
either the better or the worse for it.” In it Morley takes up three
different spheres of life. First, the formation of opinion; second,
the expression of opinion when it is called out from us; and, third,
the propagation of opinion; and then he pursues this line of argument:
In the matter of the formation of opinion there cannot be any
compromise at all. Every one of us is bound to hunt for the truth, no
matter what the truth may be, and when we have found it, to give our
lives absolutely to it. In the realm of the expression of opinion,
nobody has any right to deceive any one regarding his principles and
convictions when they are called forth. But in the third place, he
admits room for compromise when it comes to the aggressive propagation
of our convictions. He says that every man is not bound to propagate
what he believes, and he takes for example his own case,――that of
a man who does not believe in the Bible, who has abandoned the old
religious views of his people, but who does not regard it as his duty
aggressively to propagate his dissentient convictions.
In his own words his thesis is this:
“In the positive endeavour to realize an opinion, to convert
a theory into practice, it may be, and very often is, highly
expedient to defer to the prejudices of the majority, to
move very slowly, to bow to the conditions of the status
quo, to practice the very utmost sobriety, self-restraint,
and conciliatoriness. The mere expression of opinion, in the
next place, the avowal of dissent from received notions, the
refusal to conform to language which implies the acceptance
of such notions――this rests on a different footing. Here
the reasons for respecting the wishes and sentiments of the
majority are far less strong, though, as we shall presently
see, such reasons certainly exist, and will weigh with all
well-considering men. Finally, in the formation of an opinion
as to the abstract preferableness of one course of action
over another, or as to the truth or falsehood or right
significance of a proposition, the fact that the majority of
one’s contemporaries lean in the other direction is naught,
and no more than dust in the balance. In making up our minds
as to what would be the wisest line of policy if it were
practicable, we have nothing to do with the circumstance that
it is not practicable. And in settling with ourselves whether
propositions purporting to state matters of fact are true or
not, we have to consider how far they are conformable to the
evidence. We have nothing to do with the comfort and solace
which they would be likely to bring to others or ourselves, if
they were taken as true.”
Now, we cannot but be rather grateful that men, who if they spoke would
have to oppose Christianity, take this view and remain silent, and
yet that is not our principle. Believing in Christianity, we believe
that it would be wrong and unworthy compromise to conceal it and to
refrain from propagating it. Mr. Morley prefixed to his essay Whately’s
saying, “It makes all the difference in the world whether we put truth
in the first place or in the second place.” We hold to another word of
Whately’s also: “If our religion is false, we must change it. If it is
true, we must propagate it.” Notice that Morley is speaking not of his
doubts, but of his convictions. There is no obligation of a propaganda
of insecurity. There is an obligation to propagate positive truth. It
must, of course, be the truth that I believe. When I am asked what I
believe I must, of course, tell the truth. But we believe something
far more than that. The religious truth that one believes he must give
his life to propagate throughout the world, and it would not make any
difference if he were the only man in the world who held that truth,
it would still be his duty, if he believed it was the truth and the
great and necessary truth of life, to go out single-handed to defend
and propagate it. Athanasius is regarded as an impracticable and
troublesome type but the progress of the world is often lifted forward
a sheer and discernible stage by such uncompromisingness.
Let us set forth some of the reasons why we may believe that there
dare not be, in our Christian life and our Christian service, any
compromise whatever, either in our searching for the truth, in our
utterance of the truth, or in our aggressive and active propagation of
the truth throughout the world. This is to put the matter, of course,
very broadly and sweepingly. There is a great deal to be said for some
of Morley’s nice discriminations. But actual life is a very rough and
imperative and elemental thing. The difficulty of acting on any body of
wary and wavery casuistical principles is enormous. The really workable
principle of actual living must be very simple and uncomplicated and
direct. The only safe ethical law is “No lie,” no lie whatever or under
any justification. So also, however crude and blunt the rule may be,
“No compromise” is the only practicable right rule. Mr. Morley closed
his essay with such a plain word: “It is better to bear the burden of
impracticableness, than to stifle conviction and to pare away principle
until it becomes mere hollowness and triviality.” And in the beginning
he wrote: “Our day of small calculations and petty utilities must first
pass away; our vision of the true expediencies must reach further and
deeper; our resolution to search for the highest verities, to give up
all and follow them, must first become the supreme part of ourselves.”
The loss by compromise to ourselves and others is certain, while its
gain is uncertain and problematical.
In the first place, one believes this because compromise makes no
contribution to the settlement of the real issue over truth. It is
true that all the boundaries between truth and error are not clear and
sharply drawn lines. Often there is a gray and misty region between.
And much truth is only slowly and gradually won. But the ideal of truth
is clearer than the sun and as pure as the character of God. And we
have a far richer chance of winning it and all that it brings with it,
if we both think and live it uncompromisingly. “The political spirit,”
says Mr. Morley in noble words, “is the great force in throwing love
of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place. The evil
does not stop here. This achievement has indirectly countenanced the
postponement of intellectual methods, and the diminution of the sense
of intellectual responsibility, by a school that is anything rather
than political. Theology has borrowed, and coloured for her own use,
the principles which were first brought into vogue in politics. If in
the one field it is the fashion to consider convenience first and truth
second, in the other there is a corresponding fashion of placing truth
second and emotional comfort first. If there are some who compromise
their real opinions, or the chance of reaching truth, for the sake of
gain, there are far more who shrink from giving their intelligence free
play, for the sake of keeping undisturbed certain luxurious spiritual
sensibilities....
“The intelligence is not free in the presence of a mortal fear lest
its conclusions should trouble soft tranquillity of spirit. There is
always hope of a man so long as he dwells in the region of the direct
categorical proposition and the unambiguous term; so long as he does
not deny the rightly drawn conclusions after accepting the major and
minor premises. This may seem a scanty virtue and very easy grace. Yet
experience shows it to be too hard of attainment for those who tamper
with disinterestedness of conviction, for the sake of luxuriating
in the softness of spiritual transport without interruption from a
syllogism. It is true that there are now and then in life as in history
noble and fair natures, that by the silent teaching and unconscious
example of their inborn purity, star-like constancy, and great
devotion, do carry the world about them to further heights of living
than can be attained by ratiocination. But these, the blameless and
loved saints of the earth, rise too rarely on our dull horizons to
make a rule for the world. The law of things is that they who tamper
with veracity, from whatever motive, are tampering with the vital
force of human progress. Our comfort and the delight of the religious
imagination are no better than forms of self-indulgence, when they
are secured at the cost of that love of truth on which, more than on
anything else, the increase of light and happiness among men must
depend. We have to fight and do lifelong battle against the forces of
darkness, and anything that turns the edge of reason blunts the surest
and most potent of our weapons.” We do not believe in compromising,
because it makes no contribution to the larger discerning of truth or
the triumphing of that truth over error.
In the second place, we do not believe in it because it creates a great
many more difficulties than it removes. Now, Paul was invited to this
compromising course in Jerusalem by his misguided friends because they
thought it would avoid trouble. They wanted to set Paul right with the
Jewish Christians in the city, and maybe with the Jews who were not
Christians; they wanted to remove an impression which they thought
prevailed regarding Paul’s attitude towards the Mosaic customs in the
Gentile world.
Now, as a matter of fact, the principle of that impression was true,
for although, as Dr. McGiffert says, Paul
“recognized the legitimacy of Jewish Christianity, and the
right of Peter and other apostles to preach to the Jews the
Gospel of circumcision, and though there is no evidence that he
ever undertook to lead the Jews as a people to cease observing
their ancestral law, he had certainly been in the habit of
insisting that his Jewish converts should associate on equal
terms with their Gentile brethren, and that they should not
allow their law to act in any way as a barrier to the freest
and most intimate association with them. But this, of course,
meant, in so far, their violation of the law’s commands. It
is certain also that Paul had preached for years the doctrine
that not the Gentile Christian alone but the Jewish Christian
as well is absolutely free from all obligation to keep the law
of Moses, and though such teaching might not always result in
a disregard of that law by his Jewish converts, it must have
a tendency to produce that effect and doubtless did in many
cases. It is clear therefore that both accusations had much
truth in them, and it is difficult to suppose that Paul can
have deliberately attempted in Jerusalem to prove them wholly
false.
“And yet, though as an honourable man and a man of principle
he can hardly have undertaken to demonstrate that there was
no truth in the reports which were circulated concerning
him, it may well be that he tried to show that they were not
wholly true. It was evidently assumed by those who accused
him of ‘teaching all the Jews which are among the Gentiles to
forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children,
neither to walk after the customs,’ that he hated the Jewish
law and that he was doing all that lay in his power to destroy
it; that he believed and that he taught everywhere that its
observance was under any and all circumstances a positive
sin. But this assumption was not true. Paul was certainly not
hostile to the law in any such sense. He believed that it had
no binding authority over a Christian, and he opposed with
all his might the idea that its observance had any value as a
means of salvation, or that it contributed in any way to the
believer’s righteousness or growth in grace; but he held no
such view of the law as made its observance necessarily sinful,
and rendered it impossible for him ever to observe it himself
in any respect. And it was not at all unnatural that he should
desire to convince the Christians of Jerusalem of the fact;
especially when he had come thither with the express purpose
of conciliating them and winning their favour for himself and
for his Gentile converts. He would have been very foolish under
these circumstances to allow such a false impression touching
his attitude towards the law to go uncontradicted.”[1]
[1] “The Apostolic Age,” p. 341.
This is a satisfactory defense if one were needed of Paul’s course,
but no one would question his motive. That was right enough and he
evidently acted in all good conscience, but the procedure, instead of
getting him out of his trouble, got him into worse trouble. It always
does that. I do not believe any man was ever permanently helped by
compromise. Every man who has begun to play with it has been drawn into
worse difficulties and troubles, or has gone down, perhaps without
conscious difficulty but with real moral loss, to a lower level of
life. For one thing, compromise blurs the line of cleavage between
truth and error, and that is exactly what no one of us can afford to
have done. We do not want the lines of distinction between what is
true and what is false slurred over for us. We want them sharpened
so that we shall make as little mistake as possible as to where they
lie. Furthermore compromise gets us into more difficulty than it
removes, because it throws together things that are not congruous or
reconcilable. This is its very nature. It brings into one bed things
that cannot sleep together, into one union things that cannot be
tied. And it postpones real settlements in the interest of spurious
arrangements, sacrificing some
“greater good for the less, on no more creditable ground than
that the less is nearer. It is better to wait, and to defer
the realization of our ideas until we can realize them fully,
than to defraud the future by truncating them, if truncate
them we must, in order to secure a partial triumph for them
in the immediate present.... What is the sense, and what is
the morality, of postponing the wider utility to the narrower?
Nothing is so sure to impoverish an epoch, to deprive conduct
of nobleness, and character of elevation.”
These are Mr. Morley’s closing words. This is the second reason why we
believe there can be no room for compromise in our Christian life or
service.
In the third place, it encourages evil by making it think that having
got so much it can get the rest, and so it prolongs the life of evil.
That is exactly what compromise did in the old days of slavery. Every
one of those early compromises prolonged the life of evil which at
last the nation had to pour out its blood to destroy. That is what
compromise always does. It persuades evil that, after all, maybe evil
can win the victory, that having gotten so much from us it can get the
rest if only it will be patient, and we simply increase the courage of
our foe in proportion as we make any compromise with him instead of
standing up face to face against him from the very beginning. And so it
destroys the power and might of right causes by mixing in the taint of
wrong. You do not make a good man better by putting a dash of bad in
him. You do not make a good cause stronger by letting the evil come in;
you only weaken its strength and power. Compromise plays into the hands
of the very evil which we are here to overcome and destroy.
In the fourth place, compromise breaks down the strength of rigid
consistency, and by letting in one qualification prepares the way for
others. That is the reason why it is so much harder for a man to be a
moderate drinker than to be a total abstainer. As was said of Samuel
Johnson, “He could practice abstinence but not temperance.” When a man
has made up his mind that he will never do a thing, it is a great deal
easier for him to refuse to do it in any given instance than if he has
made up his mind that he will do it moderately, because he never knows
when he ceases to be moderate. There is a sharp line between moderate
drinking and total abstinence. That boundary line no one can ever
mistake, but the boundary line between intemperance and moderation is
not located anywhere. There is no definite border between those two
countries. As a matter of fact, every man starts in by being a moderate
drinker. He never intended to become anything else but a moderate
drinker when he began. But there is a boundary line so clear that a
blind man can see it between yes and no, between not doing a thing at
all and doing that thing only moderately. We believe in the principle
of absolutely no compromise in moral habit and principle, and we
believe in the same principle in our clear and evangelical convictions
regarding the Christian faith.
In the fifth place, we ought to shun all such compromise because
it undermines our confidence in men, and the solid unity of their
coöperative action. We know where truth is, but we never know where
calculating compromise may be. In the language of the deaf and dumb
this is the sign for truth――a straight line right away from your
mouth――for the simple reason that between two points there is only
one straight line, but there may be many crooked lines. The truth is
always a single thing, but the error,――no man knows what it may be. No
compromise makes possible unity of accord by giving people one standard
on which they can rely, and by supplying confidence in the stability of
men and their convictions. But we cannot follow the compromising man,
for as soon as he gets out of our sight we do not know where he will be.
It is the man who makes no compromise, who stands fast by truth, that
we know we can locate. It was that which gave Stonewall Jackson his
huge power as a leader of men in the Civil War. He was a man of the
most unflinching Christian convictions. He was one who never moved the
breadth of a hair from his loyalty to his Lord or to truth as he saw
truth in the presence of his Lord. Colonel Henderson draws for us a
rich picture of the great soldier’s character and it is full of genial
and kindly touches, but it is faithful also in its account of the man’s
rigid and inflexible righteousness.
“Jackson’s religion entered into every action of his life. No
duty, however trivial, was begun without asking a blessing, or
ended without returning thanks. ‘He had long cultivated,’ he
said, ‘the habit of connecting the most trivial and customary
acts of life with a silent prayer.’ He took the Bible as his
guide, and it is possible that his literal interpretation
of its precepts caused many to regard him as a fanatic. His
observance of the Sabbath was hardly in accordance with
ordinary usage. He never read a letter on that day, nor
posted one; he believed that the Government in carrying the
mails was violating a divine law, and he considered the
suppression of such traffic one of the most important duties
of the legislature. Such opinions were uncommon, even among
the Presbyterians, and his rigid respect for truth served to
strengthen the impression that he was morbidly scrupulous.
If he unintentionally made a misstatement――even about some
trifling matter――as soon as he discovered his mistake he would
lose no time and spare no trouble in hastening to correct it.
‘Why, in the name of reason,’ he was asked, ‘do you walk a mile
in the rain for a perfectly unimportant thing?’ ‘Simply because
I have discovered that it was a misstatement, I could not sleep
comfortably unless I put it right.’
“He had occasion to censure a cadet who had given, as Jackson
believed, the wrong solution of a problem. On thinking the
matter over at home, he found that the pupil was right and
the teacher wrong. It was late at night and in the depth of
winter, but he immediately started off to the Institute,
some distance from his quarters, and sent for the cadet. The
delinquent, answering with much trepidation the untimely
summons, found himself to his astonishment the recipient
of a frank apology. Jackson’s scruples carried him even
further. Persons who interlarded their conversation with the
unmeaning phrase ‘you know’ were often astonished by the blunt
interruption that he did _not_ know; and when he was entreated
at parties or receptions to break through his dietary rules,
and for courtesy’s sake to seem to accept some delicacy, he
would always refuse with the reply that he had ‘no genius for
seeming.’ But if he carried his conscientiousness to extremes,
if he laid down stringent rules for his own governance, he
neither set himself up for a model nor did he attempt to
force his convictions upon others. He was always tolerant; he
knew his own faults, and his own temptations, and if he could
say nothing good of a man he would not speak of him at all.
But he was by no means disposed to overlook conduct of which
he disapproved, and undue leniency was a weakness to which
he never yielded. If he once lost confidence or discovered
deception on the part of one he trusted, he withdrew himself as
far as possible from any further dealings with him; and whether
with the cadets or with his brother-officers, if an offense
had been committed of which he was called upon to take notice,
he was absolutely inflexible. Punishment or report inevitably
followed. No excuses, no personal feelings, no appeals to
the suffering which might be brought upon the innocent, were
permitted to interfere with the execution of his duty.”
“As exact as the multiplication table,” some one said of him, “and as
full of things military as an arsenal.” Those of us who are looking for
the secret of Christian influence over others may be sure that we will
find it here. Men are not going to follow the shifting man. They will
follow the man who makes no compromise, who has his firm convictions
and who stands by those convictions, no matter what the cost of his
loyalty may be. Recent American politics are rather eloquent and
convincing on this point.
In the sixth place, compromise in principle substitutes reliance upon
majorities for reliance upon the truth, and the majorities never have
been right and we may doubt whether, until our Lord Jesus Christ comes
again, they ever will be right. God never has relied upon the majority.
He never has waited to do His work until it was ready to side with Him.
In all ages God has done His work by the few. In Old Testament times He
did it by the few. The one principle prevailed always――not by might,
nor by power. It was ever only “the Sword of the Lord and of Gideon.”
When our Lord came He did His work with the few. Through all the ages
God has been working so, and we simply depart from His whole method
in history when by compromise we try to get the force of the majority
on our side. The force of the majority does not amount to anything in
comparison with the force of truth. “The history of success,” says
Mr. Morley, “as we can never too often repeat to ourselves, is the
history of minorities.” And we do not believe in compromise because
it substitutes our reliance upon the majority for our reliance upon
the truth of God, and upon the strength of God to enable the few with
the truth to triumph against the error of the crowd. This passes for
foolish idealism and some of our most popular political leaders and
reformers have poured scorn upon the idealists and dreamers, who are
not to be numbered among the practical men.
“One would like to ask them what purpose is served by an ideal,
if it is not to make a guide for practice and a landmark
in dealing with the real. A man’s loftiest and most ideal
notions must be of a singularly ethereal and, shall we not
say, senseless kind, if he can never see how to take a single
step that may tend in the slightest degree towards making
them more real. If an ideal has no point of contact with what
exists, it is probably not much more than the vapid outcome
of intellectual or spiritual self-indulgence. If it has such
a point of contact, then there is sure to be something which
a man can do towards the fulfillment of his hopes. He cannot
substitute a new national religion for the old, but he can
at least do something to prevent people from supposing that
the adherents of the old are more numerous than they really
are, and something to show them that good ideas are not all
exhausted by the ancient forms. He cannot transform a monarchy
into a republic, but he can make sure that one citizen at least
shall aim at republican virtues, and abstain from the debasing
complaisance of the crowd.”[2]
[2] Morley, “Compromise,” p. 226.
And we might add, “he cannot instantly make truth the life of the
nation, but he can be loyal to its commandments. He cannot make
political leaders honest and patriotic, but he can refuse to profit by
their dishonesty or to regard them as honest men if they will but wear
his badge and seek their own ends by promoting his. He can form his own
ideals of honour and glory and live by them whatever way others may go.”
In the seventh place, compromise increases in peril as we draw near the
highest. If you take a man who is down on the lower levels, compromise
does not mean as much to him as it does to men who have been climbing
up. The nearer we come to Christ and the highest truth, the more
perilous does compromise become. As Edward Thring said: “In proportion
to excellence, compromise is impossible. A single leak sinks a great
ship, a raft that is all leaks floats.” That is just the deep lesson
that men and women need to learn; that the higher and cleaner and
more morally lofty or exacting the life, the more perilous compromise
becomes to it. One has heard Christian men say sometimes that they
thought they were safe in doing what this or that man, not as strong
or experienced or mature, could do. It is a great mistake. The clearer
and stronger a man’s life, the more careful must the man be, the more
solicitous, the more anxious, lest thinking he stands he falls. One
of the greatest things about the life of Paul was the humility and
self-distrust in which he walked, fearing lest when he had preached
to others he himself might be a castaway. We have to learn that here
lies power and duty, and that the cleaner Christ makes any human life,
the more careful must that life be to keep all its habits pure and
unsullied, and its convictions of truth unflinching and firm.
It was this principle that made our friend, S. H. Hadley, and that
makes so many men who have escaped from the slavery of drink, go to
extremes in cutting off physical indulgences. Mr. Hadley not only
dropped once and forever the use of alcohol, but he stopped tobacco
too, and he tried to get every drunkard whom he was seeking to save to
discontinue the use of nicotine. He held that men should be clean every
whit and his strong conviction was that while he would not for a moment
class such indulgences together, nevertheless the man who wanted to be
free from the one would find his deliverance far easier if he sloughed
off the other also. It is safer and easier to be thoroughgoing and
indiscriminate, if you will, than to be always calculating how great
risks can be safely run.
And, lastly, we believe in no compromise because the truth is bound
to prevail, and it will triumph the soonest when it is least hampered
and tied up with error or with qualification. One might stop here to
make a defense on this ground of the fanatics and devotees, but it
is enough to say that the truth is going to prevail because it is
God’s truth, and hell and all hell’s power in the world cannot stand
against it. What is the use in delaying the day of that triumph by
compromising with error? The right will prevail all the faster if we
make no compromise with error, if we go out and preach unflinchingly
and courageously with no compromise, with no surrender or economy or
adaptations, the hard, plain truth of God as we see it. If what we
think is truth is really error, it will be the sooner beaten down for
being made to stand up for itself. But if it is indeed the truth we
know it will prevail the more in the world as we keep it free from all
connection with anything that will weaken or becloud it.
I know how much danger there is in such an attitude as this if we take
it up towards the truth that we hold. It lies in our human nature to go
to violence or extremes with everything. Martin Luther used to say that
human nature is like a drunken man trying to ride a horse, you prop him
up on one side and he topples over on the other. It is that way with
us. We try to be firm and we become hard-hearted. We pride ourselves
on uncompromising loyalty to the truth and we lack the tenderness
and sympathy. Moreover, as Bushnell said in his essay on “Christian
Comprehensiveness”:
“It is the common infirmity of mere human reformers that, when
they rise up to cast out an error, it is generally not till
they have kindled their passions against it. If they begin with
reason, they are commonly moved, in the last degree, by their
animosities instead of reason. And as animosities are blind,
they, of course, see nothing to respect, nothing to spare.
The question whether possibly there may not be some truth or
good in the error assailed, which is needed to qualify and
save the equilibrium of their own opposing truth, is not once
entertained. Hence it is that men, in expelling one error, are
perpetually thrusting themselves into another, as if unwilling
or unable to hold more than half the truth at once.”
And yet these dangers are lesser dangers than the danger of
surrendering the truth. And we can be guarded from them by the great
and unselfish love that guarded Paul. The man who loves others more
than he loves himself, who holds human lives sacred and free from
invasion, who is seeking not his own glory, but the glory of God and
the good of men, is in little danger from an absolutely uncompromising
loyalty to the truth.
And if ever men have any doubts or misgivings regarding this, or if
the time of discouragements and fears comes to them, and they look
with longing to the multitudes who act together, while they think of
themselves as just a few, bearing testimony for the truth against
error and sin, they may encourage themselves with Mr. Matthew Arnold’s
doctrine of the remnant, or better yet, by remembering the great
Solitary, Jesus Christ. How lonesomely He walked His way; seeing what
no other soul was seeing; standing alone for the great truth which He
uttered, and at last meeting death upon the cross alone; one of His
disciples having betrayed Him, another having three times denied that
he ever knew Him, and all the others having left Him and gone away!
And yet as we look back, we see that lonely cross ruling the whole
world, and that forsaken figure men are clothing now with the crown
of everlasting light, and His name is above every name. All that we
are asked to do is simply to follow in His train, to take up the truth
which He opened, and for that truth to be willing to live, and, which
is far easier, if need be, to die. Our lives are ours for this one
thing, that through them, without compromise with error or with sin,
God may bear testimony to Himself, and whether He does that through
many years or through few, through peaceful personal service or through
storm and tragedy, is of no consequence. The one thing that is of
consequence is that we should know and be true to God.
But there is a better way to set forth and commend this principle
as a law of life than by arguing it in these general terms. Let the
principle put on flesh and live before us in a man:
“And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the sojourners of Gilead, said
unto Ahab, As the Lord, the God of Israel, liveth, before whom I stand,
there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.”
The old man who spoke these words was one of the four great characters
of the Old Testament. He and Moses and Samuel and David stood apart in
the thought of the Hebrew people. Indeed, there was a sense in which
he and Moses were in a class by themselves. The appearance of those
two with our Lord on the Mountain of Transfiguration was only an
illustration of the place which they held in the imagination of Israel.
These were the first words he spoke as he bursts on our view. What
lay behind them we can only surmise. He was a Tishbite, one “of the
sojourners of Gilead,” dwelling beyond the Jordan, a man brought up
in the desert. There on the level sands, with the eye of God looking
down upon him, he had come to a deep feeling of the soul’s lonely stand
before God, and convinced of God and the righteousness of God he came
over the Jordan to speak his message and do his work in the organized
national life of his people. He was a clean-limbed, frugal-lived man,
who gathered up his skirts about him, we are told, and ran straight
away sixteen miles before the chariot of Ahab, from Carmel to the
entering in of Jezreel; a calm, quiet, courageous, firm-principled man;
bred so in the desert with God.
We do not have any very elaborate story of his life. He appears on the
stage and then he vanishes. There are long periods of time covering
years when he disappears entirely from the record. We can condense what
we know about his life into six brief chapters, between each two of
which there is an interval, in some cases, a long interval of time.
He appears first of all in connection with the great drought which he
prophesied and which lasted for the three years he had foretold. We
see him by the little brook Cherith, fed of the ravens, until through
the long cessation of the rain the brook itself disappeared. Then we
see him in the house of the widow of Sarepta, feeding with her on her
little supply of meal, and in her hour of depthless sorrow raising her
son from death to life. And then, in the second chapter, he breaks
forth once more upon the national stage. Ahab and Obadiah, his chief
man, had sought for him up and down the land, having divided the
country between them, partly that they might seek water for their fast
diminishing herds, partly that they might meet again and punish this
troubler of Israel. At last, on one of the highways, the man of God
appeared to the prime minister and told him that he had no fear to meet
the king and would do so if he would carry word to Ahab. True to his
word, he met the king, confronted him with his disloyalty to Jehovah,
and challenged him to produce the prophets of Baal for the great test
on Mount Carmel; and then, after his triumph, Elijah again disappears.
In the third chapter we have the only account of the man’s inner life.
If it were not for that chapter with its story of his subjective
struggle, Elijah would be no example for us men of this day. In all the
other chapters of the story he appears absolutely undaunted, unafraid
of the face of man, clearly convinced of what God would have him do,
and absolutely fearless in the doing of it. But here we are shown the
man in his own inward wavering, in doubt in some measure about the
reality or power of his mission, afraid to carry forward that which he
had set out to do with such daring spirit; and in the wilderness alone,
first beneath the juniper tree and then on Mount Horeb, Elijah had
to face again his life and settle himself once more in that faith in
the living God which had brought him out of the desert. And God stood
out and spoke to him, and Elijah rose up on his feet once more a man
unafraid to resume his mission. God bade him return and anoint a new
king over Syria and a new king over Israel, and to go to Abel-meholah
and find his own successor, the young man Elisha, plowing behind his
oxen. And the prophet went out from his hour of discouragement to find
at once the young man who was to take up his work after him and to be
an even mightier prophet than he.
Then for a long time Elijah disappears again, only to reappear when he
confronts Ahab once more, in Naboth’s vineyard, shows him how little
he fears him, and pronounces upon him the judgment of Jehovah. Then he
vanishes from the stage for three years at least of solitary meditation
in the wilderness, vanishes so long that the common people apparently
forgot him, so that when one day he met a little party of the servants
of the new king Ahaziah on the highway bound to Ekron to consult
Baal-zebub, they did not know who the prophet was and brought back his
message to the king, able only to say of him that he was a hairy man,
with a leather girdle about his loins. But the king well knew that the
Tishbite had broken once more upon the stage of the nation’s life,
and he bowed beneath the judgments of God that the man from Gilead
denounced.
Then in the concluding chapter we see Elijah and his young man coming
down from Gilgal to Bethel and then to Jericho and then back to the
wilderness out of which he had come, that from his own deserts where
he had come to know God he might go back to God again. And there in
the chariot of fire the man who was himself “the chariots of Israel,
and the horsemen thereof,” went up to the Lord God of Israel, Who was
alive, to meet Him before Whom he had always stood.
One does not wonder that the old man impressed as he did the
imagination of his people, and that when centuries later John the
Baptist emerged upon the stage challenging the attention of the nation,
almost the first question addressed to him was, “Art thou Elijah?”
And we have the secret of Elijah’s life given to us in these words
with which he is introduced to us, “As the LORD God of Israel liveth,
before whom I stand.” Out there in the barrenness of the desert beyond
the Jordan, Elijah had come to believe in a God Who was alive, and
before Whom he lived his life. The deserts have never bred polytheism.
The great polytheistic systems have sprung from the lush jungles of the
tropics. The great monotheisms have been born in the deserts. And out
on the lonely sands beyond the Jordan, beyond the hills and amid the
great level places where there was no one but God, Elijah came to know
that He was and to know that his life stood in Him.
This was the principle of the man’s life――the consuming conviction of a
living God and of the commission of His uncompromising service. Indeed
we are not sure that we know Elijah’s name. It is possible that the
name by which we think we know him is only a pseudonym――Elijah, “My God
is Jehovah.” It may be that from the very repetition of this phrase to
which he was addicted, “The LORD God of Israel, before whom I stand,”
men came at last to call him by the opening note of his message, “the
man of the living God.”
Now what that message meant to Elijah was just this: that the Lord God
was no dead force, no unknown cause of things, that the Lord God was
alive, and that a man was to have dealings with Him; that a man’s life
was not his own personal and irresponsible experiment, but a work to be
done in front of God; and that a man must reckon in all his thoughts,
in all his ways, with One Who lives, and go out and do his work in the
world in the consciousness of his relationship and his subjection to an
active, working, personal God Who would stand by him in the fire, would
uphold him before kings, and carry him through to the end of each of
his appointed tasks. If there is one thing that we need to get clearly
fixed in our own lives it is the matter of our attitude towards this
infinite and unseen God Who is alive.
This faith in a God Who is alive, before Whose face a man is to live
his life, is no mere theory. You cannot find any conviction that will
more really mould and transform all our conduct and put uncompromising
stiffness in it than the conviction that we are living our lives
thus before the eyes of a God Who observes. In the life of Thring of
Uppingham we are told of an incident that pleased him greatly. It is
a story that came to him regarding a little group of boys who were
spending the summer in France. A visitor saw these English schoolboys
and overheard their conversation as to what they should do on Sunday.
Some of the boys were proposing a certain course of action, and all
seemed to agree until one fellow spoke up and said: “No, I do not
agree. I will not do it.” And when the other lads urged him to come
along, he still insisted that he would not. They asked him his reasons.
He said: “Well, Thring would not like it, and what Thring would not
like I do not intend to do.” “Well, but Thring isn’t here,” they said;
“he’s back at Uppingham.” “I do not care,” said the boy; “Thring would
not like it.” He believed that he was living in a real sense――I mean in
the most real sense of all, in the life of his personal will――before
the standards of his master, and by those standards as in the light of
his master’s countenance he insisted that he would uncompromisingly
live. Before the eyes of God a man will beware how he lives his life.
If he knows that this life of his can find no darkness where he can
hide himself from God, if he knows that all of his days are to be spent
before His face, that all his deeds are to be done beneath the gaze of
God, assuredly that will govern and control a man’s decisions about his
practical ways. The consciousness of a living God will give direction
to a man’s moral life.
And it will not only give direction. There is many a man among us who
knows that the consciousness of a God Who is alive not only gives
determination and direction to his ways, but puts a new power and
inspiration in them.
A friend in New York tells a lovely story about a boy in one of the
great English schools. He was an only child, and his mother died when
he was but a little fellow. Between him and his father there grew up
relations of the most delicate and sensitive intimacy. The father was
blind, so that the little boy had to be his father’s eyes, and until
the day came when the lad had to go away to school there was scarcely
an hour when the two were separated. But at last the time came and
the boy went. He became the best athlete in his school. One spring,
just before the final game in which the boy was to bowl for his own
school, tidings came that his father was seriously ill and he must
come home. The news sent the whole school into lamentation, for they
were afraid that he might not recover and that if he did not the boy
could not play in the concluding and critical game. And indeed, as it
turned out, the father died. The day before the game was to be played
the boy came back to school, and, to the amazement of all, let it be
known that he intended to play. The next day he took his place and
played as he had never played in his life before. When at last the game
was over and the school had won its triumph, one of the masters came
to the boy and expressed to him the delighted surprise of the school
at what he had done and their amazement both that he had played at
all and at the way he had played. “Why,” said the boy, “didn’t you
understand? I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. That was the first
game my father ever saw me play.” Beneath the consciousness that for
the first time his father’s eyes were open and watching him the boy had
discovered capacities of power that he hardly knew he possessed before.
Beneath the eye of our Father, Who is looking upon the game that we are
playing, where is the man that cannot play a better game, who cannot
draw on the reservoirs of power untouched before, who cannot come out
and do his work in the world and live his life with larger inspiration
and strength, with more dominion and sovereignty, because he is living
it before a God Who is alive? To such a man will compromise not seem a
filial insult impossible except by a base degradation of the soul?
And not only did Elijah’s principle determine his conduct and pour
inspiration into it; it was this principle of a God Who is alive that
made him absolutely fearless. He was not only unafraid of physical
harm, but he had none of that subtler fear that every man knows――the
fear that he himself will fail, the fear that he cannot carry himself
safely through. What you and I are afraid of is not the things that are
without; our enemy is inside. Treachery within the walls is all that we
need to dread, and our deepest fear is of our own failure. That was the
great thing in Elijah’s life, that he dared to stand on Mount Carmel,
before all that crowd of priests, confident and fearless. He knew he
would prevail, that he had not promised in vain that God would answer.
The man who knows that he is living his life before a God Who is alive
and doing his work in the name of a God Who is alive is not afraid
either of what men can do to him or of the failure that he may make
himself.
There is a story in the life of Dr. Schauffler that illustrates how
to-day too men can rise into just such fearlessness. The missionaries
were being bothered a great deal in Constantinople by Russian
machinations against the Protestant missions in the empire, and Dr.
Schauffler went to see the Russian ambassador. “I might as well tell
you now, Mr. Schauffler,” said the ambassador, “that the Emperor of
Russia, who is my master, will never allow Protestantism to set its
foot in Turkey.” The old missionary looked at him for a moment and then
replied: “Your Excellency, the kingdom of Christ, who is my Master,
will never ask the Emperor of all the Russias where it may set its
foot.” And he went on with his mission unintimidated by any agencies
working in the dark against him, because he was confident that the
living God Whose work he was doing would achieve for him His own
victory.
And we see in this story of Elijah another thing that this great
conviction will do for a man: it will make a troubler of him. “Art thou
he,” said Ahab when he met Elijah in the midst of the great famine,
“art thou he that troubleth Israel?” “No,” said Elijah; “thou art he
who troubles Israel.” And yet they were both troubling Israel, the one
with the iniquities into which he was leading the people, the other
because the principle of the living God dominating his life drove him
as a great moral force against the evils of his time. A man cannot live
in a college or university with a faith that God is living and that
he himself is living in front of God, and be quiet before the moral
iniquities and evils he will find. It is not enough for a man to say,
“I will simply be myself, live my own clean life, and let my silent
influence count.” If his silent influence does not count, no other
influence of his will count. But the silence is not enough. A little
while ago I copied from one of the letters of Mandel Creighton, late
Bishop of London, written to his boys who were away at school, this
bit of advice. “You will see, then,” he writes to one son, who had
just been made a monitor in his school, “you will see, then, that the
chief influence of a monitor is in his example. But this is the point
on which I have seen many people deceive themselves. They trust to what
they call the force of silent example. That is most pernicious. If you
content yourself with merely keeping school rules and doing what is
right yourself and keeping out of the way of any fellows who you know
are doing wrong, or if you stand by and listen to them saying what they
ought not, without reproof, you are doing wrong. No, that won’t do. It
is part of the essence of good to fight against evil. You must set your
face strongly against all that is bad, and must put down not only all
that you find in the course of your walk, but you must go out of your
walk to find it in order to put it down.”
There has been much complaint these last years because in high places
in this land there have been men who were troublers of the nation.
The great need of the nation has been men who were prepared to make
trouble in order that, at last, righteousness might come. Things that
have thought themselves secure will be shaken; long vested interests
that have believed themselves to be sacred will have their sanctity
scrutinized; and men will come at last into their rights and their
righteousness, if we are prepared, following the old Tishbite, to live
our lives before the God Who is alive.
And this same principle brings peace and quiet and tranquillity to
men. Elijah shook once, we know, but only once. Every time we see him
on the public stage, no matter whom he is confronting――Jezebel, Ahab,
Obadiah, Ahaziah――he is standing with confident soul, quiet and still.
We can be sure that if on that day at Mount Carmel we could have first
mingled with those four hundred and fifty priests of Baal who knew that
their day of doom had come, and then have gone over and stood by the
side of the old man, we should have found the old man the most quiet
and placid person on the mountainside and his heart beat the calmest.
And we may be sure that we can go in the same tranquillity and calm and
steadfastness in which the old Tishbite lived, if we will believe as
deeply as he did in a Lord God Who is alive, and will live our lives
before His face with as little compromise and fear.
And it is a great conviction like this of Elijah’s that steadies men in
the hour of their trial and that when they fall redeems them again. The
old prophet fell down. He ran from a woman’s threats, and beneath the
juniper tree and then on Horeb, he shook and was afraid. But God, Who
was alive before, was alive still, and He came to Mount Horeb, where
the man lay in his spiritual petulance and fear, and He was not in the
great wind, and He was not in the great earthquake, and He was not in
the great fire, but at last in the still small voice of life He spoke
to Elijah, and Elijah rose up on his feet once more and went out to
complete his work in unfaltering triumph.
It works that way still. There is a letter of Abraham Lincoln, the
original of which is preserved in the state capitol at Albany. It is a
letter Lincoln wrote granting a pardon to a deserter.
EXECUTIVE MANSION,
WASHINGTON, October 4, 1864.
Upon condition that Roswell McIntyre of Company E, Sixth
Regiment of New York Cavalry, returns to his regiment and
faithfully serves out his term, making up for lost time, or
until otherwise lawfully discharged, he is fully pardoned for
any supposed desertion heretofore committed; and this paper is
his pass to go to his regiment.