"_Seek ye first_ ... _His righteousness._"--MATT. vi. 33.
Righteousness, as it was understood and taught by Christ, includes the
two things which we often distinguish as religion and morality. It is
right-doing, not only as between man and man, but as between man and
God. The Lawgiver of the New Testament, like the lawgiver of the Old,
has given to us two tables of stone. On the one He has written, "Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,
and with all thy mind "; and on the other, "Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself." In these two commandments the whole law is summed
up, the whole duty of man is made known. It is well to emphasize this
two-fold aspect of the truth at a time when we are often tempted to
define religion wholly in the terms of morality, and, while insisting on
the duties which we owe to each other, to forget those which we owe to
God. If there be a God righteousness must surely have a meaning in
relation to Him; it cannot be simply another name for philanthropy.
Christ at least will not call that man just and good who does right to
all except his Maker. In the Christian doctrine of the good life room
must be found for God. At the present moment, however, it is the subject
in its man-ward aspect that I wish specially to keep in view, partly
because some limitation is obviously necessary, and partly also because
it is this of which Christ Himself had most to say.
I
What, then, is Christ's idea of righteousness? In other words, what did
He teach concerning the good life? Now here also, as in His teaching
about God, Christ did not need to begin _de novo_. Those to whom He
spoke had already their own ideals of duty and holiness. True, these
were sadly in need of revision and correction. Nevertheless, such as
they were, they were there, and Christ could use them as His
starting-point. Consequently, therefore, we find His ideas of
righteousness defined largely by contrast with existing ideas. "It was
said to them of old time ... but I say unto _you_." This is the note
heard all through the Sermon on the Mount. The contrast may be stated
in two ways.
(1) In the first place, Christ said that the righteousness of His
disciples must exceed that of publicans and heathen: "If ye love them
that love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same?
And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not
even the Gentiles the same?" There are virtues exhibited in the lives of
even wholly irreligious men. There are rudimentary moral principles
which they that know not God nevertheless acknowledge and obey. It was
so in Christ's time; it is so still. The popular American ballad, "Jim
Bludso," and Ian Maclaren's touching story of the Drumtochty postman,
are familiar illustrations of self-sacrificing virtues revealed by men
of coarse and vicious lives. Nor ought we to deny the reality of such
virtues; still less ought we to follow the bad example of St. Augustine
and call them "splendid vices." Such was not Christ's way. He assumed
the existence and reality of this "natural goodness," and with familiar
illustrations of it on His tongue turned upon His disciples with the
question, "What do ye more?"
"What do ye more?" Yet in some respects, it is to be feared, the
morality of the Church sometimes falls behind that of the world. One of
the most painful passages in St. Paul's epistles is that in which he
tells the Corinthian Christians that one of their own number had been
guilty of immorality such as would have shocked even the conscience of
an unbelieving Gentile. And it was but the other day that I came across
this sentence from the pen of an observant and friendly critic of
contemporary religious life: "I am afraid," he said, "it must be
admitted that the idea of honour, though in itself an essential part of
Christian ethics, is much stronger outside the Churches than within
them." How far facts justify the criticism I will not stay to inquire;
but the very fact that a charge like this can be made should prove a
sharp reminder to us of the stringency of the demands which Jesus Christ
makes upon us. There is no kind of sound moral fruit which is to be
found anywhere in the wide fields of the world which He does not look
for in richer and riper abundance within the garden of His Church.
A great Christian preacher has given an admirable illustration of one
way in which we may examine ourselves in this matter. He has grouped
together a number of precepts from the writings of some of the great
heathen moralists, such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and then has
urged the question how far we who profess to be the disciples of a
loftier faith are true even to these ancient heathen ideals.[38]
Perhaps, however, this is not a method of self-examination which is open
to us all. But this, at least, we can do: we can test ourselves by that
moral law, which God gave to the Jews by Moses, and which Christ
reinterpreted in the Sermon on the Mount. "Thou shalt not kill, thou
shalt not commit adultery"--all these commandments in their literal
meaning we must observe; yet this is not enough; "do not even the
publicans the same?" and Christ's demand is, "What do ye more than
others?" The murderous thought, Christ says, that is murder; the lustful
look, that is adultery. "Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love
thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your
enemies, and pray for them that persecute you." As we listen to words
like these must not we also confess, "Either these sayings are not
Christ's, or we are not Christians"?
(2) Christ's idea of righteousness is further defined by contrast with
that of the Pharisees: "Except your righteousness shall exceed the
righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter
into the kingdom of heaven." What was the Pharisees' idea of religion?
Let us take the words which Christ Himself put into the lips of a
representative of his class: "God, I thank Thee, that I am not as the
rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.
I fast twice in the week; I give tithes of all that I get." This is a
full-length portrait of the finished Pharisee. Religion to him was a
round of prescribed ritual, a barren externalism, a subjection to the
dominion of the letter, which never touched the heart, nor bowed the
spirit down in penitence and humility before God. The Pharisee's whole
concern was with externals; but Christ declared that he who is only
right outwardly is not right at all. There is no such thing, He said, as
goodness which is not from within. The alms-deeds, the prayer, the
fasting of the Pharisee were all done before men, to be seen of them;
and so long as that which men saw was right and seemly, he was
satisfied. But Christ went back behind the outward act to the heart. A
man is really, He said, what he is there. You may hang grapes on a
thorn-bush, that will not make it a vine; you may put a sheep's fleece
on a wolf's back, but that will not change its wolfish heart. And men
are what they are within. Just as to get good fruit you must first of
all make the tree good, so to secure good deeds you must first make good
men. This was the truth which Pharisaism ignored; with what results all
the world knows. In the long history of man, it remains, perhaps, the
supreme illustration of the fatal facility with which religion and
morality are divorced when once the emphasis is laid upon the outward
and ceremonial instead of the inward and spiritual. All experience helps
us to understand how the system works. There is no deliberate intention
of setting ritual above righteousness, but it is so much easier to count
one's beads than to curb one's temper, so much easier to fast in Lent
than to be unswervingly just, that if once the easier thing gets
attached to it an exaggerated importance, fidelity in it is allowed to
atone for laxity in greater things, and the last result is Pharisaism,
where we see conscience concerned about the tithing of garden herbs, but
with no power over the life, and religion not merely tolerating but
actually ministering to moral evil. It was in the name of religion that
the Pharisees suffered a man to violate even the sanctities of the Fifth
Commandment, and to do dishonour to his father and mother. The righteous
man in their eyes was not he who loved mercy, and did justly, and walked
humbly with his God, but he who observed the traditions of the elders.
So that, as Professor Bruce says,[39] it was possible for a man to
comply with all the requirements of the Rabbis and yet remain in heart
and life an utter miscreant. "Outwardly," said Christ, "ye appear
righteous unto men, but inwardly ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity."
Is it any wonder that He should call down fire from heaven to consume a
system which had yielded such bitter, poisonous fruits as these?
But let us remember, as Mozley well says,[40] there are no extinct
species in the world of evil. The value for us of Christ's condemnation
lies in this, that it is a permanent tendency of human nature which He
is condemning. Pharisaism is not dead. Have I not seen the Pharisee
dressed in good broad-cloth and going to church with his Bible under his
arm? And have I not seen him sitting in church and reading the
twenty-third chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, and thinking to himself what
shockingly wicked people these men must have been of whom Christ spoke
such terrible words, and never once supposing that there is anything in
the chapter that concerns him? No, Pharisaism is not dead; and when we
read of those who devoured widows' houses and for a pretence made long
prayers, using their religion as a cloak for their villainy, let us
remember that Christ says to His disciples to-day, even as He said to
them centuries ago, "Except your righteousness shall exceed the
righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter
into the kingdom of heaven."