‘Then said He unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.’
Luk_17:1-2
Notice one or two applications of our Lord’s words—
I. A life of selfish enjoyment can hardly escape being a life through which offence comes.—It is hard to live before others a life which is easier than theirs—more guarded and furnished with appliances of comfort and pleasure—without causing some harm to them; it may be by rousing envy, it may more easily be by setting before them a wrong ideal, strengthening in them the dangerous sense that a man’s life consists in the abundance of the things that he possesses.
II. Our Lord’s words give the key to one side of human sin and wretchedness.—‘It is impossible but that offences will come’—impossible, but that one man’s wickedness or folly should lead to sin and wretchedness in others; impossible even in a world Christian in name and profession; impossible even when men are trying in a sense and degree to live as Christians. It is a question that we must be always asking ourselves, whether we are so living as to help or to injure these near us—those who look up to us, those who breathe the same air with us, those who will in any way form a standard from our acts and character.
—
Dean Wickham.
Illustration
‘It is not for us to limit the possible range of God’s restoring mercy. But what do facts tell us? Nay, what does fiction tell us (for fiction dare only reflect the light of fact) of any hopes of reformation in this world for the arch-tempter’s delegates—those who ply their victims with drink, that they may mock at their degradation; for the cold-blooded seducers; the touts of gambling-hells; the smiling, damned villain who pours into the innocent ear the leprous distilment of his vile suggestiveness, or lures unsuspecting simplicity to ruin under the mask of good fellowship and geniality? Are such men curable in fiction or in fact? Dare Dickens have restored the educating demons of his den of thieves, or Scott his Varney or Dalgarno, or George Eliot her Grandcourt, or Thackeray his Marquis of Steyne or Lord Hellborough to repentance, or even to remorse? I fear that such a transformation would stamp their fictions as untrue to life. They may invest such characters, if they please, with all the external charms of grace and dignity; for though there are hideous shapes among the fiends, yet Milton’s master-fiend is no loathsome-looking reptile, but—
Created aloft and carbuncle his eye,
With burnished neck of verdant gold, erect
Amid his circling spires, that on the grass
Floated redundant. Pleasing was his shape and lovely.
Yes, it is the case that when a man’s inner nature becomes so impregnated with poison as to become actively contagious, he may actually gain in attractiveness, though he has become corrupt beyond redemption.’
