The Threefold Cord
^’Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the
Were you ever struck with the sobriety of Scripture? There are many good thoughts in human compositions, and many hints of truth in human systems; but in proportion as they are original or striking, they border on extravagance. You cp.nnot follow them fully till you find yourself toppling on the verge of a paradox, or are obliged to halt in the midst of a glaring absurdity. There are many excellent ideas in the old philosophy, and some valuable principles in the ethics of later schools; but they all show, though it were in nothing but their extremeness, their frail original, their human infirmity, their wrong-side bias. And so is it with many religious systems, built on insulated texts of Scripture. They are not without a basis of truth, but that basis is partial. The extremeness of religionism pounces on a single text, or a single class of texts, and walls them off’ from the rest of revelation, and cultivates them exclusively, — bestows on them the irrigation of constant study, and reaps no harvests except those which grow on this favourite territory, — and looks on all the rest of the Bible as a sort of common; an unenclosed waste; a territory good for little or nothing, except a short occasional excursion; ay, and perhaps frowns on another class of texts with a secret jealousy, as texts which had better never have been there; a dangerous group, whose creeping roots or wafted thistle-down threaten evil to the enclosure of their own favourite little system. If the texts so treated be doctrinal, the result of this partiaHty, this exclusiveness, or extremeness, is sectarianism; if the texts so treated be practical, the result is religious singularity. But sectarianism of doctrine and sing-ularity of practice, whatever countenance they get from single clauses and detached sentences of Scripture, are contradicted and condemned the moment you confront them with a complete Bible. Hence it happens, that whilst there never was a doctrinal or practical error which had not some text to stand upon, there never was one which dared encounter openly and honestly the entire Word of God. In other words, there has seldom been an error which did not include some important truth; but just as surely as it included some truth, so it excluded others. And just as oxygen alone will never make the atmosphere, or hydrogen alone will never make the ocean, or red beams alone will never make the sun-light, so one fact, or one set of ideas, will never make the truth. A truth, by abiding alone, becomes to all intents an error.
Nothing can be more diiferent from the partiality of man than the completeness and comprehensiveness of Scripture. Nothing can be more opposite to man’s extremeness than the sobriety of Scripture. It does not deal in hyperbole or paradox: it puts forth the truth, calmly, fully, and in all its goodly proportions. Unlike the systems of man’s invention, its ethics do not flutter on the solitary wing of one only virtue, nor do they dot along on the uneven legs of a short theology and a long morality. Its philanthropy does not consist in hating yourself, nor does its love to God require you to forget your brother. Its perfection of character is not pre-eminence in one particular, nor does it inculcate any excellence which requires the annihilation of all the rest. Though neither a see-saw of counterpoising virtues and vices, nor a neutral mixture of opposing elements, there is a balance of excellence, a blending of graces, in the Gospel ideal of character. It forgets neither the man himself, nor the God above him, nor the world around him. It teaches us to live godly, but it does not forget to teach us to live righteously and soberly. It urges diligence in business, but it does not omit to enjoin fervour of spirit and devotedness to the Lord.
I do not know that we can select a more opportune exemplification of these contrary principles, — the partiahty of human religion and the comprehensiveness of scriptural religion, — than the passage with which you are now so familiar, and the treatment which its several precepts have received at the hands of men. I think it may be very easily shown that each separate clause has been the motto of a several sect, the watchword of a separate party; — each right, so far as it remembered that special clause; each wrong, so far as it forgot the other two.
1. First, “Not slothful in business.” There have been in all ages those who were very willing to sum up religion in discharging the duties of their calling. If they were at service, they were conscious of great industry, and a real attention to their employers’ interest. If wives or mothers, they were notable for keeping at home, and caring after their own concerns. They looked well to the ways of their household, and ate not the bread of idleness; and could the trim threshold and each tidy arrangement of the well-ordered dwelling tell the full tale of anxious thoughts, and early rising, and worrying bustle, which have been expended upon them, happy the empire which had such prime minister as rules this little realm. If men of business, they feel that they are busy men. They mind their own affairs, and do not interfere in other
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men’s matters. They are at it late and early; the summer’s sun does not seduce them from their dinsry counting-room, nor do the amenities of literature bewitch them from the anxieties of money-making. They seldom treat themselves to a holiday, and what is more to the purpose, they do not despatch business by halves; they work in good earnest. They feel as if the chief end of man lay somewhere about the terminus of their own trade or profession, and they push on accordingly. Then there mingles with it all a complacent feeling. “It is not for myself I thus tug and strain, and grow prematurely old; it is for others. ‘He that provides not for his own house hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.’ ‘If any man will not work, neither let him eat.’ We are commanded to redeem the time, and are forbidden to be slothful in business.” And if to this again should be superadded ‘a certain amount of overt and ostensible religion, — if this busy man or cumbered housekeeper should withal read a chapter daily, and maintain the regular form of family worship, and the equally regular form of church-going, — above all, if his business should prosper, and nothing occur to vex his conscience, he is very apt to feel “What lack I yet? True, I pretend to no peculiar sanctity; but I believe I am as honest and industrious and sober as those who do. I may not get into the .raptures into which some try to work themselves, nor do I fuss about from sermon to sermon and from meeting to meeting, as many do; but I believe my respect for religion is as real, and my intentions as good as theirs. And though I do not lay the same stress on speculative points and matters of faith, no man can accuse me of neglecting the weightier matters of the law.” Now the industrious element in this character is good, but if this be the whole of it, in the Bible balance it will be found deplorably wanting. A man may be all that you describe yourself, without being born again. He may be all this, and his heart never have been made right with God; and of all the work he has done so heartily, nothing may have been done as unto the Lord, — in the animation of that love, and in the singleness of that loyalty, without which the most fagging toil is but an earnest self-idolatry. And he may be all this without any of that fervour of spirit which will make a man happy in that world, where the things of our present faith are the visible sources of joy, and where psalm-singing and the other outpourings of ecstatic hearts are the exercises most congenial.
2. But then again, “fervent in spirit.” Others have erred in subliming the whole of Christianity into fervour. They fancy that there is no outlet for piety except in emotion. They forget that the engine may be doing most work when none of the steam is blowing ofl’; and therefore they are not content except they yee, a great deal, and live in constant excitement. They forget that the best form that feeling can take is the practical form, the praying, praising, working form. r if it should take this form, their fervour is ill-directed. It is not fairly distributed; they are fervent in secret or in the sanctuary, but not fervent in society; they are fervent in controrersies, but not in truths conceded; they are fervent in the things of their own denomination, but not in the things of Jesus Christ; or if fervent in his cause, they fix on the fields of labour far away, and contemn those nearer home. Their fervour is reserved for hallowed places and devotional hours, and does not pervade their daily life. They will rise from a prayer in which they have expatiated on the glory of the latter day, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and some ordinary duty is awaiting them; they are asked to fulfil some prosaic service, to do some such matter-of-fact employment as angels in heaven are apt to do; and the sight of actual labour disperses their good frame in a moment; their praying fervour’ is not a working fervour. Or they have just been singing, under some extraordinary afflatus, a hymn about universal peace or millennial glory; but the unopened letter turns out to be a despatch from some nefarious correspondent, or the moment the worship is over some gross negligence or some provoking carelessness accosts them, and the instant explosion proves, that were they living in the millennium, there would be at least one exception to the universal peace. Or they have come back from some jubilant missionary meeting, where their hearts were really warm, where they loudly applauded speeches, and where their eyes overflowed at the recital of some affecting instance of liberality; and they are hardly safe in their homes, when the ill-favoured collector assails them, and they are asked for the solid sympathy of their substance. After they have given their tears, to be asked for their gold! They feel as if it were a fatal transition, a most headlong climax, from delicious emotion down to vulgar money. And thus it is that they continue to let as much feeling vanish in inaction, as much fervour fly off in mere emotion, as, if turned on in the right direction, might have propelled some mighty enterprise, or conducted to a safe and joyful conclusion many a work of faith and labour of love.
3. “Serving the Lord.” In Old Testament times it was not unusual for persons of eminent piety to dedicate themselves entirely to temple-service, waiting on God in prayer continually night and day. Thus Samuel was dedicated to the Lord all the days of his life: so we presume was the maid of Gilead, Jephthah’s daughter; and so was Anna the prophetess, who departed not from the temple the eighty-four years of her long Avidowhood. In seeking this seclusion, they were practically carrying out the Psalmist’s devout behest, “One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.” And a pleasant life it were, away from a stormy world in the calm pavilion of God’s own presence, and away from the tantalizing phantoms, vexing cares, and stunning noise of dehrious mortality, to see no beauty less soul-filling than his own, and hear no voice less assuring than his who says, “My peace I give unto yon.” But the gospel dispensation is not the era of anchorets and recluses and temple-devotees; or more properly speaking, every disciple of the Saviour ought to be alike a devotee. He should live not to himself, but to Him who loved him. He should be a self-devoted, a dedicated man; a living sacrifice, but a sacrifice diffusing its sweet savour in the scenes of ordinary life, and regaling not heaven alone, but earth with its grateful exhalations. He should
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seek to behold his Lord’s beauty and dwell in his Lord’s presence all the days of his life;^ but now that neither at Jerusalem nor at Samaria is the temple, his believing heart should be the shrine, and his ascending Saviour’s promise, “Lo, I am with you,” should be the Shekinah. Wherever he 2:oes, he should carry his Lord’s presence along with him, and whatever he is doing he should be doing his Heavenly Master’s work. However, this life of active devotedness does not suit the taste of many. In order to serve the Lord they feel that they must leave the living world. They must off and away to some cleft of the rock, some lodge of the far wilderness, some
“sacred solitude, “Where Quiet with Rehgion makes her home.”
To be diHgent in business they feel incompatible with serving the Lord; and even that more hallowed business which is occupied with ministering to the bodies and souls of men, is a nide break in their retirement, a jar in their contemplative joys. They would rather be excused from any thing which forces them into contact with unwelcome flesh and blood, and reminds them of this selfish world and its gross materialism. Their closet is more attractive than the cottage of poverty; meditations of “the rest which remaineth” are more congenial than toils in the work of the day; and pensive lamentations over the world’s wickedness come more spontaneously than real earnest efforts to make this bad world better. Now it is impossible to be too devoted if that devotedness make you correspondingly fervent in spirit and diligent in business. You cannot pray too much, though you should pray without ceasing, if your prayer take a practical direction, and lead you to do good without ceasing. But it is just as possible to run away from the Lord’s service by running into retirement as by running into the world. In the retirement of the ship, and then in the completer retirement of the whale’s belly, Jonah was as much a rebel and a runaway as in the noisy streets of Joppa. Had he wished to “serve the Lord,” his “business” was to have been at Nineveh. And it little matters whether it be the recluse of the desert who absconds from his brethren, and leaves the sick to tend themselves, and the ignorant to teach themselves, and the careless to convert themselves; or the recluse of the closet, who leaves the neglected household to take care of itself, the slip-shod children to look after themselves, and the broken furniture to mend itself; each in his own way is slothful in business, under a self-deceiving pretext that he is serving the Lord.
Thus you perceive that each of the three classes, the mere bustlers, the mere feelers, and the mere devotees, by being right in only one thing, are altogether wrong. These are not fancy sketches, nor are they studies after the antique. True, you may find the counterpart of the first class in the correct morality and heartless formalism of that worldly professorship, that “Whole Duty of Man” Pharisaism of a former age. And you may represent the second by that antinomian fervour, that unproductive zeal which has marked some periods of the church, — which possibly marks some sections still. And you will find the third exemphfied in all the mystic devotion and day-dreaming quietism of world-weary recluses, popish and protestant, in every age. Though all can quote one fragment of this passage, all are wrongby not being able to quote the whole. Those who are diligent in business, but in that business do not serve the Lord, their selfish diligence is but a busy idleness, a hypocritical activity. Their time-bounded and self-reverting work is the ineflectual labour of the convict who digs the pit and fills it up again, who draws water from the well and pours it back again. And so the devotedness which results in no diligence is like the planning of a house which is never built, the daily purposing of a journey which is never set about. The fervour of spirit which, withal, is slothful in business, is like the stream falling on the mill-wheel, but the connecting shaft is broken, and though the wheel turns nimbly round, the detached machinery stands still, and no work is done; or like the disconnected engine and tender, which bolt away by themselves, and leave the helpless train still standing where it stood.
Now in opposition to all these defective versions, these maimed and truncated representations, this verse delineates the Christian character in its completeness, hard-working, warmly-feeling-, single-eyed, “not slothful in business,” “fervent in spirit,” “serving the Lord.” And if you look at the Christian philosophy of the subject, you will find that it is the single eye which awakes the fervent spirit, and the fervent spirit which sets the busy hands and feet in willing motion.
1. It is an eye fixed on Jesus which kindles the fervent spirit. An unconverted man is not happy. There is a dull load on his spirit — a dim cloud on his conscience — he scarcely knows what he would be at — but he certainly is not happy. If a considerate man, he is aware that there must be a joy in existence which he has not yet struck out — a secret of more solid bliss which he hitherto has not hit upon. He is not at peace with God. He has not secured an explicit reconcihation with his Creator and Sovereign. God’s frown is upon him, a frown as wide as is the sinner’s universe. Go where he may, he cannot get out into the clear daylight of a glad conscience and a propitious heaven.
And it is not till he finds his way into the Goshen of the gospel, the sun-Ht region on which the beams of God’s countenance still smile down; it is not till, from the gross darkness and palpable gloom of a natural condition, a man is led into the grateful light and glorious liberty of the sons of God: it is not till then that he knows the ecstasy of undiluted joy and the perfection of that peace which passeth all understanding.
It is not till the spirit of adoption makes him a child of God that he thoroughly feels himself a man; and it is in the sweet sense of forgiveness, and in the transporting assurance that he is now on the same side with Omnipotence, that he first breathes freely. The thrill of a sudden animation sweeps through all his frame; and, encountering an unwonted gayety all around him, he perceives an unwonted energy within him. Peace with God has brought him power from God, and (with the Lord, he loves, to dictate) there is no work which he is loath to do; and with that Lord upon his side, none which he cannot hope to do. The convict-labour and hireling-tasks of the prisoner and bondsman are exchanged for the free-will offerings and affectionate services of a son and a disciple. Reconciled to God, he is reconciled to every thing which comes from God; and full of the love of Christ, he courts every thing which he can do for Christ. “Come, labour, for I rather love thee now. Come, hard work and long work, I am in a mood for you now. Come, trials and crosses, for I can carry you now. Come, death, for I am ready- for thee now.”
His relation to Christ has put him in a new relation to every thing else; and the same fountain which has washed the stain from his conscience having washed the scales from his eyes, an inundation of light and of beauty burst in from the creation around him, which hitherto was to him as much an unknown universe as its Creator was the unknown God; and the boundless inflowings of peaceful images, and happy impressions, and strong consolations, dilate his soul with an elasticity, an enterprise and courage as new as they are divine. He has found a Saviour, and his soul is happy. The Lord Jesus is his friend; and his spirit, once so frigid, is become a fervent spirit. His new views have made him a new man.
2. The fervent spirit creates the industrious life. Sulky labour and the labour of sorrow are little worth. Whatever a man does with a guilty feeling he is apt to do wrong; and whatever he does with a melancholy feeling he is likely to do by halves. Look at that little boy sitting down to his hated lesson after a burst of passion. Do you notice how long the same page hes open before the pouting student, and how solemnly he watches the blue-bottle raging round the room and bouncing against the window? Look at his blurred copy-book, its trembling strokes and blotted loops, a memento of this angry morning. And the sum upon the slate, only here and there a figure right, an emblem of his rebellious mind, all at sixes and sevens with itself. It is guilt that makes him a trifler. It is guilt that makes him blunder. Guilt makes him wretched; and therefore all he does is wrong.
But, sometimes, grief disables or disinclines for exertion as much as guilt. You may remember times when such a sorrow possessed you, that you not only forgot to eat your daily bread, but had no heart to do your daily work. You did not care to set your house in order; for some stunning intelligence or fearful foreboding had paralyzed all your energy. You did not care to hear your children’s tasks; for the shadows of a sick-room had diffused a look of orphanage on them and on every thing. And the more delightsome the recreation once had been, the more congenial the labour, so much the deeper was the funeral dye it had now assumed, and the more did your heart revolt from it. Sorrow makes the eyes heavy, even when they cannot sleep; and, for inefficiency, next to the blundering work of a guilty conscience, is the dull work of a weary or wounded spirit. If you could only shed tranquillity over the conscience, and infuse joy into the soul, you would do more to make the man a thorough worker than if you could lend him the force of Hercules, or the hundred arms of Briareus. Now, the gospel freely admitted makes the man happy. It gives him peace tvilh God and makes him happy in God. Its strong consolation neutralizes the sting of reluctant labour and the curse of penal toil. Its advent of heavenly energy takes the languor out of life, and much of its inherent indolence out of lazy human nature. It chases spectres from the fancy and lions from the street. It gives industry a noble look which selfish drudgery never wore; and from the moment that a man begins to do his work for his Saviour’s sake, he feels that the most ordinary employments are full of sweetness and dignity; and that the most difficult are not impossible. “Through Christ strengthening me I can do all things.” Even in the aflfairs of ordinary life, the best — the most beautiful and effective work which a man can do is full-hearted work; the ingenious, conclusive, tasteful work which quits the masterly hands or the invigorated mind of him whose heart is glad. And if any one of you, my friends, is weary with his work; if dissatisfaction with yourself, or sorrow of any kind, disheartens you; if, at any time, you feel the dull paralysis of conscious sin, or the depressing influence of vexing thoughts, look to Jesus and be happy. Be happy, and your joyful work will prosper well.