GET-I'-THE-HUNDRED-AND-LOSE-I'-THE-SHIRE
'For, what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world,
and lose his own soul?'--_Our Lord_.
This whole world is the penny, and our own souls are the pound. This
whole world is the hundred, while heaven itself is the shire. And the
question this evening is, Are we wise in the penny and foolish in the
pound? And, are we getting in the hundred and losing in the shire?
1. Well, then, to begin at the beginning, we are already begun to be
penny-wise and pound-foolish with our children when we are so particular
with them about their saying their little prayers night and morning,
while all the time we are so inattentive and so indolent to explain to
them how they are to pray, what they are to pray for, and how they are to
wait and how long they are to wait for the things they pray for. Then,
again, we are penny-wise and pound-foolish with our children when we
train them up into all the proprieties and etiquettes of family and
social life, and at the same time pay so little attention to their inward
life of opening thought and quickening desire and awakening passion. When
we are so eager also for our children to be great with great people,
without much regard to the moral and religious character of those great
people, then again we are like a man who may be wise for a penny, but is
certainly a fool for a pound. When we prefer the gay and the fashionable
world to the intellectual, the religious, and the philanthropical world
for our children, then we lose both the penny and the pound as well.
Almost as much as we do when we accept the penny of wealth and station
and so-called connection for a son or a daughter, in room of the pound of
character, and intelligence, and personal religion.
Then, again, even in our own religious life we are ourselves often and
notoriously wise in the penny and foolish in the pound. As, for
instance, when we are so scrupulous and so conscientious about forms and
ceremonies, about times and places, and so on. In short, the whole
ritual that has risen up around spiritual religion in all our churches,
from that of the Pope himself out to that of George Fox--it is all the
penny rather than the pound. This rite and that ceremony; this habit and
that tradition; this ancient and long-established usage, as well as that
new departure and that threatened innovation;--it is all, at its best,
always the penny and never the pound. Satan busied me about the lesser
matters of religion, says James Fraser of Brea, and made me neglect the
more substantial points. He made me tithe to God my mint, and my anise
and my cummin, and many other of my herbs, to my all but complete neglect
of justice and mercy and faith and love. Whether there are any of the
things that Brea would call mint and anise and cummin that are taking up
too much of the time of our controversially-minded men in all our
churches, highland and lowland, to-day is a matter for humbling thought.
Labour, my brethren, for yourselves, at any rate, to get yourselves into
that sane and sober habit of mind that instantly and instinctively puts
all mint and all cummin of all kinds into the second place, and all the
weightier matters, both of law and of gospel, into the first place. I
wasted myself on too nice points, laments Brea in his deep, honest, clear-
eyed autobiography. I did not proportion my religious things aright. The
laird of Brea does not say in as many words that he was wise in the penny
and foolish in the pound, but that is exactly what he means.
Then, again, the narrowness, the partiality, the sickliness, and the
squeamishness of our consciences,--all that makes us to be too often
penny-wise and pound-foolish in our religious life. A well-instructed,
thoroughly wise, and well-balanced conscience is an immense blessing to
that man who has purchased such a conscience for himself. There is an
immense and a criminal waste of conscience that goes on among some of our
best Christian people through the want of light and space, room, and
breadth, and balance in their consciences. We are all pestered with
people every day who are full of all manner of childish scrupulosity and
sickly squeamishness in their ill-nourished, ill-exercised consciences.
As long as a man's conscience is ignorant and weak and sickly it will, it
must, spend and waste itself on the pennyworths of religion and' morals
instead of the pounds. It will occupy and torture itself with points and
punctilios, jots and tittles, to the all but total oblivion, and to the
all but complete neglect, of the substance and the essence of the
Christian mind, the Christian heart, and the Christian character. The
washing of hands, of cups, and of pots, was all the conscience that
multitudes had in our Lord's day; and multitudes in our day scatter and
waste their consciences on the same things. A good man, an otherwise
good and admirable man, will absolutely ruin and destroy his conscience
by points and scruples and traditions of men as fatally as another will
by a life of debauchery. Some old and decayed ecclesiastical rubric;
some absolutely indifferent form in public worship; some small
casuistical question about a creed or a catechism; some too nice point of
confessional interpretation; the mint and anise and cummin of such
matters will fill and inflame and poison a man's mind and heart and
conscience for months and for years, to the total destruction of all that
for which churches and creeds exist; to the total suspense, if not the
total and lasting destruction, of sobriety of mind, balance and breadth
of judgment, humility, charity, and a hidden and a holy life. The penny
of a perverted, partial, and fanaticised conscience has swallowed up the
pound of instruction, and truth, and justice, and brotherly love.
2. 'Nor is the man with the long name at all inferior to the other,'
said Lucifer, in laying his infernal plot against the peace and
prosperity of Mansoul. Now, the man with the long name was just Mr. Get-
i'-the-hundred-and-lose-i'-the-shire. A hundred in the old county
geography of England was a political subdivision of a shire, in which
five score freemen lived with their freeborn families. A county or a
shire was described and enumerated by the poll-sheriff of that day as
containing so many enfranchised hundreds; and the total number of
hundreds made up the political unity of the shire. To this day we still
hear from time to time of the 'Chiltern Hundreds,' which is a division of
Buckinghamshire that belongs, along with its political franchise, to the
Crown, and which is utilised for Crown purposes at certain political
emergencies. This proverb, then, to get i' the hundred and lose i' the
shire, is now quite plain to us. You might canvass so as to get a
hundred, several hundreds, many hundreds on your side, and yet you might
lose when it came to counting up the whole shire. You might possess
yourself of a hundred or two and yet be poor compared with him who
possessed the whole shire. And then the proverb has been preserved out
of the old political life of England, and has been moralised and
spiritualised to us in the _Holy War_. And thus after to-night we shall
always call this shrewd proverb to mind when we are tempted to take a
part at the risk of the whole; to receive this world at the loss of the
next world; or, as our Lord has it, to gain the whole world and to lose
our own soul. Lot's choice of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Esau's purchase of
the mess of pottage in the Old Testament; and then Judas's thirty pieces
of silver, and Ananias and Sapphira's part of the price in the New
Testament, are all so many well-known instances of getting in the hundred
and losing in the shire. And not Esau's and Lot's only, but our own
lives also have been full up to to-day of the same fatal transaction.
This house, as our Lord again has it, this farm, this merchandise, this
shop, this office, this salary, this honour, this home--all this on the
one hand, and then our Lord Himself, His call, His cause, His Church,
with everlasting life in the other--when it is set down before us in
black and white in that way, the transaction, the proposal, the choice is
preposterous, is insane, is absolutely impossible. But preposterous,
insane, absolutely impossible, and all, there it is, in our own lives, in
the lives of our sons and daughters, and in the lives of multitudes of
other men and other men's sons and daughters besides ours. Every day you
will be taken in, and you will stand by and see other men taken in with
the present penny for the future pound: and with the poor pelting hundred
under your eye for the full, far-extending, and ever-enriching shire.
Lucifer is always abroad pressing on us in his malice the penny on the
spot, for the pound which he keeps out of sight; he dazzles our eyes with
the gain of the hundred till we gnash our teeth at the loss of the shire.
'He hath in sooth good cause for endless grief,
Who, for the love of thing that lasteth not,
Despoils himself for ever of THAT LOVE.'
3. 'What also if we join with those two another two of ours, Mr. Sweet-
world and Mr. Present-good, namely, for they are two men full of civility
and cunning. Let these engage in this business for us, and let Mansoul
be taken up with much business, and if possible with much pleasure, and
this is the way to get ground of them. Let us but cumber and occupy and
amuse Mansoul sufficiently, and they will make their castle a warehouse
for goods instead of a garrison for men of war.' This diabolical advice
was highly applauded all through hell till all the lesser devils, while
setting themselves to carry it out, gnashed their teeth with envy and
malice at Lucifer for having thought of this masterpiece and for having
had it received with such loud acclamation. 'Only get them,' so went on
that so able, so well-envied, and so well-hated devil, 'let us only get
those fribble sinners for a night at a time to forget their misery. And
it will not cost us much to do that. Only let us offer them in one
another's houses a supper, a dance, a pipe, a newspaper full of their own
shame, a tale full of their own folly, a silly song, and He who loved
them with an everlasting love will soon see of the travail of His soul in
them!' Yes, my fellow-sinners, Lucifer and his infernal crew know us and
despise us and entrap us at very little trouble, till He who travailed
for us on the tree covers His face in heaven and weeps over us. As long
as we remember our misery, all the mind, and all the malice, and all the
sleeplessness in hell cannot touch a hair of our head. But when by any
emissary and opportunity either from earth around us or from hell beneath
us we for another night forget our misery, it is all over with us. And
yet, to tell the truth, we never can quite forget our misery. We are too
miserable ever to forget our misery. In the full steam of Lucifer's best-
spread supper, amid the shouts of laughter and the clapping of hands, and
all the outward appearance of a complete forgetfulness of our misery, yet
it is not so. It is far from being so. Our misery is far too
deep-seated for all the devil's drugs. Only, to give Lucifer his due, we
do sometimes, under him, so get out of touch with the true consolation
for our misery that, night after night, through cumber, through pursuit
of pleasure, through the time being taken up with these and other like
things, we do so far forget our misery as to lie down without dealing
with it; but only to have it awaken us, and take our arm as its own for
another miserable day. Yes; though never completely successful, yet this
masterpiece of hell is sufficiently successful for Satan's subtlest
purposes; which are, not to make us forget our misery, but to make us put
it away from us at the natural and proper hour for facing it and for
dealing with it in the only proper and successful way. But, wholly, any
night, or even partially for a few nights at a time, to forget our
misery--no, with all thy subtlety of intellect and with all thy
hell-filled heart, O Lucifer, that is to us impossible! Forget our
misery! O devil of devils, no! Bless God, that can never be with us!
Our misery is too deep, too dreadful, too acute, too all-consuming ever
to be forgotten by us even for an hour. Our misery is too terrible for
thee, with all thy overthrown intellect and all thy malice-filled heart,
ever to understand! Didst thou for one midnight hour taste it, and so
understand it, then there would be the same hope for thee that, I bless
God, there still is for me!
Let us bend all our strength and all our wit to this, went on Lucifer, to
make their castle a warehouse instead of a garrison. Let us set
ourselves and all our allies, he explained to the duller-witted among the
devils, to make their hearts a shop,--some of them, you know, are
shopkeepers; a bank,--some of them are bankers; a farm,--some of them are
farmers; a study,--some of them are students; a pulpit,--some of them
like to preach; a table,--some of them are gluttons; a drawing-room,--some
of them are busybodies who forget their own misery in retailing other
people's misery from house to house. Be wise as serpents, said the old
serpent; attend, each several fallen angel of you, to his own special
charge. Study your man. Get to the bottom of your man. Follow him
about; never let him out of your sight; be sure before you begin, be sure
you have the joint in his harness, the spot in his heel, the chink in his
wall full in your eye. I do not surely need to tell you not to scatter
our snares for souls at random, he went on. Give the minister his study
Bible, the student his classic, the merchant his ledger, the glutton his
well-dressed dish and his elect year of wine, the gossip her sweet
secret, and the flirt her fool. Study them till they are all naked and
open to your sharp eyes. Find out what best makes them forget even for
one night their misery and ply them with that. If I ever see that soul I
have set thee over on his knees on account of his misery I shall fling
thee on the spot into the bottomless pit. And if any of you shall
anywhere discover a man--and there are such men--a man who forgets his
misery through always thinking and speaking about it, only keep him in
his pulpit, and off his knees, and no man so safe for hell as he. There
are fools, and there are double-dyed fools, and that man is the chief of
them. Give him his fill of sin and misery; let him luxuriate himself in
sin and misery; only, keep him there, and I will not forget thy most
excellent service to me.
Make all their hearts, so Lucifer summed up, as he dismissed his
obsequious devils, make all their several hearts each a warehouse, a
shop, a farm, a pulpit, a library, a nursery, a supper-table, a chamber
of wantonness--let it be to each man just after his own heart. Only,
keep--as you shall answer for it,--keep faith and hope and charity and
innocence and patience and especially prayerfulness out of their hearts.
And when this my counsel is fulfilled, and when the pit closes over thy
charge, I shall pay thee thy wages, and promote thee to honour. And
before he was well done they were all at their posts.