and quality in each particular person. Untold mischief has been done
by excusing the unpardonable in a man, on the ground that in some other
directions he is a good man. If he is ill to live with in the home, or
is hard and overreaching in his business, if he willingly makes life
more difficult than it need be for others, this is conduct which is
character; and when it is found with a profession of religion, let the
man, who thus outrages religion, be anathema. But at the same time,
young people should not conclude too hastily that a man is a hypocrite
because he does some things they cannot reconcile with his profession.
A man may be a very faulty man, and yet be a genuinely good man. His
goodness does not excuse his faults, nor do his faults destroy his
claim to goodness. I have known many a son judge a father very
harshly, and find himself in after years glad to find a place of
repentance. If you would have less reason later on to call yourself a
fool, be told that as yet you are not the best judges of what are but
faults on the surface of a man, and what are vices that are the man
himself. The truth about others will out sooner or later; what most
concerns you in the meanwhile is to know the truth about yourselves.
While always trying to think fairly, and even generously about others,
have you the right to think well of yourselves? "It is above all
things necessary," said the late President Garfield, "that in every
action I should have the good opinion of James Garfield; for to eat,
and drink, and sleep, and awake with one whom you despise, though that
one be yourself, is an intolerable thought, and what must it be as a
life experience?"
This is his way of saying that, as he puts it, above all things he must
be able to respect himself; and therefore there must be no double
existence, no secret sin, no side streets off the open thoroughfare of
his life, which he preferred to visit when it was dark--for, although
his neighbours and friends might not know about them, James Garfield
would know about them, and to be this creature whom you despise was
Garfield's idea of what every rightly ordered man should think of with
loathing. It is the word of wise old Polonius over again--
"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
Let a man have the right to respect himself, and he has that which can
take the sting out of his disappointments and the tyranny of victory
out of his failures. He may be no great success, as the world
appreciates success. He may not make much show at money-getting; the
position he fills may not excite much envy. Whether or not he achieves
this order of success will be all the same fourscore years hence.
These things, seen and temporal, will be past and forgotten, but that
which he makes himself in the use of them will remain, and that will
_not_ be all the same whatever it is.
I myself have been through a hard mill. I know what it is to have to
struggle for self-respect over the toil by which I earned my bread. I
have been counted as just a "hand" among a few hundred others, of
importance only so far as it affected the cost of a certain production.
But I say it advisedly, and speaking out of years which have left their
mark, I would rather have this experience to the finish of my mortal
days and all the way, and at the end be able to look my soul in the
face and say: "There is no shadow between us, we are at peace"--rather
this, I say, than any such success as I have had, multiplied a
hundredfold, if it can only turn to conscience to be smitten by it.
I would have you succeed; and by success I mean, for the moment, what
the world means by the term. Why should you not? There is no
necessary connection between a straight life and failure to win the
kingdoms of this world. You can be clean and conscientious in your
methods, and you can succeed if you have it in you to succeed. If you
have not, scorn the trick of blaming honesty for what is really lack of
ability. There may be cases where honesty handicaps a man for a time,
but they are comparatively few and short-lived in their operation. But
lift the definition of success to higher levels, and I assert without
qualification that with the right to respect ourselves there can be no
failure, and without it there can be no success. That I do or do not
make money is a question of gift or the favour of circumstances; that I
am an honest man haps neither upon accident nor contingency. It is the
deliberate and responsible exercise of my own moral will. I may make
money or position and be a failure; I may do neither and be a success.
Let me counsel you to hold it true with the great President: "I must,
above all things, have the good opinion of myself." Look up to God and
pray: "Keep Thou me from secret faults"; then look in upon yourselves
and say: "By the help of God I will make it possible for God to give me
the help I ask." To thine own self be true. Put this estimate upon
yourself, and whatever price the world may put upon you, time will show
that you have no more valuable asset than your own self-respect. You
may not be able to command the declarative success upon which the world
places its emphasis, but you can always deserve it. He is the great
man who can say, and mean it, I would rather be beaten in the right
than succeed in the wrong.
Saul had ceased to respect himself, and this very probably supplies the
explanation of his being found in this questionable company. Bear in
mind who, and what, these so-called prophets were, and you gather the
force of the surprise with which it was asked: "Is Saul also, the king,
the Lord's anointed, in the company of men like these?"
For in this connection it suggests the influence of companionships.
There is a well-known saying that a man is known by the company he
keeps, and it is truer than many sayings that are oftener on our lips.
"Do you think him beyond further effort?" I said lately to a good man
concerning one in whom we were both interested--a young man fast
heading towards ruin. "I am afraid there is, humanly speaking, no
hope," was the answer; "he has taken up with company that forbids it."
When we are young we are apt to evolve friendships out of our
imagination. We do not so much prove them as create them, according to
the impulses and undisciplined generosities of our disposition. It is
only time, here as elsewhere, that can teach us how much there is that
is human about the best of friends. But how much may have been done,
for better or for worse, before we realize that the angels have gone
away only because they were never here? As we get older outside
friendships count for less. Life fills with other interests, or it
empties in a sense friendships can never fill. If we who are older
have carried into the later years one or two, or two or three,
well-laid, well-tested and useful friendships, let us be very thankful,
and cherish them. They are pearls of great price, for no friends are
like old friends, and as they drop off we have to make the best we can
of acquaintances. It is when we are young that we have the genius for
friendships; they are, indeed, a necessary part of our life. And
whether or not it is much use to warn young people about the formation
of friendships, the warning is seriously needed. Much will be
determined by affinities and by mutual sympathies. You may have to
sample many friendships before you find a friend. And while it is
difficult, not to say impossible, to lay down rules where affinities
are involved, one thing you can do, you can allow the moral instinct to
decide, as it can decide, whether in the real interests of character a
given friendship is worth cultivation. If you realize that you must
surrender something of your better self to be the friend of a certain
person, you will be almost sure to establish that friendship at your
peril. It is far harder to save your life than it is to lose it, and
the chances are, not that you will lift the friendship up to your
level, but that it will pull you down to its own.
These remarks on the general subject of personal friendship are
warranted by its importance. But there is another aspect of it which,
as a question of widespread and deep-seated influence, is even more
important. And it is one that is too rarely touched in or out of the
pulpit. There is something which begins with only an acquaintance, but
it readily grows into more, and that more is supplied at a heavy cost
to the individual and to the community.
In a well-known passage in one of his letters, St. Paul asks: "What
concord hath Christ with Belial, or what part hath he that believeth
with an infidel? Wherefore come out from among them, saith the Lord,
and be ye separate; touch not the unclean thing." Both the question
and the admonition apply to personal friendships and to other
relationships, such as marriage, social and business intercourse. But
it has another and wider application. They refer to the general
attitude of our thought, our bearing towards interests and people whom
we have reason to believe are hurtful themselves and represent hurtful
institutions. For me to call myself a Christian, and yet be on terms
of apparent friendship, of easy good nature and tolerance of men and
things that stand for Belial, that are Belial, is one of the most
effective ways I know of crucifying Christ afresh, and putting Him to
open shame. Whatever the King of Israel might think of his company,
the fact that he was in it gave to their worthlessness a new tenure of
existence and to their wickedness an added licence. He did not make
them better men, but they made him a worse man. And for us to appear
to countenance wrong things, so as to favour an impression that
possibly they are not so wrong after all; to strengthen the wickedness
which would hide itself behind the sinister expression, that the "devil
may not be so bad as he is painted," is to be on the side of the devil.
It is to hearten the foes of good and perplex and discourage the
enemies of evil.
In that remarkable book, _Mark Rutherford's Deliverance_, the writer
speaks of a day when politics will become a matter of life or death,
dividing men with really private love and hate. "I have heard it
said," he tells us, "that we ought to congratulate ourselves that
political differences do not in this country breed personal
animosities. To me this seems anything but a subject of
congratulation. Men who are totally at variance ought not to be
friends, and if Radical and Tory are not totally but merely
superficially at variance, so much the worse for their Radicalism and
Toryism. Most of us," he goes on to say, "have no real loves and no
real hatreds. Blessed is love, less blessed is hatred, but thrice
accursed is the indifference which is neither one nor the other, the
muddy mess which men call friendship." The truth underlying these
words is put in a severe form, but there is truth in it. Our
compromises in politics, and the consequent slow and doubtful progress
we make in social conditions, have many explanations, but the abiding
one is, that at the moral root of things we have not, as Mark
Rutherford means it, those real loves and hatreds which vitally
influence conduct. Take any wrong that happens to appeal to your sense
of indignation, and ask why it continues? in what does it get its lease
of existence? And the answer is, the fact that we have too many Sauls
among the prophets. The wrong remains because, although we do not
profess to be its friends, its friends have no need to reckon with us
as its foes.
I have already alluded to my experience in a hard school. Indulge me
if I return to it for a moment. My earlier years were spent in a
Lancashire cloth mill. In it I wrought from morning to night side by
side with youths of my own age and men who were older. For the most
part, young and old, they were practised in almost every conceivable
coarse and brutal way of casting their existence as rubbish to the
void. But I think I can truthfully say that, while I tried to be loyal
to the conditions of contact, and as a comrade in the ranks was not
unpopular, yet they knew that neither within those grim walls nor
without them was I of their world.
It is not easy, sometimes it is very hard, to take up this positive
position amid one's daily surroundings. And it is not only hard to do
the thing itself; it may be even harder to do it wisely. It is not
pleasant to have your conscientious attitudes to things which to you
are neither expedient nor permissible interpreted by the old words used
as a sneer: "Stand aside, for I am holier than thou." Young people
like to be what is called "popular" with those who touch their lives;
and within well-defined limits they owe it to themselves and others to
cultivate the qualities that invite popularity. If, however, the price
of popularity is some form of compromise with things that harm and
things that hate--then, if you are worth world-room, you will draw the
line sharply and keep on one side of it. And that can be done without
giving the impression that you are either a prig or a snob. When you
go the right way about it, the attitude I advise is far harder in
contemplation than it is in practice. The real difficulty in eight out
of every ten of the critical places in life is not what is in them, but
what we imagine is in them. Let it be felt that the things you hold to
be wrong must expect from you neither compromise nor show of
friendship; that you are the open and declared enemy of unclean speech,
filthy jesting, secret sins, with their hints and implied fascinations,
brainless pursuits, frivolous conversation, and low down levels of
existence, and, with the exception of those whose enmity it is a
distinction to have, people will come to realize that your position is
neither that of the religious crank nor of self-righteous conceit--that
it is the expression and outcome of your reverence for whatsoever
things are pure and lovely and of good report.
Human society has no need more pressing than its need of young men and
women with moral courage and religious conviction to take up the right
attitude to wrong things. "Know ye not that whoever will be the friend
of the world is the enemy of God?" When Saul was found in a certain
company he had ceased to respect himself. This is why he was found
there; and these two things were more than enough to sweep his life to
its tragic close. How many of us have read this man's life-finish?
Let me suggest to you something new to read. A story that has in it
more elemental material than half the fiction that ever was written, or
half the facts that mortgage the attention of a superficial world.
Read that chapter where Saul, face to face with the last things in his
darkened career, and hard upon the Nemesis of his own evil past, seeks
out the woman with the familiar spirit, and in the words that he
addresses to the apparition which he conjures up before his distorted
vision you have the confession of a lost soul: "The Philistines make
war against me, and the Lord answered me no more, neither by prophet
nor by dream." "I have read nothing," says a well-known novelist,
"quite like this man's experience in its utter abandon of lonely
horror."
Think what you may about the setting of this story, you will be
strangely lacking in moral insight if you miss the meaning that
pulsates through the words that were wrung out of Saul in his
extremity. They point to the lost, which once lost is lost for ever.
Even God, I say again, cannot give us back the yesterdays. Once they
are gone we can only say: "That which is written is written."
Many of you have practically the best of your chances before you, but
every day takes some part of them out of your hands, and gives it to an
irrecoverable past. Be jealous about your own self-respect, and do
only the things that command it. Take care of your self-respect, and
your success will take care of itself; as also will your
companionships. "Seek ye the Lord while He may be found; call ye upon
Him while He is near." Do not put off and forget, forget and put off
until your clock strikes, and so far as the best of your opportunities
are concerned, you have to say: "The Lord answereth me no more, neither
by prophet nor by dream." Lay hold at once upon the help that comes
through genuine decision for God. Place yourself in position where God
can help you; and you will find that God in Christ denies you nothing
except that which disappoints in the seeking and defeats in the
finding. You will realize that He offers you life; strong, sane, happy
life all the way, and at the end the more life and the fuller.
THE ROYAL LAW
"Howbeit if ye fulfil the royal law, according to the Scripture, Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, ye do well."--St. James ii. 8.
VII
THE ROYAL LAW
What St. James calls the Royal Law, is mentioned as far back as the
time of Moses. It is one of the two commands to which our Lord gave
new incidence, into which He put fresh meaning.
There has been, I hardly need remind you, endless debate about the
source of some of Christ's most characteristic sayings. Was He
original in His teaching, as we use the word, or was He eclectic,
gathering together the most luminous things that had been said? Jewish
scholars, as we might expect, have not been slow to point out that many
of the sayings attributed to Jesus, and certainly many of His ideas,
are to be found in the old Rabbinical writings; that many of His
highest truths had been announced by saints and seers of His race long
before He came.
We need not question that there is truth in this representation. But
we must question the inference from these words, "long before He came."
For time has known no such solitude. He, which is, and was, and is to
come, has ever been in the world teaching men how to pray, inspiring
them what to say. He had taught "them of old time." "Before Abraham
was," He says, "I am." And St. John tells us that "He was in the
world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not."
Originality is no mere traffic with words however skilfully
manipulated. There is a language of God transcending all words, and
intelligible only when we meet Him spirit to spirit in the secret
places of His eternity.
"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Observe the setting of
this admonition when first given: "Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear
grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself." This word "neighbour" connoted something that
was a distinct advance in the upward trend of the race. It did, at any
rate, a little to lift the Israelite out of himself into the lives of
others. But it meant to him, at the most, only those who were of the
same tribe or nation. In the fulness of time--when the world was
ready--Jesus took up His own word spoken through Moses, and limited in
its interpretation by the moral intelligence of that day; took up His
own word, and made it co-extensive with humanity.
This is what I mean by a language of God transcending all speech. "You
have been told," says Jesus, "to love your neighbour"; and to the
question, "Who is my neighbour?" He makes the answer reach out to its
full circumference--"Thy neighbour is he or she who bears thy nature."
By the law which declares that God has made of one blood all the
nations of the earth, the physical unity of the race is implied; so by
the operation of the law of love the moral unity, or, what we now call
the "solidarity of humanity," is intended.
"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." And I hardly need point
out, that it is this little word _as_ in the text which gives us pause.
Is it possible, then, to bring down this command and incarnate it in
our daily life? It does not say, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour with
certain arbitrary qualifications of thy own." It evidently means what
it says: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour _as thyself_." Is it possible
to do it? And many of us are ready to answer, It is not. Either there
has been some mistake in the way it is reported, we tell ourselves, or
it is useless to try to fulfil it with such natures as ours in such a
world as this.
Put it in this way: granted we loved others as we love ourselves--this
should be good and pleasant for those who possessed our love, if it had
genuine strength in it. Granted, again, we had the fulness of the
strong love of others, that should be helpful to us. If we may
condition the Royal Law in some such manner as this, "Love them who
love us;" or, "love them who are worthy of our love," the difficulty is
obviously lessened, if not in fact removed. But such a limit, while it
might amount to prudence, would not reach up to beatitude. "If ye love
them who love you, what do ye more than others?" "Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself." But who is thy neighbour? And Jesus answers,
"thy neighbour is he who bears thy nature." This is iteration, but I
venture it because I want us to confront the real insistence of this
text. They who share our nature may be, and often are, those who hate
us with or without a cause. There are people who perpetuate an
existence on others which is little better than a moral and physical
calamity. To tell us to tolerate them, not to speak about loving them,
is like telling us to attempt the impossible. And yet Jesus did not
forget these people when He said: "Love your enemies, bless them that
curse you, pray for them who despitefully use you and persecute you."
We, then, who say we accept Christ's teaching must accept it. This is
one of the places where we cannot escape behind some ingenuity of
exegesis or manipulation of text. The command is plain. We can take
it or leave it. One thing we cannot do, we cannot re-write it. "Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." As thyself. If this but fixes a
hard standard; or simply indicates the measurement of neighbourly love,
then we may almost as well close the discussion--its practical
attainment is out of our reach.
But, as some one has very wisely said: "Love of self must become a
medium before it becomes a measure." [1] In other words, we cannot
love our neighbour as we ought until we love ourselves as we should.
Out of love of self "flow the ingredients which must enter into
neighbour love."
The text, then, lays down a twofold obligation: to cultivate a right
love of self, and to translate this love of self into love for others.
As touching the first part of this obligation, it is useless to ask
what it is in our neighbour we are to love as ourselves, until we know
what it is in ourselves we are to love. In what sense is a man to love
himself? Because there is a radical difference between self-love as
taught and practised in the world, and the love of self sanctioned and
regulated by the Royal Law. Love of self is a right anxiety to secure
the things we need in this world. It is based upon the principle that
life is not to be unclothed but clothed upon. The fact that we are in
the world and have to fulfil its desired ends should carry with it
reverence for our manhood, and the demand for space to work out its
full equation. While the Apostle Paul was always ready to subject his
rights to the law of love, he was equally careful to assert that they
were his rights before he yielded them. In his care for the weak
brethren, he did not become a weak brother. One of the first things we
have to learn, is how to take wise care of ourselves; and then, step by
step, a true life is a growth in the knowledge of how so to take care
of ourselves as to promote the best interests of others. In this
matter of a right love of self, the point of transition at which it
passes into beneficence is the victory over a self-love which is
selfishness. It is really the basal principle of moral government in
the world.
But when this is said, the surest and simplest answer to the question,
What is it in ourselves we are to love? is to say--We are to love that
which God loves in us. And what does God love in us? From all we know
of the divine nature as revealed in Jesus Christ, we are surely right
in thinking that God loves in us what is most like Himself. No man can
stand at Calvary reverently and thoughtfully for five minutes without
being impressed with the truth of a wondrous self-sacrifice. I met
with a remark lately in a story I was reading which fastened itself on
my mind. It was made by a poor, toiling woman who had scarcely
sufficient means to keep body and soul together: "I never, somehow,"
she said, "seem to think a thing is mine until I have given it away."