THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF WEALTH
_Matthew_ xxv. 14-30.
In the parable of the talents the use of money is of course only an ill.u.s.tration of spiritual truth. Yet the story has its obvious lessons about the uses of money itself. The five-talent man is the rich man; and his way of service makes the Christian doctrine of wealth. And, first of all, the parable evidently permits wealth to exist. It does not prohibit acc.u.mulation. Jesus is not a social leveler. His words are full of tenderness to the poor, but when a certain rich young man came to him, Jesus loved him also; and when one man asked him, saying: "Master, speak to my brother that he divide the inheritance with me,"
Jesus disclaimed the office of a social agitator, saying: "Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you." Thus Jesus cannot be claimed for any pet scheme which one may have of the distribution of wealth.
But let not the Christian {130} think that on this account the Christian theory of wealth is less sweeping or radical than some modern programme. The fact is that it asks more of a man, be he rich or poor, than any modern agitator dares to propose. For it demands not a part of one"s possessions as the property of others, but the whole of them.
The Christian holds all his talents as a trust. There is in the Christian belief no absolute ownership of property. A man has no justification in saying: "May I not do what I will with mine own?" He does not own his wealth; he owes it. The Christian principle does not divide the rich from the poor; it divides the faithful use of whatever one has from its unfaithful use. Wealth is a fund of five talents of which one is the trusted agent; and to some five-talent men who have been faithful in their grave responsibilities, the word of Jesus would be given to-day as gladly as to any poor man: "Well done, faithful servant, enter into the joy of thy Lord."
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LIII
THE AVERAGE MAN[1]
_Matthew_ xxv. 22.
In the parable of the talents the man that gets least general attention is the man that stands in the middle. The five-talent man gets distinction, and the one-talent man gets rebuke, but the two-talent man, the man with ordinary gifts and ordinary returns from them, seems to be an unexciting character. And yet this is the man of the majority, the average man, the man most like ourselves,--not very bad, and not very remarkable. As has been said: "G.o.d must have a special fondness for average people, for He has made so many of them." Now, the average man stands in special need of encouragement. One of the most serious moments of life is when a man discovers that he is this sort of man. It comes over most of us some day that we are not going {132} to do anything extraordinary; that we are never likely to shine; that we are simply people of the crowd. Nothing seems to take the ambition and enthusiasm out of one more than this recognition of oneself as an average man. Then comes Jesus with his word of courage.
"Your work," he says, "is just as significant, and rewarded with precisely the same commendation as the work of the five-talent man."
The same "Well done" is spoken to both, and it may be that the more heroic qualities are in the man with fewer gifts. To make great gifts effective may be easy, but to take common gifts and make them yield their best returns--that is what helps us all. There is not a more inspiring sight in life than to see a man start with ordinary capacity and to see his power grow out of his consecration. Looking back on life from middle age, that would be the story one would tell of many a success. One sees five-talent men fail and two-talent men take their place; average gifts persistently used yielding rich returns, and the promise of usefulness lying, not in abundant endowments of nature, but in the using to the utmost what moderate capacities one has soberly accepted as trusts from G.o.d.
[1] Read also, on this and the following subject, the kindling sermons of Phillips Brooks: "The Man with Two Talents," vol. iv. p. 192; "The Man with One Talent," vol. i. p. 138.
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LIV
THE OVERCOMING OF INSIGNIFICANCE
_Matthew_ xxv. 24.
The parable of the talents was specially given to teach Christians not to be discouraged because Christ"s kingdom was delayed. The one-talent man is its real object, and the lessons of larger endowment are only by the way. The one-talent man is not the bad man, for to him also G.o.d gives a trust, but this man is given so little to do that he thinks it not worth while to do anything. He is not the many-gifted five-talent man, or even the average two-talent man, but he is simply the man of no account. The risk of the five-talent man is his conceit; the risk of the two-talent man is his envy; the risk of the one-talent man is his hopelessness. Why should this insignificant bubble on the great stream of life inflate itself with self-importance? Why should it not just drift along with the current and be lost in the first rapids of the stream? Now Christ"s first appeal to this sense of insignificance is {134} this,--that in the sight of G.o.d there is no such thing as an insignificant life. Taken by itself, looked at in its own independent personality, many a life is insignificant enough. But when we look at life religiously and recognize that it is a trusted agent of G.o.d, then the doctrine of the trust redeems it from insignificance. You have not much, but what you have is essential to the whole. The lighthouse-keeper on his rock sits in his solitude and watches his little flame. Why does he not let it die away as other lights in the distance die when the night comes on? Because it is not his light. He is its keeper, not its owner. The great Power that watches that stormy coast has set him there, and he must be true. The insignificant service becomes full of dignity and importance when it is accepted as a post of honor and trust. So the unimportant life gets its significance not by its own dimensions, but by its place in G.o.d"s great order, and the most wretched moment of one"s life must be when he discovers that he has been trusted by G.o.d to do even a little part and has thrown his chance away. The one-talent man thought his trust not worth investing, and behold, the account of it was called for with the rest. He {135} had in his hands a trust from G.o.d and had wasted it, and there was nothing left for him but the weeping of regret and the gnashing of teeth of indignant self-reproach.
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LV
CAPACITY EXTIRPATED BY DISUSE
_Matthew_ xxv. 29.
The parable of the talents begins with its splendid encouragement to those who have done their best, but it ends with a solemn warning and with the stern announcement of a universal law. It is this,--that from him who does not use his powers there is taken away even the power that he has. The gift is lost by the lack of exercise, or as Horace Bushnell stated the principle, the "capacity is extirpated by disuse."
This principle has manifold ill.u.s.trations. The hand or muscle disused withers in power. The fishes of the Mammoth Cave, having no use for their eyes, lose them. Mr. Darwin in an impressive pa.s.sage of his biography testifies that he began life with a taste for poetry and music, but that by disuse this aesthetic taste grew atrophied so that at last he did not care to read a poem or to hear a musical note. So it is, says Jesus, with spiritual insight and power. Sometimes we see a man of intellectual {137} gifts lose his grasp on spiritual realities, and we ask: "How is it that so learned a man can find little in these things? Does not he testify that these things are illusions?"
Not at all. It is simply that he has not kept his life trained on that side. His capacity has been extirpated by disuse. He may know much of science or language, but he has lost his ideals. We hear a young man sometimes say that he has grown soft by lack of exercise. Well, if you live a few years you will see people who have grown soft in soul, and you will see some great blow of fate smite them and crush them because their spiritual muscle is flabby and weak. Ignatius Loyola laid down for his followers certain methods of prayer which he called "Spiritual Exercises." So in one sense they were. They kept souls in training.
The exercise of the religious nature is the gymnastics of the soul, and the disuse of the religious nature extirpates its capacity. That is the solemn ending of the parable of the talents. From him who does not use his power there is taken away even the power that he hath.
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LVI
THE PARABLE OF THE VACUUM
_Matthew_ xii. 38-45.
It is easy to see where the emphasis of this parable lies. It is on the impossible emptiness of this man"s house. A man casts out the devil of his life and turns the key on his empty soul and feels safe.
But he cannot thus find safety. That is not the way to deal with evil spirits. Back they come, crowding into his life through the windows if not through the doors, and the last state of that man is worse than the first. If the parable had been told in modern times it might have been called the parable of the vacuum. A man"s life is a s.p.a.ce which refuses to be empty. If it is not tenanted by good the evil knocks and enters it. There is no such thing as an unoccupied life. Nature abhors a vacuum.
Here is one of the most common mistakes of human experience. A man often thinks that the less occupied his life is the safer it is. He casts out his pa.s.sions, he denies his {139} desires, he abandons his ambitions, and so seeks safety. But his life is attacked by new perils. The l.u.s.ts and conceits of life cannot be barred out of life; they must be crowded out. The old pa.s.sion must be supplanted by a new and better one. The very same qualities which go to make a great sinner are needed to make a true saint. A man"s soul is not safe when the vigor and force are taken out of it. It is safe only when the same pa.s.sion which once threatened ruin is converted to generous service; and the same physical life that seemed an enemy of the soul has become the instrument of the soul. The saved life is not the empty life, but the full life. Jesus comes not to destroy men"s natures, but to fill their capacities full of better aims. The only way to overcome evil is to have the life preoccupied by good.
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LVII
CHRISTIANITY AND BUSINESS
_Luke_ xvi. 1-12.
This is a difficult parable. There is a quality of daring about it which at first sight perplexes many people. It is the story of a steward who cheats his master, and of debtors who are in collusion with the fraud, and of a master praising his servant even while he punishes him, as though he said: "Well, at least you are a shrewd and clever fellow." It uses, that is to say, the bad people to teach a lesson to the good, and one might fancy that it praises the bad people at the expense of the good. But this is not its intention. It simply goes its way into the midst of a group of people who are cheating and defrauding each other and says: "Even such people as these have something to teach to the children of light."
I once heard of a father whose son was sentenced to the Concord Reformatory for burglary. The father stood by the bars of the cell and heard the boy"s story, and then {141} with tears in his eyes he turned to the jailer and said: "It is a terrible sorrow to have one"s boy thus disgraced, but"--and his face brightened a little--"after all he was monstrous plucky." So Jesus, out of the heart of this petty group of persons s.n.a.t.c.hes a lesson for Christians. It is this: "Why should not the children of light be as sagacious as these rascals were? Why should pious people be so stupid?" Jesus looks on to the needs that must occur in his religion for sagacity, prudence, discretion, and the perils that will come to it from sentimentalism, mysticism, silliness, and he asks: "Why is it that the children of this world are so much shrewder than the children of light?"
How closely his question comes to the needs of our own time! Why is it that in our moral agitations and reforms the bad people seem so much cleverer than the good ones; that political self-seeking gets the better of unselfish statesmanship; that the liquor dealers defeat the temperance people; that compet.i.tion in business is so often cleverer than cooperation in business? What does Christianity need to-day so much as wisdom? It has soft-heartedness, but it lacks {142} hard-headedness. It has sweetness, but it lacks light. It has sentiment, but it needs sense. How often a man of affairs is tempted to feel a certain contempt for the Church of Christ, when he turns from the intensely real issues of his week-day world to the abstractness and unreality of religious questions! How fict.i.tious, how unbusiness-like, how preposterous in the sight of G.o.d is this internecine sectarianism and impotent sentimentalism where there might be the triumphant march of one army under one flag! Let us learn the lesson which even the grasping, unscrupulous world has to teach,--the lesson of an absorbed and disciplined mind giving its entire sagacity to the chief business of life.
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LVIII
MAKING FRIENDS OF MAMMON