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‘Be ye doers of the Word, and not hearers only, deluding your own selves.’
Jam_1:22 (R.V.)
I. The self-indulgent, self-absorbed life ranges up and down many degrees in the social and moral scales. It may be that of the elegant and bejewelled patrician, or it may reek of the gin-shop and the prison. It may assume the guise of languid ease or that of brutal ruffianism; but in all cases it is only selfishness wearing different masks, and in all phases it involves the most despicable state to which human life can sink. And God—speaking in the force of outward circumstances—God, ‘Whose light shines on so patiently, showing all things in the slow history of their ripening’—stamps this life with the seal of His utter reprobation. Oh, how terrible and certain a retribution does this life of selfishness draw down upon itself!
II. How different is the altruistic life, the unselfish life, the life which is given to God and fearlessly lives for the good of its fellow-men—the life, not like those others, earthly, sensual, devilish; but pure, gentle, peaceable, full of mercy and good fruit, without partiality and without hypocrisy! That is the life of heaven; such are the lives of the saints of God. The world has ever recognised the lustre, the loveliness of such a life, though in envy and hatred it has many times slain or slaughtered those who have tried to live it. Rise before us as ye were, ye saints of God, in the beauty of your holiness; show us the lives ‘roses without, lilies within’; the lives white as lilies in their transparent guilelessness, and red as roses in their glowing enthusiasm! Show how gracious a thing a human being may become, in whom the love of God, expanded into infinitude, has led to the abjuration of the lower self.
III. Can such a life be described in a single word?—Yes! and it lies at the centre of all that in all nations of the world has the best right to call itself religion. When Confucius was asked by a disciple to express all the virtues in one word, he answered, ‘Is not reciprocity such a word?’ and by ‘reciprocity’ he meant the Divine rule—‘Do unto thy neighbour as thou wouldst that he should do to thee.’ When Auguste Comte tried to formulate a new religion of Positivism he made its one rule altruism—‘Vivre pour autrui.’ It is Christianity that gives us a word more divine, more all-comprehensive, more steeped in emotion, more radiant with the light of heaven than ‘reciprocity’ or ‘altruism’—and that is the word love. And—let men prate how they will about other things—if the Word of God stands sure, then one truth is supremely important above all other truths, and that is, that we ‘owe no man anything, but to love one another’; that love is ‘the bond of perfectness’; and that ‘love is the fulfilling of the law.’
IV. Consider the bearing of these two lives on the entire condition of the world.
(a) The natural and immediate result of selfishness is utter, hopeless, callous quiescence, contented luxury, absolute neglect. It shuts out the disturbing spectacle of human necessity.
(b) The unselfish life, the life of Christian charity, is opposed to all this. Though all the journals misrepresent and sneer at it, it will try every method in its power—legislative, social, ecclesiastical, individual—whereby it may in any way alleviate the sorrows or reverse the wrongs of the world. It is invincibly hopeful; it is undauntedly courageous; it ‘believes in the soul, and is very sure of God’; it is full of Divine enthusiasm; it leaps amid the laughter of the world into the flaming chariot of zeal, and shakes loosely the slack reins.
How shall we grapple with this overwhelming mass of evil? There are some, thank God! who are grappling with it. Everywhere the work is being attempted by the clergy, and by those who help their work. The poor in many parishes are treated as brethren, and as free men and women, for whom, with all their faults, Christ died.
—
Dean Farrar.
Illustration‘To the egotist class—those who are absorbed by the desires of the mind—belong the ruinous conquerors who from time to time have swept over the earth with sword and flame, and have made her furrows red with the blood of men. “The course you propose,” said Prince Metternich to Napoleon, “would cost the lives of a hundred thousand men.” “A hundred thousand men!” answered Napoleon. “What are a hundred thousand men to me?” Prince Metternich walked to the window, flung it wide open, and said, “Sire, let all the world know that you express this atrocious sentiment!” There you have this egoism on a colossal scale. Yet a man need not be a Napoleon to sacrifice the good of hundreds, and sell the fate of his country for the satisfaction of himself, his party, or his class.