from "miserable aims that end with self." God loves in us the
self-mastery that scorns to compromise with self-indulgence. God loves
in us that which cannot find its true home in the things seen and
temporal, but must ever soar out to the things unseen and eternal; the
things that live in and wait upon the earnest man and after which he
must ceaselessly aspire. God loves in us the strenuous effort which
proceeds from the conviction that there is sacred power in every life
which must not be wasted in "egotistical pride, or in a narrowing
self-love." From instinct, from the moral consciousness, from the
Scriptures--these we know to be representative of the things that God
loves. And we know we are right in loving in ourselves what God loves
in us. We also know that no man can wisely love himself until he knows
the purifying power of a love that is divine.
If now I may assume that this exposition of the text shows the ground,
and defines the sphere of a right love of self, I may further say that
the Royal Law does not require us to love in others what it does not
permit us to love in ourselves. And we do well to be clear about this.
Many of us stumble over this text because, not getting at its true
inwardness, we have an uneasy feeling that it carries us too far.
Others try to work up an artificial sentiment, and profess to exercise
a charity which is not theirs to extend.
Here is a man, let us say, who calls himself a religious man, who yet
notoriously is a mean and shabby creature. I once heard this man, well
placed and prosperous, boast of having that day become richer by some
twelve hundred pounds through an oversight of a solicitor in winding up
the affairs of a late client. I afterwards learned that the mistake
was at the expense of a widow and her young children, who, because of
it, were brought within very measurable distance of want. Must my love
for my neighbour include one callous enough, not only to do a thing
like that, but to boast about it? Must it annex the whole low plane of
such a squalid disposition? God forbid. What I hope I should hate in
myself I am not asked to love in another. If a man is base and
unworthy we are to recognize the fact, however ugly; we are to look the
devil in him in the face, and say it is the devil.
But, on the other side, Christianity admonishes us that our judgments
of our neighbours are neither infallible nor final. It has been well
pointed out, that if we "have found any part of the secret of God's
mercy shown to us, we shall not find it hard to believe in God's mercy
for our neighbours." To realize that the essential thing the Redeemer
saw in us and deemed it worth dying for, He sees in them, will help us,
however weary at times in their service, not to weary of it.
In this command, then, we have the ground and motive for the sacrifice
of each for the good of all. We see that it is possible to love our
neighbour in the sense we are to love ourselves. We see that the
command which, on the surface of it, seems to urge an unattainable
experience, is, in truth, what St. James calls it, the Royal Law that
binds us together not only as neighbours, but as children of the same
All-Father.
"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Should any one ask, "Who
does it?" I answer, That is not the question. To deny that we can love
our neighbour in this sense is to deny that we can love ourselves. Yet
I know what fate, especially for young men, may lurk in this cold,
faithless question. And I want it to be understood, that my single aim
in this address--the reason why I have wrestled at this length for the
meaning of the passage before us--is to show, that _whether we choose
to do it or not, it can be done_. I affirm that this text is a simple
statement of the principle of the only rational, helpful life man can
live. And to prevail upon you to admit this, would be to accomplish
much. To accept it as the truth, that you can love your neighbour as
yourself, is to win intellectual confidence in the service which your
day demands of you. It is to take the sting of death out of the old
evil question: "Who does it?" Once recognize that Christ asks for
nothing impossible, when He gave a new and ever-abiding authority to
this ancient precept, and the question will not be, Who does it?
Rather will it be, Who can afford not to do it? For not to do it is
selfishness, and selfishness is self-defeat. He who exists only for
himself, exists only to injure himself. It is the fashion now to get
rid of a judgment to come by telling us that we are our own judgment
here. The latter part of the statement is not the whole truth, but
there is truth in it. The strain brings out the strength there is, but
shirk it and we have weakness. Do as we like rather than do as we
ought, and the price must be paid in loss of manhood. Everything we
gain for selfishness we must steal from ourselves.
"Ah me," said Goethe once, "that the yonder is never here." Go deep
enough into every wrong and sin and you find at its root this
selfishness. So many of us degrade life into a heartless scramble. We
fight each other because each man, dissatisfied himself, is convinced
that his neighbour is getting more than his share. It may be doubted
whether there has ever been a day in the Western world when more people
were dominated by the conviction that gain is godliness. So many about
us have virtually ceased to put their trust in anything about which
they cannot lace their fingers. With them, dreamers about anything
else are cranks, and martyrs for anything else are nuisances. And this
reacts upon such apology as they have for more serious thinking. We
seem in many ways to be returning to the pagan condition when judgment
was not feared and spiritual influences were unfelt. In novel, drama,
and much that passes for science, we have the monotonous iteration that
man is the creature of blind chance under an indifferent sky.
But this, thank God, is not the whole story. There is another and
brighter side. If we take a very subdued estimate of our modern day
and world, I am yet persuaded that never were the saving ideas of the
Saviour more potent, never have His high aspirations been more ardently
welcomed or more strenuously followed than they are now.
Past all human speculations about Christ, men hopelessly divided in
creed are yet getting nearer to what He lived believing and died
believing. In the weariness of so much of the modern world, and in the
hopelessness of its outlook, I see an age ready to receive anew the
baptism of the Holy Spirit. I see a temper ready to grasp with fresh
earnestness the thoughts of the "Living Lord and Supreme Teacher of our
race." Men to-day are dreaming like dreams as shone before the souls
of the ancient prophets, and in the visions of men who have wrought for
human progress since the first days even until now. Waking dreams of a
new and diviner order of society. A state marked by righteousness,
peace, and happiness for the whole people; the golden age, when man,
knowing what it is in himself he ought to love, loves that in his
neighbour as in himself.
And Christianity, which came into the world to fulfil these heaven-born
dreams, is being openly challenged as never before to substantiate them.
In the larger aims of our spiritual ideals the "yonder is never here,"
nor, indeed, can it be. There must always be above us something better
than our best. When we cease to make progress we die, and that, in the
language of Scripture, is the second death.
If, therefore, the searching demand of the text confronts us with the
weakness of our nature, we need not wonder and we need not be
discouraged. It is the purpose it has in view. "It discloses an
ideal, and it reveals an end." If in seeking to realize the ideal and
gain the end we are forced to know how insufficient we are in our own
strength--this, I repeat, is the end it seeks to accomplish in us and
for us. Until our life is in Christ linked on to God, we cannot love
our neighbour as we ought, because we have not the higher power to love
ourselves as we should.
But the power is offered us. And it is for you young men to lay fast
hold of it, and accept the world's challenge in a way it has never been
handled and faced before. "Do not talk about the things you believe,"
says the world to us who name the name of Christ; "convince me that you
believe by what you do." And this is said, not from an indifference to
dogma, as some would have us think. It means that a man's beliefs are
between himself and God. It is what comes out of his belief, that can
be reckoned with amid the forces of our everyday life.
You place in cold sheet one of the loftiest passages of a great
composer before a man sensitive to music, but who does not know one
note from the other, and he looks at it with indifference. You put the
sheet before a gifted organist seated at his instrument; and as the
melody rolls forth in swells of power, then in cadences of persuasive
pathos, the indifference of the man vanishes as he catches his breath
like a sob, and feels a prayer he cannot speak. We say we believe in
Christ, and men turn aside with indifference. We live Christ, and men
love Him. It is common enough to find this indifference about
religion, and a marked want of what I have called intellectual
confidence in Christianity as we preach it from the pulpit. But I have
never yet found a man infidel to the fruits of its spirit, which are,
love, peace, goodness, a living faith, and a genuine self-sacrifice.
Before men can be expected to become Christ-like, they must know what
Christ is like, and how far are we prepared to put our lives before men
as an answer to the question: "What think ye of Christ?"
Preach Christ by living Christ. "All men," says the Koran, "are
commanded by the Saint." And no man ever casts the wealth of his life
and the crown of his devotion at the feet of Jesus without "quickening
the earth with a diviner life, and uplifting it with a new courage."
One of the most brilliant of the eighteenth-century poets said: "The
lapse of time changes all but man, who ever has been, and ever will be,
just what he is." Which means that man is by make incurably selfish.
This is a lie. And it is the worst kind of lying, for it represents
not only the inability to find good in man, but the inability to
believe that there is good to be found. My own stand is where thought
and experience have forced me. From human nature left to itself I hope
for nothing; with that nature remade in Christ I despair of nothing.
It all turns on the remake. And it can be remade: "As many as received
Him, to them gave He power to become sons of God: who were born not of
blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of
God."
Let us, therefore, by divine grace, refashion our lives on the mighty
principle of divine love. And let us settle it as one of the truths
never to be questioned, that nothing is worthy to be called love that
cannot be affirmed of God. We know what God loves; or we know enough
for the practical ordering of our daily life. Let us love in ourselves
what God loves in us. This will include for ourselves and others all
things which are good for us to have and enjoy; and because it will
exclude all things that are narrow, mean, and selfish, it will go far
to raise the world to a power of a new day. Then, through hearts and
homes, through Churches and societies, the Royal Law, made royal life,
will solve the problem of the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.
It will become the touch of omnipotence that casts out of our life the
unworthy, by bringing in the opposite virtues, resolving all into
character which shall transform mankind into one realm over which the
right and the might of Christ shall at last prevail--
"From creed and scheme the light goes out,
The saintly fact survives,
The Blessed Master who can doubt,
Revealed in human lives?"
[1] Two or three sentences in this chapter are memorized from a sermon
I heard years ago, preached by Rev. H. E. Michie, M.A., of Stonehaven.
'HE WAS DESPISED AND REJECTED'
"He is despised and rejected of men."--Isaiah liii. 3.
VIII
'HE WAS DESPISED AND REJECTED'
Some two or three years ago the picture, "He was despised and
rejected," by Sigismund Göetze, was on view in Glasgow. In this
address I shall try to tell you something about the impression it made
on me; and the reason will be given at the end why I include it in this
series. Some of you may have seen the picture; others may have read or
heard about it.
The conception of it appears to have formed itself in the mind of the
artist out of what ordinarily is a very commonplace circumstance. He
had attended a Sunday service at St. Paul's Cathedral, and heard a
sermon that made a deep impression upon him; which found his higher
being with something like the touch of an immortal influence. He
thought within himself: "What a real difference a word like this must
make in the thoughts and life of those who have been privileged to
listen to it. Never again, surely, can they be as though they had not
heard it." It was a message, so he felt, to shake men, to arouse them,
and make them turn on one another and cry: "Men and brethren, what must
we do?"
Under the impact of his own emotions and sensitive to his surroundings,
he was eager at the close of the service to share with others what he
virtually demanded they should impart to him. But he was grievously
disappointed. Not a word did he hear, not a look did he see on the
face of a departing worshipper which so much as betrayed the transient
emotion stirred by dream or romance. If they had listened to the
discourse, they had evidently forgotten what they had been at no pains
to remember. No new experience befell this man of artistic and
impulsive temperament. I heard a sermon a short time ago preached in a
seaside church, which deeply moved me; a sermon I was thankful to have
heard, and the like of which I would walk a long way to hear again. As
I stood outside the building waiting for a friend, the congregation
came out, and I heard the usual interchange of verbal nothings. The
only reference I did hear to the service was from a well-dressed young
man to a girl by his side, and this is what he said: "A long-winded
fellow, that; let us go on the parade." The remark did not unduly
surprise me. "I wonder," said a man to me lately, "why some people go
to a place of worship at all; they appear to be as indifferent to what
is said, sung, or prayed, as the dog that barks is indifferent about
the dog-star." In every congregation of fair size there is a strange
mixture. But it always includes those whose attention and evident
interest do something to compensate for others who show neither. There
are elect souls who hear the Word and receive it. You may not trace
the fact by what they say, but you know it by the holiness of
helpfulness, which radiates from them like light, and is made by them
as an atmosphere. God has not ordained the foolishness of
preaching--which does not mean foolish preaching--to thin out in the
miserable anti-climax of a remark like that of the young man I have
just quoted. Fortunately, however, our artist had not sufficient
experience of the conventional congregation at a place of worship to
have become philosophic about it--which usually amounts to
indifference. Judging others by what he himself felt, he thought they
must be equally moved. But instead of having received the preached
Word, there was nothing, so far as he could discern, to indicate that
they had even heard it, while there was much to lead to the conclusion
that they had not. Hence he resolved to repeat the sermon through the
translation of his art. They should, if he could accomplish it,
receive through the eyes what they would not hear with the ears.
Something like this, we are told, was the genesis of this picture, with
its central Figure of the Crucified One close by an ancient altar, yet
immediately outside a modern building called a Christian church. There
He stands unregarded and silent, but so far as His anguish speaks the
eternal Passion of God, while there stream past Him the clearly-defined
types of a twentieth-century multitude--each, with one doubtful
exception, as indifferent about who, and whence, and why He is, as if
He were one of the stone pillars that support the vestibule of the
temple dedicated to His worship. Poverty sits at His very feet and it
is not even curious; fashion and vice, toil and sport, science and
ruin, culture and ignorance, want and opulence pass by, and do not so
much as despise and reject Him--for that at least would argue some form
of interest. It is the indifference which, as Confucius says, is the
"night of the mind--night without a star." I need not linger over the
types. You may see them any day in a characteristic London throng; you
may see them in a less emphasized form in a city like Glasgow. If I
may make one reference to them, let it be where the artist attempts to
represent the attitude of the Churches to the Man of Sorrows. We have,
for example, a high ecclesiastic in one of the sacerdotal communions,
and by his side there is some order of Nonconformist minister. The
latter is evidently in earnest, not to entreat the attention of the
crowd to Him whom they pass by, but to convict his companion of error
out of their commonly-received Scriptures. And the great ecclesiastic,
sleek, debonair, and well preserved, has a bored look on his capacious
face which says: "My dear good man, why excite yourself? I readily
make you a present of your contention. You take your truth and I will
keep my position. As we can settle nothing but ourselves, why not
settle ourselves as comfortably as we can?"
According to the artist, each in his own way is in the crowd and of it.
It is anything and everything except the Crucified One, as in St.
Paul's it was anything and everything except the message spoken to
those who, having ears, heard not. How do we explain it, then, from
his point of view, that this stream of people, representative of a
widespread society, is utterly indifferent to that Figure so pathetic
in its loneliness, so tragic in its appeal, and almost aggressive in
its sorrow? It is possible that not a type on the canvas is to be
interpreted as quite ignorant of the letter of the claims made for Him
who is yet the Object of the world's indifference. There is a sense in
which it is true that Christ was never better known than He is in your
day and mine. We have the well-authenticated Scriptures which testify
of Him. We are more sure that we possess many of His sayings than we
are sure that the writings known as Shakespeare's plays were written by
a man called William Shakespeare. In these Scriptures He is reported
to have said:
"Before Abraham was, I am." And in another word, that falls like a
beam of light on everything He did and said, He tells us that "the Son
of Man is come to seek and to save the lost." We have the key-word of
the Father's message to the race in the wondrous declaration that "God
so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever
believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
We have a mighty Christian literature which, if it be evolved out of a
myth, resolves itself into a miracle. We have the fact that never
before was Christ so admired, so much quoted, and so generally
applauded as He is at the opening of the twentieth century. We have
accredited thinkers who reject, as they think, all dogmatic theologies
about Christ, and yet tell us that the spirit which Christ incarnated
in His words and actions reveals a God humanity cannot improve upon.
We have, moreover, an army of men who are set apart by training, and
what they believe to be their "calling," to preach Christ by precept,
and to teach Him by a life derived, as they declare, from Him whom they
preach and teach. And amid many failures, and motives of the earth
earthy, these men do not all fail, nor do they all live by bread alone.
Was there no place in that canvas-crowd for one of those devoted men
who, ill-paid, half-starved, and overwrought, toil night and day in
that most awful work on this earth, the attempt to rescue and raise the
lapsed masses of our large populations? Was there no room for the man
who penalizes body and soul to straining-point for words and thoughts
that shall inspire and hearten men to steer their lives by the higher
stars, those eternal principles of truth and right? Was there no room
for a woman of the Salvation Army who is out of some hideous slum for a
moment's breathing, before returning to it with a great self-renouncing
life of love and healing?
But take the picture as the artist's impression of the ail-but
universal indifference about Him who is yet declared to be the soul and
centre of our Scriptures, our creeds, and our religious life, and how
do we explain it? Or if we put the artist's impression aside, and on
our own account face the truth which, for the purposes of constructive
art, he may have exaggerated, is there any less need that we should
ask: Why is Christ despised and rejected of men? Why is it that they
do not come unto Him that they may have life? The answers are legion.
To my thinking, they resolve themselves into practically one. Before
we can know Christ, before we can understand Christ, before we can come
to Christ, we must come to ourselves. And not a face on that crowded
canvas suggests a hope that he, or she, had taken an honest step in
this all-determining direction. Before I can look to Christ as my
Saviour I must know that I need a Saviour. Before I can realize my
need of salvation from sin I must realize that I am a sinner. So much,
if not all, turns there. It is not every man who feels that he is a
sinner because he talks about being one. But let him feel it, and out
of the knowledge will come his saving health, or the death that dies.
It is declared to be the work of the Holy Spirit to convince men of
sin, and the unbelief growing out of sin. Analyse the causes of
indifference about the things that belong to our peace, and you find
that for the most part they resolve themselves into sin, and the
unbelief that follows sin, as consequence comes out of cause. I know
with what impatience the world turns from what is called the
evangelical teaching about the nature and effects of sin. And we need
not go outside the Church to find the same impatience, not to say
contempt. We have in our pulpits men who represent sin to us as good
in the making. It is in some sense a necessary means to an end. They
speak of arrested development, of defect of will, of inheritances and
surroundings, of a vacancy as yet unfilled by virtue. It is hard to
think that people held by a half-sceptical pantheism, and the
relativity of evil, have ever been face to face with the awful deeps
and disobediences of their own heart, or have felt the hot breath of
the devil on their own cheek. If we have any worth-discerning faculty,
we know when a man is handling certain subjects whether he knows what
he is talking about; whether or not, to use an expressive
colloquialism, "he has been there." No man who with the eyes of the
soul has looked down that awful cleft that separates between the carnal
mind and the holy will of God, can use words here under the wasting
impression that he knows things. If Christ only died to save us from
something which, after all, is only good in the making, then the Cross
of Calvary is the supreme irony of time. We shall never find a Saviour
by the road that, at the most, leads but to a martyr.