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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 653. His Character
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His Character
Men of achievement crown loyalty as one of the first of the virtues. Charity must be a divine gift indeed if it is greater than faithfulness. The soldier's worth is in his adherence to duty. The test of the jurist is loyalty to the client. The test of the pupil is loyalty to his master. The two great books in ancient literature are the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad exposes the fickleness and disloyalty of beautiful Helen, whose infidelity turned a city into a heap. The Odyssey celebrates the loyalty of Penelope, who kept her palace and her heart. Young man, scorn the very thought of disloyalty to your employer. If you can't work with him, resign. But flee the very thought of disloyalty as you would flee from the edge of the precipice. Disloyalty belongs to the serpent that bites, the wolf that rends, and the lion that slays. To be disloyal is to join hands with the devil himself. Pride yourself on your loyalty. Learn to follow, that you may be worthy to lead. Life may bring you gold, office, and honour, but it will bring you nothing comparable to the happiness that comes from the consciousness of having been loyal to your ideals. And when it is all over, let this be men's judgment upon you: “He was faithful unto death.”1 [Note: N. D. Hillis, The Contagion of Character, 202.]
2. Probably Apollos is not much more than a name to the average reader of the New Testament, yet his character is one which well deserves our admiring study. That it is possible to include him among the friends of St. Paul is a tribute alike to his greatness and to the power of Christian love. It would not have been surprising had he proved, at one stage of his life, St. Paul's most dangerous opponent, and at another his avowed rival. In the first instance, he was saved by the inherent nobility of his character. From the second risk he escaped through the thoroughness with which he accepted the fulness of the new teaching, bringing its doctrines of love and fellowship to bear upon the practice of his life. And so Apollos has a double claim upon our regard: both intellectually and morally he was a great man. Remarkable as were St. Paul's mental attainments, and profound as was his acquaintance with the literature of the Old Testament, it is doubtful whether in these respects he was the superior of Apollos. In eloquence and the power of impressing the educated men of Corinth, Apollos was unmistakably the more gifted. But, had it not been united to moral greatness, his intellectual greatness would have thwarted in place of furthering the growth of the Christian faith. Exceptional gifts seem always to carry with them the penalty of exceptional temptations, and the very fact that his intellectual powers were so remarkable might easily have made Apollos either impatient of instruction or intolerant of a subordinate position in the Church. We may feel quite certain that those temptations presented themselves to him in full force. But he overcame them, and remained to the end St. Paul's loyal comrade and fellow-worker.
Cowden Clarke has left us a very pleasant record of one curious feature in the intercourse between the two friends [Leigh Hunt and John Keats]. From time to time they would challenge one another to poetic effort in the composition of verses written in amicable rivalry on some given theme. On one occasion, when the talk had run “on the character, habits, and pleasant associations with that reverent denizen of the hearth, the cheerful little grasshopper of the fireside,” Hunt proposed to Keats that they should compose, “then and there and to time,” a sonnet each on the grasshopper and the cricket. “No one but myself was present,” says Clarke, “and they accordingly set to,” Keats being the first to complete his task. Then came “the after-scrutiny,” which, says Clarke, “was one of many such occurrences which have riveted the memory of Leigh Hunt in my affectionate regard and admiration for unaffected generosity and perfectly unpretentious encouragement.” And he goes on to speak of Hunt's “sincere look of pleasure” on reading out the first line of Keats's poem: “The poetry of earth is never dead.” “Such a prosperous opening,” he exclaimed. And when he came to the tenth and eleventh lines-
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence …
“Ah, that's perfect! Bravo, Keats!”1 [Note: W. H. Hudson, Keats and his Poetry, 25.]
If the wide world stood row on row,
And stones at you began to throw,
I'd boldly out with them to fight,
Saying they were wrong and you were right.
If every bird on every tree,
With note as loud as loud could be,
Sang endlessly in your dispraise,
One graceless thought it would not raise.
If all the great, and wise and good,
Upon your sins in judgment stood-
They'd simply waste their valued breath,
For I'm your friend through life and Death.
If I were wrong, and they were right,
I'd not believe (for all their might),
Not even if all they said were true,
For you love me and I love you.1 [Note: D. Mountjoy, The Hills of Hell, 26.]
Dean Stanley writes: To make sure of “Apollos's name being enrolled in no calendar, however apocryphal,” I wrote to Ward from Norwich to ask, but got no answer till this morning, forwarded from Norwich. Fortunately, it coincided with what I had said; he had put the question to the Roman Catholic divines at Ware, and they had said that it had never struck them before, but that certainly it was a remarkable fact that Apollos was nowhere called Saint or Doctor.2 [Note: R. E. Prothero, The Life of Dean Stanley, 368.]