'I am made all things to all men . . . I please all men in all
things.'--_Paul_
Captain Anything came originally from the ancient town of Fair-speech.
Fair-speech had many royal bounties and many special privileges bestowed
upon it, and Captain Anything and his family had come to many titles and
to great riches in that ancient, loyal, and honourable borough. My Lord
Turn-about, my Lord Time-server, my Lord Fair-speech (from whose
ancestors that town first took its name), as also such well-known
commoners as Mr. Smooth-man, Mr. Facing-both-ways, and Mr. Two-tongues
were all sprung with Captain Anything from the same ancient and
long-established ancestry. As to his religion, from a child young
Anything had sat under the parson of the parish, the same Reverend Two-
tongues as has been mentioned above. And our budding soldier followed
the example of his minister in that he never strove too long against wind
or tide, or was ever to be seen on the same side of the street with
Religion when she was banished from court or had lost her silver
slippers. The crest of the Anythings was a delicately poised weather-
cock; and the motto engraved around the gyrating bird ran thus: 'Our
judgment always jumps according to the occasion.' As a military man,
Captain Anything is described in military books as a proper man, and a
man of courage and skill--to appearance. He and his company under him
were a sort of Swiss guard in Mansoul. They held themselves open and
ready for any master. They lived not so much by religion or by loyalty
as by the fates of worldly fortune. In his secret despatches Diabolus
was wont to address Captain Anything as My Darling; and be sure you
recruit your Switzers well, Diabolus would say; but when the real stress
of the war came, even Diabolus cast Captain Anything off. And thus it
came about that when both sides were against this despised creature he
had to throw down his arms and flee into a safe skulking place for his
life.
1. In that half-papist, half-atheistic country called France there is a
class of politicians known by the name of Opportunists. They are a kind
of public men that, we are thankful to say, are not known in Protestant
and Evangelical England, but they may be pictured out and described to
you in this homely way: An Opportunist stands well out of the sparks of
the fire, and well in behind the stone wall, till the fanatics for
liberty, equality, and fraternity have snatched the chestnuts out of the
fire, and then the Opportunist steps out from his safe place and blandly
divides the well-roasted tid-bits among his family and his friends. As
long as there is any jeopardy, the Jacobins are denounced and held up to
opprobrium; but when the jeopardy and the risk are well past, the sober-
minded, cautious, conservative, and responsible statesmen walk off with
the portfolios of place and privilege and pay under their honest arms.
But these are the unprincipled papists and infidels of a mushroom
republic; and, thank God, such spurious patriotism, and such sham and
selfish statesmanship, have not yet shown their miserable heads among
faithful, fearless, straightforward, and uncalculating Englishmen. At
the same time, if ever that continental vice should attack our national
character, we have two well-known essays in our ethical and casuistical
literature that may with perfect safety be pitted against anything that
either France or Italy has produced. Even if they are but a master's
irony, let all ambitious men keep _Of Cunning_ and _Of Wisdom for a Man's
Self_ under their pillow. Let all young men who would toady a great man;
let all young ministers who would tune their pulpit to king, or court, or
society; let all tradesmen and merchants who prefer their profits to
their principles--if they have literature enough, let them soak their
honest minds in our great Chancellor's sage counsels; and he who promoted
Anything and dubbed him his Darling, he will, no doubt, publish both a
post and a title on his birthday for you also.
2. 'What religion is he of?' asks Dean Swift. 'He is an Anythingarian,'
is the answer, 'for he makes his self-interest the sole standard of his
life and doctrine.' And Archbishop Leighton, a very different churchman
from the bitter author of the _Polite Conversations_, is equally
contemptuous toward the self-seeker in divine things. 'Your boasted
peaceableness often proceeds from a superficial temper; and, not seldom,
from a supercilious disdain of whatever has no marketable use or value,
and from your utter indifference to true religion. Toleration is an herb
of spontaneous growth in the soil of indifference. Much of our union of
minds proceeds from want of knowledge and from want of affection to
religion. Many who boast of their church conformity, and that no one
hears of their noise, may thank the ignorance of their minds for that
kind of quietness.' But by far the most powerful assault that ever was
made upon lukewarmness in religion and upon self-seeking in the Church
was delivered by Dante in the tremendous third canto of his _Inferno_:--
Various tongues,
Horrible languages, outcries of woe,
Accents of anger, voices deep and hoarse,
With hands together smote that swelled the sounds,
Made up a tumult that for ever whirls
Round through that air with solid darkness stain'd,
Like to the sand that in the whirlwind flies.
I then, with error yet encompass'd, cried,
'O master! What is this I hear? What race
Are these, who seem so overcome with woe?'
He then to me: 'This miserable fate
Suffer the wretched souls of those who lived
Without or praise or blame, with that ill band
Of angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved,
Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves
Were only. Mercy and Justice scorn them both.
Speak not of them, but look and pass them by.'
Forthwith, I understood for certain this the tribe
Of those ill spirits both to God displeasing
And to His foes. Those wretches who ne'er lived,
Went on in nakedness, and sorely stung
By wasps and hornets, which bedewed their cheeks
With blood, that mix'd with tears dropp'd to their feet,
And by disgustful worms was gathered there.
3. Now, we must all lay it continually and with uttermost humiliation to
heart that we all have Captain Anything's opportunism, his self-interest,
his insincerity, his instability, and his secret deceitfulness in
ourselves. That man knows little of himself who does not despise and
hate himself for his secret self-seeking even in the service of God. For,
how the love of praise will seduce and corrupt this man, and the love of
gain that man! How easy it is to flatter and adulate this man out of all
his former opinions and his deepest principles, and how an expected
advantage will make that other man forget now an old alliance and now a
deep antipathy! How often the side we take even in the most momentous
matters is decided by the most unworthy motives and the most contemptible
considerations! Unstable as water, Reuben shall not excel. Double-minded
men, we, like Jacob's first-born, are unstable in all our ways. We have
no anchor, or, what anchor we sometimes have soon slips. We have no
fixed pole-star by which to steer our life. Any will-o'-the-wisp of
pleasure, or advantage, or praise will run us on the rocks. The
searchers of Mansoul, after long search, at last lighted on Anything, and
soon made an end of him. Seek him out in your own soul also. Be you
sure he is somewhere there. He is skulking somewhere there. And, having
found him, if you cannot on the spot make an end of him, keep your eye on
him, and never say that you are safe from him and his company as long as
you are in this soul-deceiving life. And, that Anything will not be let
enter the gates of the city you are set on seeking, that will go largely
to make that sweet and clean and truthful city your very heaven to you.
4. 'I am made all things to all men, and I please all men in all
things.' One would almost think that was Captain Anything himself, in a
frank, cynical, and self-censorious moment. But if you will look it up
you will see that it was a very different man. The words are the words
of Anything, but the heart behind the words is the heart of Paul. And
this, again, teaches us that we should be like the Messiah in this also,
not to judge after the sight of our eyes, nor to reprove after the
hearing of our ears. Miserable Anything! outcast alike of heaven and
hell! But, O noble and blessed Apostle! the man, says Thomas Goodwin,
who shall be found seated next to Jesus Christ Himself in the kingdom of
God. Happy Paul: happy even on this earth, since he could say, and in
the measure he could say with truth and with sincerity, such
self-revelations as these: 'Unto the Jews I am become as a Jew that I
might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law,
that I might gain them that are under the law. To them that are without
law, as without law, that I might gain them that are without law. To the
weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak; I am made all things
to all men, that I might by all means save some. Giving none offence,
neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the Church of God. Even
as I please all men in all things, not seeking mine own profit, but the
profit of many, that they may be saved.' Noble words, and inspiring to
read. Yes: but look within, and think what Paul must have passed
through; think what he must have been put through before he,--a man of
like selfish passions as we are, a man of like selfish passions as
Anything was,--could say all that. Let his crosses and his thorns; his
raptures up to the third heaven, and his body of death that he bore about
with him all his days; let his magnificent spiritual gifts, and his still
more magnificent spiritual graces tell how they all worked together to
make the chief of sinners out of the blameless Pharisee, and, at the same
time, Christ's own chosen vessel and the apostle of all the churches.
Boasting about his patron apostle, St. Augustine says: 'Far be it from so
great an apostle, a vessel elect of God, an organ of the Holy Ghost, to
be one man when he preached and another when he wrote; one man in private
and another in public. He was made all things to all men, not by the
craft of a deceiver, but from the affection of a sympathiser, succouring
the diverse diseases of souls with the diverse emotions of compassion; to
the little ones dispensing the lesser doctrines, not false ones, but the
higher mysteries to the perfect--all of them, however, true, harmonious,
and divine.' The exquisite irony of Socrates comes into my mind in this
connection, and will not be kept out of my mind. By instinct as well as
by art Socrates mixed up the profoundest seriousness with the humorous
affectation of qualities of mind and even of character the exact opposite
of what all who loved him knew to be the real Socrates. 'Intellectually,'
says Dr. Thomson, 'the acutest man of his age, Socrates represents
himself in all companies as the dullest person present. Morally the
purest, he affects to be the slave of passion and borrows the language
even of the lewd to describe a love and a good-will far too exalted for
the comprehension of his contemporaries. This irony of his disarmed
ridicule by anticipating it; it allayed jealousy and propitiated envy;
and it possibly procured him admission into gay circles from which a more
solemn teacher would have been excluded. But all the time it had for its
basis a real greatness of soul, a hearty and an unaffected disregard of
public opinion, a perfect disinterestedness, and an entire abnegation of
self. He made himself a fool in order that fools by his folly might be
made wise; he humbled himself to the level of those among whom his work
lay that he might raise some few among them to his own level; he was all
things to all men, if by any means he might save some. Till Alcibiades
ends the splendid eloge that Plato puts into his mouth with these words,
"All my master's vice and stupidity and worship of wealthy and great men
is counterfeit. It is all but the Silenus-mask which conceals the
features of the god within; for if you remove the covering, how shall I
describe to you, my friends and boon companions, the excellence of the
beauty you will find within! Whether any of you have seen Socrates in
his serious mood, when he has thrown aside the mask and disclosed the
divine features beneath it, is more than I know. But I have seen them,
and I can tell you that they seemed to me glorious and marvellous, and,
truly, godlike in their beauty."'
Well, now, I gather out of all that this great lesson: that it is, to
begin with, a mere matter of temperament, or what William Law would call
a mere matter of complexion and sensibility, whether, to begin with, a
man is hard, and dry, and narrow, and stiff, and proud, and scornful, and
cruel; or again, whether he is soft and tender, broad and open, and full
of sympathy and of the milk of human kindness. At first, and to begin
with, there is neither praise nor blame as yet in the matter. A man is
hard just as a stone is hard; it is his nature. Or he is soft as clay is
soft; it is again his nature. But, inheriting such a nature, and his
inherited nature beginning to appear, then is the time when the true man
really begins to be made. The bad man dwells in contentment, and,
indeed, by preference, at home in his own hard, proud, scornful,
resentful heart; or, again, in his facile, fawning, tide-waiting, time-
serving heart; and thus he chooses, accepts, and prefers his evil fate,
and never seeks the help either of God or man to enable him to rise above
it. Paul was not, when we meet him first, the sweet, humble, affable,
placable, makeable man that he made himself and came to be after a
lifetime of gospel-preaching and of adorning the gospel he preached. And
all the assistances and all the opportunities that came to Paul are still
coming to you and to me; till, whether naturally pliable and affectionate
or the opposite, we at last shall come to the temperament, the
complexion, and the exquisite sensibility of Paul himself. Are you,
then, a hard, stiff, severe, censorious, proud, angry, scornful man? Or
are you a too-easy, too-facile man-pleaser and self-seeker, being all
things to all men that you may make use of all men? Are you? Then say
so. Confess it to be so. Admit that you have found yourself out. And
reflect every day what you have got to do in life. Consider what a new
birth you need and must have. Number your days that are left you in
which to make you a new heart, and a new nature, and a new character.
Consider well how you are to set about that divine work. You have a
minister, and your minister is called a divine because by courtesy he is
supposed to understand that divine work, and to be engaged on it night
and day in himself, and in season and out of season among his people. He
will tell you how you are to make you a new heart. Or, if he does not
and cannot do that; if he preaches about everything but that to a people
who will listen to anything but that, then your soul is not in his hands
but in your own. You may not be able to choose your minister, but you
can choose what books you are to buy, or borrow, and read. And if there
is not a minister within a hundred miles of you who knows his right hand
from his left, then there are surely some booksellers who will advise you
about the classical books of the soul till you can order them for
yourselves. And thus, if it is your curse and your shame to be as
spongy, and soapy, and oily, and slippery as Anything himself; if you
choose your church and your reading with any originality, sense, and
insight, you need not fear but that you will be let live till you die an
honest, upright, honourable, fearless gentleman: no timid friend to
unfashionable truth, as you are to-night, but a man like Thomas Boston's
Ettrick elder, who lies waiting the last trump under a gravestone
engraven with this legend: Here lies a man who had a brow for every good
cause. Only, if you would have that written and read on your headstone,
you have no time to lose. If I were you I would not sit another Sabbath
under a minister whose preaching was not changing my nature, making my
heart new, and transforming my character; no, not though the Queen
herself sat in the same loft. And I would leave the church even of my
fathers, and become anything as far as churches go, if I could get a
minister who held my face close and ever closer up to my own heart. Nor
would I spend a shilling or an hour that I could help on any impertinent
book,--any book that did not powerfully help me in the one remaining
interest of my one remaining life: a new nature and a new heart. No, not
I. No, not I any more.