As I have said, well-doing is the wider, and doing good to others the
narrower, expression. The one covers the whole ground of virtue, the
other declares that virtue which is self-regarding, the culture which
is mainly occupied with self, is lame and imperfect, and there is a
great gap in it, as if some cantle had been cut out of the silver disc
of the moon. It is only full-orbed when in well-doing, and as a very
large constituent element of it, there is included the doing good to
others. That is too plain to need to be stated. We hear a great deal
to-day about altruism. Well, Christianity preaches that more
emphatically than any other system of thought, morals, or religion does.
And Christianity brings the mightiest motives for it, and imparts the
power by which obedience to that great law that every man's conscience
responds to is made possible.
But whilst thus we recognise as a dictate of elementary morality that
well-doing must necessarily include doing good to others, and feel, as I
suppose we all do feel, when we are true to our deepest convictions,
that possessions of all sorts, material, mental, and all others, are
given to us in stewardship, and not in absolute ownership, in order that
God's grace in its various forms may fructify through us to all, my
present point is that, if that is recognised as being what it is, an
elementary dictate of morality enforced by men's relationships to one
another, and sealed by their own consciences, there is no getting away
from the obligation upon all Christian men which it draws after it, of
each taking his share in the great work of imparting the gospel to the
whole world.
For that gospel is our highest good, the best thing that we can carry to
anybody. We many of us recognise the obligation that is devolved upon us
by the possession of wealth, to use it for others as well as for
ourselves. We recognise, many of us, the obligation that is devolved
upon us by the possession of knowledge, to impart it to others as well
as ourselves. We are willing to give of our substance, of our time, of
our effort, to impart much that we have. But some of us seem to draw a
line at the highest good that we have, and whilst responding to all
sorts of charitable and beneficent appeals made to us, and using our
faculties often for the good of other people, we take no share and no
interest in communicating the highest of all goods, the good which comes
to the man in whose heart Christ rests. It is our highest good, because
it deals with our deepest needs, and lifts us to the loftiest position.
The gospel brings our highest good, because it brings eternal good,
whilst all other benefits fade and pass, and are left behind with life
and the dead flesh. It is our highest good, because if that great
message of salvation is received into a heart, or moulds the life of a
nation, it will bring after it, as its ministers and results, all manner
of material and lesser benefit. And so, giving Christ we give _our_
best, and giving Christ we give the highest gift that a weary world can
receive.
Remember, too, that the impartation of this highest good is one of the
main reasons why we ourselves possess it. Jesus Christ can redeem the
world alone, but it cannot become a redeemed world without the help of
His servants. He needs us in order to carry into all humanity the
energies that He brought into the midst of mankind by His Incarnation
and Sacrifice; and the cradle of Bethlehem and the Cross of Cavalry are
not sufficient for the accomplishment of the purpose for which they
respectively came to pass, without the intervention and ministry of
Christian people. It was for this end amongst others, that each of us
who have received that great gift into our hearts have been enriched by
it. The river is fed from the fountains of the hills, in order that it
may carry verdure and life whithersoever it goes. And you and I have
been brought to the Cross of Christ, and made His disciples, not only in
order that we ourselves might be blessed and quickened by the gift
unspeakable, but in order that through us it may be communicated, just
as each particle when leavened in the mass of the dough communicates its
energy to its adjacent particle until the whole is leavened.
I am afraid that indifference to the communication of the highest good,
which marks sadly too many Christian professors in all ages, and in this
age, is a suspicious indication of a very slight realisation of the good
for themselves. Luther said that justification was the article of a
standing or a falling church. That may be true in the region of
theology, but in the region of practical life I do not know that you
will find a test more reliable and more easy of application than this,
Does a man care for spreading amongst his fellows the gospel that he
himself has received? If he does not, let him ask himself whether, in
any real sense, he has it. 'Well-doing' includes doing good to others,
and the possession of Christ will make it certain that we shall impart
Him.
II. Notice the bearing of this elementary injunction upon the scope of
the obligation.
'Let us do good to all men.' It was Christianity that invented the word
'humanity'; either in its meaning of the aggregate of men or its meaning
of a gracious attitude towards them. And it invented the word because it
revealed the thing on which it rests. 'Brotherhood' is the sequel of
'Fatherhood,' and the conception of mankind, beneath all diversities of
race and culture and the like, as being an organic whole, knit together
by a thousand mystical bands, and each atom of which has connection
with, and obligations to, every other--that is a product of
Christianity, however it may have been in subsequent ages divorced from
a recognition of its source. So, then, the gospel rises above all the
narrow distinctions which call themselves patriotism and are parochial,
and it says that there is 'neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, Jew
nor Greek, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free,' but all are one. Get
high enough up upon the hill, and the hedges between the fields are
barely perceptible. Live on the elevation to which the Gospel of Jesus
Christ lifts men, and you look down upon a great prairie, without a
fence or a ditch or a division. So my text comes with profound
significance, 'Let us do good to all,' because all are included in the
sweep of that great purpose of love, and in the redeeming possibilities
of that great death on the Cross. Christ has swept the compass, if I may
say so, of His love and work all round humanity; and are we to extend
our sympathies or our efforts less widely? The circle includes the
world; our sympathies should be as wide as the circle that Christ has
drawn.
Let me remind you, too, that only such a world-wide communication of the
highest good that has blessed ourselves will correspond to the proved
power of that Gospel which treats as of no moment diversities that are
superficial, and can grapple with and overcome, and bind to itself as a
crown of glory, every variety of character, of culture, of circumstance,
claiming for its own all races, and proving itself able to lift them
all. 'The Bread of God which came down from heaven' is an exotic
everywhere, because it came down from heaven, but it can grow in all
soils, and it can bring forth fruit unto eternal life everywhere amongst
mankind. So 'let us do good to all.'
And then we are met by the old objection, 'The eyes of a fool are in the
ends of the earth. Keep your work for home, that wants it.' Well! I am
perfectly ready to admit that in Christian work, as in all others there
must be division of labour, and that one man's tastes and inclinations
will lead him to one sphere and one form of it; and another man's to
another; and I am quite ready, not to admit, but strongly to insist,
that, whatever happens, home is not to be neglected. 'All men' includes
the slums in England as well as the savages in Africa, and it is no
excuse for neglecting either of these departments that we are trying to
do something in the other. But it is not uncharitable to say that the
objection to which I am referring is most often made by one or other of
two classes, either by people who do not care about the Gospel, nor
recognise the 'good' of it at all, or by people who are ingenious in
finding excuses for not doing the duty to which they are at the moment
summoned. The people that do the one are the people that do the other.
Where do you get your money from for home work? Mainly from the
Christian Churches. Who is it that keeps up missionary work abroad?
Mainly the Christian Churches. There is a vast deal of unreality in that
objection. Just think of the disproportion between the embarrassment of
riches in our Christian appliances here in England and the destitution
in these distant lands. Here the ships are crammed into a dock, close up
against one another, rubbing their yards upon each other; and away out
yonder on the waters there are leagues of loneliness, where never a
sail is seen. Here, at home, we are drenched with Christian teaching,
and the Churches are competing with each other, often like rival
tradespeople for their customers; and away out yonder a man to half a
million is considered a fair allowance. 'Let us do good to all.'
III. Lastly, note the bearing of this elementary precept on the
occasions that rise for the discharge of the duty.
'As we have opportunity.' As I have already said, the Christian way to
look at our circumstances is to regard them as openings for the exercise
of Christian virtue, and therefore summonses to its discharge. And if we
regarded our own position individually, so we should find that there
were many, many doors that had long been opened, into which we had been
too blind or too lazy, or too selfishly absorbed in our own concerns, to
enter. The neglected opportunities, the beckoning doors whose thresholds
we have never crossed, the good that we might have done and have not
done--these are as weighty to sink us as the positive sins, the
opportunities for which have appealed to our worse selves.
But I desire to say a word, not only about the opportunities offered to
us individually, but about those offered to England for this great
enterprise. The prophet of old represented the proud Assyrian conqueror
as boasting, 'My hand hath gathered as a nest the riches of the peoples
. . . and there was none that moved the wing, or opened the mouth, or
peeped.' It might be the motto of England to-day. It is not for nothing
that we and our brethren across the Atlantic, the inheritors of the same
faith and morals and literature, and speaking the same tongue, have had
given to us the wide dominion that we possess, I know that England has
not climbed to her place without many a crime, and that in her 'skirts
is found the blood of poor innocents,' but yet we have that connection,
for good or for evil, with subject races all over the earth. And I ask
whether or not that is an opportunity that the Christian Church is bound
to make use of. What have we been intrusted with it for? Commerce,
dominion, the impartation of Western knowledge, literature, laws? Yes!
Is that all? Are you to send shirting and not the Gospel? Are you to
send muskets that will burst, and gin that is poison, and not
Christianity? Are you to send Shakespeare, and Milton, and modern
science, and Herbert Spencer, and not Evangelists and the Gospels? Are
you to send the code of English law and not Christ's law of love? Are
you to send godless Englishmen, 'through whom the name of God is
blasphemed amongst the Gentiles,' and are you not to send missionaries
of the Cross? A Brahmin once said to a missionary, 'Look here! Your Book
is a good Book. If you were as good as your Book you would make India
Christian in ten years.'
Brethren! the European world to-day is fighting and scrambling over what
it calls the unclaimed corners of the world; looking upon all lands that
are uncivilised by Western civilisation either as markets, or as parts
of their empire. Is there no other way of looking at the heathen world
than that? How did Christ look at it? He was moved when He saw the
multitudes as 'sheep having no shepherd.' Oh! if Christian men, as
members of this nation, would rise to the height of Christ's place of
vision, and would look at the world with His eyes, what a difference it
would make! I appeal to you, Christian men and women, as members of
this nation, and therefore responsible, though it may be
infinitesimally, for what this nation is doing in the distant corners of
the world, and urge on you that you are bound, so far as your influence
goes, to protest against the way of looking at these heathen lands as
existing to be exploited for the material benefit of these Western
Powers. You are bound to lend your voice, however weak it may be, to the
protests against the savage treatment of native races--against the
drenching of China with narcotics, and Africa with rum; to try to look
at the world as Christ looked at it, to rise to the height of that great
vision which regards all men as having been in His heart when He died on
the Cross, and refuses to recognise in this great work 'Barbarian,
Scythian, bond or free.' We have awful responsibilities; the world is
open to us. We have the highest good. How shall we obey this elementary
principle of our text, unless we help as we can in spreading Christ's
reign? Blessed shall we be if, and only if, we fill the seed-time with
delightful work, and remember that well-doing is imperfect unless it
includes doing good to others, and that the best good we can do is to
impart the Unspeakable Gift to the men that need it.