But this is not the only difficulty; for some it is not the chief
difficulty. We have no theories of God and the universe which bar the
possibility of His intervention in the little lives of men. There is
nothing incredible to us in the doctrine of a particular Providence. But
where, we ask, is the proof of it? We would fain believe, but the facts
of experience seem too strong for us. A hundred thousand Armenians
butchered at the will of an inhuman despot, a whole city buried under a
volcano's fiery hail, countless multitudes suffering the slow torture of
death by famine--can such things be and God really care? Nor is it only
great world tragedies like these which challenge our faith. The question
is pressed upon us, often with sickening keenness, by the commonplace
ills of our own commonplace lives: the cruel wrong of another's sin, the
long, wasting pain, the empty cradle, the broken heart. How can we look
on these things and yet believe that Eternal Love is on the throne?
Except we believe in Jesus we cannot; if we do, we must. For remember,
Jesus was no shallow optimist; He did not go through life seeing only
its pleasant things; He was at Cana of Galilee, but He was also at Nain;
over all His life there lay a shadow, the shadow of the Cross; He died
in the dark, betrayed of man, forsaken of God; surely He hath borne our
griefs and carried our sorrows. And yet through all, His faith in God
never wavered. He prayed, and He taught others to pray. When He lifted
His eyes towards heaven, it was with the word "Father" upon His lips;
and in like manner He bade His disciples, "When ye pray, say 'Father.'"
He took the trembling hands of men within His own, and looking into
their eyes, filled as they were with a thousand nameless fears, "Fear
not," He said, "our heavenly Father knoweth; let not your heart be
troubled, neither let it be afraid."
"Learn of Me ... and ye shall find rest unto your souls;" herein is the
secret of peace. But it is not enough that we give ear to the words of
Christ; we must make our own the whole meaning of the fact of Christ.
"God's in His heaven," sings Browning; "all's right with the world." But
if God is only in His heaven, all is _not_ right with the world. In
Christ we learn that God has come from out His heaven to earth; and in
the Cross of Christ we find the eternal love which meets and answers all
our fears. Fear not,
"Or if you fear,
Cast all your cares on God; that anchor holds."
"Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."
* * * * *
CONCERNING MONEY
"Now I saw in my dream, that at the further side of that plain
was a little hill called Lucre, and in that hill a
silver-mine, which some of them that had formerly gone that
way, because of the rarity of it, had turned aside to see; but
going too near the brink of the pit, the ground being
deceitful under them, broke, and they were slain;-some also
had been maimed there, and could not to their dying day be
their own men again."--
JOHN BUNYAN.
* * * * *
XIII
CONCERNING MONEY
_"How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the
kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to enter in
through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the
kingdom of God._"--LUKE xviii. 24, 25.
I
The most significant thing in the teaching of Jesus concerning money is
the large place which it fills in the records of our Lord's public
ministry. How large that place is few of us, perhaps, realize. Even
religious writers who take in hand to set forth Christ's teaching in
detail, for the most part, pass over this subject in silence. In
Hastings' great _Dictionary of the Bible_ we find, under "Money," a most
elaborate article, extending to nearly twenty pages, and discussing with
great fullness and learning the coinage of various Biblical periods; but
when we seek to know what the New Testament has to say concerning the
use and perils of wealth, the whole subject is dismissed in some nine
lines.
Very different is the impression which we receive from the Gospels
themselves. It is not possible here to bring together all Christ's words
about money, but we may take the third Gospel (in which the references
to the subject are most numerous) and note Christ's more striking
sayings in the order in which they occur. In the parable of the sower,
in the eighth chapter, the thorns which choke the good seed are the
"cares and riches and pleasures of this life." Chapter twelve contains a
warning against covetousness, enforced by the parable of the rich fool
and its sharp-pointed application, "So is he that layeth up treasure for
himself, and is not rich toward God." The fourteenth chapter sheds a new
light on the law of hospitality: "When thou makest a dinner or a supper,
call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, nor thy kinsmen, nor rich
neighbours ... but when thou makest a feast, bid the poor, the maimed,
the lame, the blind; and thou shalt be blessed." Chapter fifteen tells
how a certain son wasted his substance with riotous living. Chapter
sixteen opens with the parable of the unjust steward; then follow
weighty words touching the right use of "the mammon of unrighteousness."
But the Pharisees, who were lovers of money, when they heard these
things, "scoffed at Him." Christ's answer is the parable of Dives and
Lazarus, with which the chapter closes. Chapter eighteen tells of a rich
young ruler's choice, and of Christ's sorrowful comment thereon: "How
hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God." And
then, lastly, in the nineteenth chapter, we hear Zacchaeus, into whose
home and heart Christ had entered, resolving on the threshold of his new
life that henceforth the half of his goods he would give to the poor,
and that where he had wrongfully exacted aught of any man he would
restore four-fold. It is indeed a remarkable fact, the full significance
of which few Christians have yet realized, that, as John Ruskin says,
the subject which we might have expected a Divine Teacher would have
been content to leave to others is the very one He singles out on which
to speak parables for all men's memory.[49]
II
The question is sometimes asked how the teaching of Jesus concerning
money is related to that strange product of civilization, the modern
millionaire. The present writer, at least, cannot hold with those who
think that Christ was a communist, or that He regarded the possession of
wealth as in itself a sin. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to
sympathize with the feeling that the accumulation of huge fortunes in
the hands of individuals is not according to the will of Christ. Mr.
Andrew Carnegie is reported to have said that a man who dies a
millionaire dies disgraced; and few persons who take their New Testament
seriously will be disposed to contradict him. But, inasmuch as all
millionaires are not prepared like Mr. Carnegie to save themselves from
disgrace, the question is beginning to arise in the minds of many,
whether society itself should not come to the rescue--its own and the
rich man's. No man, it may be pretty confidently affirmed, can possibly
_earn_ a million; he may obtain it, he may obtain it by methods which
are not technically unjust, but he has not earned it. Be a man's powers
what they may, it is impossible that his share of the wealth which he
has helped to create can be fairly represented by a sum so vast. If he
receives it, others may reasonably complain that there is something
wrong in the principle of distribution. And unless, both by a larger
justice to his employees, and by generous benefactions to the public, he
do something to correct the defects in his title, he must not be
surprised if some who feel themselves disinherited are driven to ask
ominous and inconvenient questions.
This, however, is a matter which it is impossible now to discuss
further. Turning again to Christ's sayings about money, we may summarize
them in this fashion: Christ says nothing about the making of money, He
says much about the use of it, and still more about its perils and the
need there is for a revised estimate of its worth. Following the example
of Christ, it is the last point of which I wish more especially to
speak. But before coming to that, it may be well briefly to recall some
of the things which Christ has said touching the use of wealth. Wealth,
He declares, is a trust, for our use of which we must give account unto
God. In our relation to others we may be proprietors; before God there
are no proprietors, but all are stewards. And in the Gospels there are
indicated some of the ways in which our stewardship may be fulfilled. I
will mention two of them.
(1) "When thou doest alms"--Christ, you will observe, took for granted
that His disciples would give alms, as He took for granted that they
would pray. He prescribes no form which our charity must take; we have
to exercise our judgment in this, as in other matters. Obedience is left
the largest liberty, but not the liberty of disobedience; and they who
open their ears greedily to take in all that the political economist and
others tell us of the evils of indiscriminate charity, only that they
may the more tightly button up their pockets against the claims of the
needy, are plainly disregarding the will of Christ. If what we are told
is true, the more binding is the obligation to discover some other way
in which our alms-giving may become more effective. The duty itself no
man can escape who calls Christ Jesus Lord and Master.
(2) But wealth, Christ tells us, may minister not merely to the physical
necessities, but to the beauty and happiness of life. When Christ was
invited to the marriage-feast at Cana of Galilee, when Matthew the
publican made for Him a feast in His own house, He did not churlishly
refuse, saying that such expenditure was wasteful and wicked excess.
When in the house of Simon the leper Mary "took a pound of ointment of
spikenard, very precious, and anointed the feet of Jesus," and they that
sat by murmured, saying, "To what purpose is this waste? for this
ointment might have been sold for above three hundred pence and given to
the poor," Jesus threw His shield about this woman and her deed of love:
"Let her alone; why trouble ye her? She hath wrought a good work on Me."
These words, it has been well said, are "the charter of all undertakings
which propose, in the name of Christ, to feed the mind, to stir the
imagination, to quicken the emotions, to make life less meagre, less
animal, less dull."[50] Do not let us speak as though the only friends
of the poor were those who gave them oatmeal at Christmas, or who secure
for them alms-houses in their old age. There is a life which is more
than meat, and all heavenly charity is not to be bound up in bags of
flour. He who strives to bring into the grey, monotonous lives of the
toilers of our great cities the sweet, refining influences of art, and
music and literature, he who helps his fellows to see and to love the
true and the beautiful and the good, is not one whit less a benefactor
of his kind than he who obtains for them better food and better homes.
Man shall not live by bread alone, and they who use their wealth to
minister to a higher life serve us not less really than they who provide
for our physical needs.
III
Much, however, as Christ has to say concerning the noble uses to which
wealth may be put, it is not here, as every reader of the Gospels must
feel, that the full emphasis of His words comes. It is when He goes on
to speak of the perils of the rich, and of our wrong estimates of the
worth of wealth, that His solemn warnings pierce to the quick. Christ
did not live, nor does He call us to live, in an unreal world, though
perhaps there are few subjects concerning which more unreal words have
been spoken than this. The power of wealth is great, the power of
consecrated wealth is incalculably great; and this the New Testament
freely recognizes; but wealth is _not_ the great, necessary,
all-sufficing thing that ninety-nine out of a hundred of us believe it
to be. And when we put it first, and make it the standard by which all
things else are to be judged, Christ tells us plainly that we are
falling into a temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful
lusts; we are piercing ourselves through with many sorrows. For once at
least, then, let us try to look at money with His eyes and to weigh it
in His balances.
Christ was Himself a poor man. His mother was what to-day we should call
a working-man's wife, and probably also the mother of a large family.
When, as an infant, Jesus was presented in the Temple, the offering
which His parents brought was that which the law prescribed in the case
of the poor: "a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons." When He came
to manhood, and entered on His public ministry, He had no home He could
call His own. In His Father's house, He said, were many mansions; but on
earth He had not where to lay His head. Women ministered unto Him of
their substance. We never read that He had any money at all. When once
He wanted to use a coin as an illustration, He borrowed it; when, at
another time, He needed one with which to pay a tax, He wrought a
miracle in order to procure it. As He was dying, the soldiers, we are
told, parted His garments among them--that was all there was to divide.
When He was dead, men buried Him in another's tomb. More literally true
than perhaps we always realize was the apostle's saying, "He became
poor."
Who, then, will deny that a man's life consisteth not in the abundance
of the things which he possesseth? Yet how strangely materialized our
thoughts have become! Our very language has been dragged down and made a
partner with us in our fall. When, for example, our Authorized Version
was written in 1611, the translators could write, without fear of being
misunderstood, "Let no man seek his own, but every man another's
_wealth_" (i Cor. x. 24).[51] But though the nobler meaning of the word
still survives in "well" and "weal," "wealth" to-day is rarely used save
to indicate abundance of material good. When Thackeray makes "Becky
Sharp" say that she could be good if she had L4000 a year, and when. Mr.
Keir Hardie asks if it is possible for a man to be a Christian on a
pound a week, the thoughts of many hearts are revealed. There is nothing
to be done without money, we think; money is the golden key which
unlocks all doors; money is the lever which removes all difficulties.
This is what many of us are saying, and what most of us in our hearts
are thinking. But clean across these spoken and unspoken thoughts of
ours, there comes the life of Jesus, the man of Nazareth, to rebuke, and
shame, and silence us. Who in His presence dare speak any more of the
sovereign might of money?
This is the lesson of the life of the Best. Is it not also the lesson of
the lives of the good in all ages? The greatest name in the great world
of Greece is Socrates; and Socrates was a poor man. The greatest name in
the first century of the Christian era is Paul; and Paul was a
working-man and sometimes in want. It was Calvinism, Mark Pattison said,
that in the sixteenth century saved Europe, and Calvin's strength, a
Pope once declared, lay in this, that money had no charm for him. John
Wesley re-created modern England and left behind him "two silver
teaspoons and the Methodist Church." The "Poets' Corner" in Westminster
Abbey, it has been said, commemorates a glorious company of paupers. And
even in America, the land of the millionaire and multi-millionaire, the
names that are graven on the nation's heart, and which men delight to
honour, are not its Vanderbilts, or its Jay Goulds, but Lincoln, and
Grant, and Garfield, and Webster, and Clay.
This is not mere "curb-stone rhetoric"; I speak the words of soberness
and truth. Would that they in whose blood the "narrowing lust of gold"
has begun to burn might be sobered by them! In the name of Jesus of
Nazareth, and of all the noblest of the sons of men, let us deny and
defy the sordid traditions of mammon; let us make it plain that we at
least do not believe "the wealthiest man among us is the best."
"Godliness with contentment," said the apostle, "is great gain;" and
though these are not the only worthy ends of human effort, yet he who
has made them his has secured for himself a treasure which faileth not,
which will endure when the gilded toys for which men strive and sweat
are dust and ashes.
It is further worthy of note that it was always the rich rather than the
poor whom Christ pitied. He was sorry for Lazarus; He was still more
sorry for Dives. "Blessed are ye poor.... Woe unto you that are rich."
This two-fold note sounds through all Christ's teaching. And the reason
is not far to seek. As Jesus looked on life, He saw how the passionate
quest for gold was starving all the higher ideals of life. Men were
concentrating their souls on pence till they could think of nothing
else. For mammon's sake they were turning away from the kingdom of
heaven. The spirit of covetousness was breaking the peace of households,
setting brother against brother, making men hard and fierce and
relentless. Under its hot breath the fairest growths of the spirit were
drooping and ready to die. The familiar "poor but pious" which meets us
so often in a certain type of biography could never have found a place
on the lips of Jesus. "Rich but pious" would have been far truer to the
facts of life as He saw them. "The ground of a certain rich man brought
forth plentifully," and after that he could think of nothing but barns:
there was no room for God in his life. "The Pharisees who were lovers of
money heard these things; and they scoffed at Him;" of course, what
could their jaundiced eyes see in Jesus? And even to one of whom it is
written that Jesus, "looking upon him loved him," his great possessions
proved a magnet stronger than the call of Christ. It was Emerson, I
think, who said that the worst thing about money is that it so often
costs so much. To take heed that we do not pay too dearly for it, is the
warning which comes to us from every page of the life of Jesus. Are
there none of us who need the warning? "Ye cannot serve God and mammon;"
we know it, and that we may the better serve mammon, we are sacrificing
God and conscience on mammon's unholy altars. And to-day, perhaps, we
are content that it should be so. But will our satisfaction last? Shall
we be as pleased with the bargain to-morrow and the day after as we
think we are to-day? And when our last day comes--what? "Forefancy your
deathbed," said Samuel Rutherford; and though the counsel ill fits the
mood of men in their youth and strength, it is surely well sometimes to
look forward and ask how life will bear hereafter the long look back.
"This night is thy soul required of thee; and the things which thou hast
prepared whose shall they be?"--not his, and he had nothing else. He had
laid up treasure for himself, but it was all of this world's coinage; of
the currency of the land whither he went he had none. In one of Lowell's
most striking poems he pictures the sad retrospect of one who, through
fourscore years, had wasted on ignoble ends God's gift of life; his
hands had
"plucked the world's coarse gains
As erst they plucked the flowers of May;"
but what now, in life's last hours, are gains like these?
"God bends from out the deep and says,
'I gave thee the great gift of life;
Wast thou not called in many ways?
Are not My earth and heaven at strife?
I gave thee of My seed to sow,
Bringest thou Me My hundred-fold?'
Can I look up with face aglow,
And answer, 'Father, here is gold'?"
And the end of the poem is a wail:
"I hear the reapers singing go
Into God's harvest; I, that might
With them have chosen, here below
Grope shuddering at the gates of night."
Wherefore let us set not our minds on the things that are upon earth;
let us covet earnestly the best gifts; let us seek first the kingdom of
God; and all other things in due season and in due measure shall be
added unto us.[52]
* * * * *
CONCERNING THE SECOND ADVENT
"Lo as some venturer, from his stars receiving
Promise and presage of sublime emprise,
Wears evermore the seal of his believing
Deep in the dark of solitary eyes,
Yea to the end, in palace or in prison,
Fashions his fancies of the realm to be,
Fallen from the height or from the deeps arisen,
Ringed with the rocks and sundered of the sea;--
So even I, and with a heart more burning,
So even I, and with a hope more sweet,
Groan for the hour, O Christ! of Thy returning,
Faint for the flaming of Thine advent feet."
F.W.H. MYERS, _Saint Paul_.
* * * * *
XIV
CONCERNING THE SECOND ADVENT
"_They shall see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven
with power and great glory.... Of that day and hour knoweth no
one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the
Father only."_--MATT. xxiv. 30, 36.
The doctrine of our Lord's Second Coming occupies at the present moment
a curiously equivocal position in the thought of the Christian Church.
On the one hand by many it is wholly ignored. There is no conscious
disloyalty on their part to the word of God; but the subject makes no
appeal to them, it fails to "find" them. Ours is a sternly practical
age, and any truth which does not readily link itself on to the
necessities of life is liable speedily to be put on one side and
forgotten. This is what has happened with this particular doctrine in
the case of multitudes; it is not denied, but it is banished to what Mr.
Lecky calls "the land of the unrealized and the inoperative." But if, on
the one hand, the doctrine has suffered from neglect, on the other it
has suffered hardly less from undue attention. Indeed of late years the
whole subject of the "Last Things" has been turned into a kind of happy
hunting-ground for little sects, who carry on a ceaseless wordy warfare
both with themselves and the rest of the Christian world. Men and women
without another theological interest in the world are yet keen to argue
about Millenarianism, and to try their 'prentice hands on the
interpretation of the imagery of the apocalyptic literature of both the
Old Testament and the New. As Spurgeon used to say, they are so taken up
with the second coming of our Lord that they forget to preach the first
So that one hardly knows which to regret more, the neglect and
indifference of the one class, or the unhealthy, feverish absorption of
the other.
As very often happens in cases of this kind each extreme is largely
responsible for the other. Neglect prepares the way for exaggeration;
exaggeration leads to further neglect. Moreover, in the case before us,
both tendencies are strengthened by the very difficulty in which the
subject is involved. Vagueness, uncertainty, mystery, attract some minds
as powerfully as they repel others. And, assuredly, the element of
uncertainty is not wanting here. In the first place, this is a subject
for all our knowledge of which we are wholly dependent upon revelation.
Much that Christ and His apostles have taught us we can bring to the
test of experience and verify for ourselves. But this doctrine we must
receive, if we receive it at all, wholly on the authority of One whom,
on other grounds, we have learned to trust. Verification, in the nature
of the case, is impossible. Further, we have gone but a little way when
revelation itself becomes silent; and, as I have said, when that guide
leaves us, we enter at once the dark forest where instantly the track is
lost.
Let us seek to learn, then, what Christ has revealed, and what He has
left unrevealed, concerning His coming again.
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