The Duties of Privilege

“But glory, honor, and peace, to the soul of every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile.” — Romans ii. lo.

The fact of privilege is everywhere throughout the world. We cannot open the door on any group of men and learn the most superficial story of their lives without finding that some of them have advantages even by no effort of their own which make life seem with them a far brighter and more precious thing than it seems to their brethren. Two boys grow up, one with the noble associations of a home that is full of thought and generous standards; the other in the midst of poverty and ignorance, or, what is just as bad, perhaps worse, wealth and ignorance; vulgar display or stingy selfishness crowding in upon and poisoning his life. One soul falls instantly into a rich abundance of friendships, another goes struggling on its way alone. One man lives in America and another has to live in Turkey. One is tempted and perhaps forced to education, another longs for it and finds no chance. The fact of privilege is everywhere.

And if we try to make light of these differences and to say: O, these are only outward circumstances, they do not touch the character, we find very soon that they do touch the character. Men have not only better and worse chances to be rich and to be famous, they have better and worse chances to be good. Nothing but the most abject slavery to a theory can claim for a moment that the child of the gutter has the same chance of goodness as the child of the pure and holy home, or that it makes no difference to the possibilities of a man’s character whether he lives in China or in England. The fact of privilege is not merely everywhere. It goes deep and touches the most sacred parts of us.

My purpose to-day does not lead me into any attempt to explain this puzzling fact or to show how one may come to look at it complacently. I think there is but one way in which a man can be truly reconciled to it, and that is by faith in God. Faith is a method of looking at life which begins with the personal Governor of life, and, being satisfied of His character, accepts the mysteries of existence as coming from Him, as right because He is right, as capable of harmony and light in those depths of His nature which we cannot fathom. It is an action of the nature perfectly familiar to us in many of the smaller divisions of life, in the family, in the schoolroom, in the state, this action which when we bring it to its largest illustration and see it working towards God we call religious faith.

But this is not what I am to speak of to-day. Rather I want to take the simple fact of privilege indisputably present everywhere. Not to prove it, not to explain it, but to study it, to see what some of its consequences are, how it makes human life different from what human life would be without it, this is my purpose. There can be no doubt, I think, whatever puzzling questions it may bring with it, that it is the fact of privilege, the inequalities among men for which they do not seem to be responsible, which makes a large part of the interest and richness of human existence. I do not speak simply of the picturesqueness which it gives to life as compared with the monotonous flatness which would come with an absolute equality among men. The country broken into hills and valleys has a picturesque variety, a play of light and shade which delights you and entices you along, far different from the weariness with which you plod across the smooth country where every footstep falls on the same level with the step before it and you can see the blank monotony unbroken to the far-away horizon. But if this picturesque and hilly land is barren while the flat country teems with fertility, then men will love the flat land best and live there most happily. It is not for its beauty but for its fruitfulness that we praise the inequality of life. I beHeve the more we think, the more we become convinced that the instinct which asks for equality is a low one, and that equality, if it were completely brought about, would furnish play only for the lower instincts and impulses of man. The instincts that spring up with inequality are deeper ones. Helpfulness, reverence, unselfish admiration, discrimination of the essential and the accidental, loyalty, magnanimity, these are what make men great, and these spring up between unequal men. Certainly the world’s greatest teachers have not been levellers. Christ never was. Remember what He said about rulers — His “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Remember how He promised His disciples that they should sit on their twelve thrones. Remember how while He told the wife of Zebedee that she was all wrong about the kind and the means of the dignity which she desired for her sons, yet that there was a dignity which should be given to them for whom it was prepared of His Father. In His Kingdom of Heaven there was to be a greatest and a least. Nowhere is there any communism in Jesus. The waste of power which communism involves would find no tolerance from Him. All crude and passionate attempts to make a flat equality in human kind have seized hold first of Christ and tried to fasten themselves on Him. But by and by He has failed them, they evidently did not carry Him with them, and at the end they have supported Him by some abstract philosophy, some h priori speculation, that blighting agrarianism which found no sanction or sympathy in the great Teacher.

This brings me round to the text, of which I have not spoken yet. The Bible contains one picture of the universal fact of privilege which in dignity and completeness surpasses every other. And St. Paul is commenting on that picture in this verse. God gives, he says, “Glory, honor, and peace to the soul of every man that worketh good, to the Jew first and also to the Gentile.” It is a very strong statement, if we think of it. It declares that the universal laws of spiritual retribution work with peculiar certainty and effect for one nation. It is the universal function of righteousness to bring glory and honor and peace to the souls of righteous men. That function works everywhere. But it works strongest and first for these Jews, this people born of Abraham and living among the hills of Palestine. And we know very well that this idea of Paul belongs to all the Bible. The reason why it does not startle us is that it is so familiar. It is frankly stated everywhere. It is urged upon them as the first fact, the deepest motive of their life. Their venerable ancestor is always seen coming over the hills, away from all the people that belonged to him, leaving the past behind him, holding in his hands as he came the promise of a future full of privilege. He had been chosen. God had called him. Ah! my friends, it puzzles us when we state it calmly as a fact of history, but that story of the call of Abraham has always been intelligible to multitudes of men, because it fell in so completely with what they saw in life. It was a scene of privilege, and privilege was everywhere. That fact of privilege ran down through all the Hebrew story from Abraham to Paul. “I the Lord have severed you from other people that ye should be mine.” And this same fact of privilege Paul is declaring to the Jews at Rome.

The Jews, then, are the very type and flower of that fact of privilege and inequality which fills the world. Let us take them as the type and by the light of their history let us try to get at some truths regarding the position and duty of privileged people everywhere, I speak habitually, and I am speaking this morning to a congregation very largely made up of privileged people. There are circumstances in the lives of most of you, my friends, which have come there by no merit of your own, and which separate your lives from multitudes of others which by no fault of theirs are destitute of some of the circumstances that belong to you. Those circumstances do not necessarily make you happy. On the contrary, they often bring with them new sources of discontent. I suppose that the most fortunate lot in life has its full share of grumblers and complainers. But a position of privilege does bring its own responsibilities and chances. They vary according to the nature of the privilege. Sometimes it is social position, sometimes it is wealth, with all the ease and chance of influence it brings. Sometimes it is education, sometimes it is religious opportunity, a peculiar richness of the means of grace of one sort or another. These are the Judaisms which are perpetual. They separate people who have them from the people who have them not, as the Jews were separated from the Gentiles. In them all the virtues and all the vices that were in historic Judaism are possible. Those who are destitute of them may be often better, stronger, more pleasant persons to contemplate and to have to do with than those who possess them are. So the Gentiles were often better and more satisfactory people than the Jews. But still the value of privilege remains. Its chances are greatest and its judgments are most severe. I speak to-day to those whose lives are in any way lives of privilege, and I want to show them how they may learn to understand and use their lives by the picture of this people of privilege, the Jews.

I. I mention first, then, the frank recognition of their privileged condition which was continually forced upon the Jews. There was something very strong and beautiful in the way in which they were never for a moment allowed to forget that they belonged to God in some peculiar way. No voice ever came out from the darkness in which God abode that did not tell them once again, before it spoke the special message, whether of commendation or rebuke, that they were his people whom he had brought out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, and to whom He had given the land which he had promised to their fathers. Their history was always lighted up by the miracles which God had given to no other people. Whenever they were tempted to think themselves like other nations they heard again in the distance the roar of the Red Sea parting its waters to let them go through, or saw the fires of Sinai glaring still upon the desert sands. No forgetfulness, no cowardice, no mock humility was allowed for a moment to obliterate the everlasting difference that separated them from the Philistines and the Edomites. And here is the first truth, the first duty as concerns all privilege. Here is what God demands of all his chosen people, of every chosen man — the frank and unforgetful recognition of the privilege that God has given him. If God gives a man social position or education or religious influence, He does it for a purpose, and the cowardice or modesty with which a man sometimes ignores the fact defeats that purpose. There is a lofty humility in which the true man says “I have influence, I am rich, I have knowledge “; with as simple truthfulness, though with more solemnity, as he says “I am thirty years old,” or “I am tall,” or “I am strong.” O believe me, my dear friends, we do not make a short and easy end of the temptation to pride which our privileges thrust upon us by just denying our privilege altogether, whether to ourselves or to one another. The true problem is to acknowledge our privilege, to keep it always in our sight, never to forget it for a moment, and yet be humble as the prophets of the Lord, the Jews of Judaism, were humble, who could say such sublime words as “The word of the Lord came unto me,” and yet be so free from pride that they could serve the meanest of their people.

Through all the world the beauty of simple truthfulness impresses us always more and more. That everything should know itself clearly and declare itself frankly, the very mention of such a thought flashes a picture before our eyes, the picture of a great, rich forest where everything has been distorted and told untrue tales about itself in a thick fog, now as the fog rises simply revealing every leaf and trunk and twig and flower just as it is and growing beautiful with truth. This is what makes the power of nature always — her perfect frankness and radiant content — no restless aspiration and no mock humility. The violet says simply “I am small and beautiful,” the oak says just as simply

I am broad and strong and grand.” Each tells its simple fact. But we men are always falsifying our lives. While we are nothing we are always lifting up our voice and saying that we are something. As soon as we are something we cover ourselves with a thin humility and say “O, I am nothing.” The first falsehood we all condemn. But the second we are apt to think is graceful and good. But it is not either. It is ugly and bad. The first duty of every man whom God has put on any pedestal is not to crouch down and make himself seem no taller than the other men upon the ground but to stand at his full height, and on the pedestal which God, not he, has built for him to lift aloft whatever torch God may give him to hold.

2. But go on further. The next feature in God’s treatment of his privileged people consisted in the way in which He was always forcing absolute standards upon them. The very fact of their privilege, as he was always telling them, took them out of the range of mere comparison with their neighbors and compelled them to be judged directly by him. The Jews said “We are no worse than the Moabites.” “Nay,” was God’s answer, in some unmistakable utterance of his right hand, “but the Moabites are not your standard. Let Midian and Moab test themselves by one another. You are my people and I, only I, must be your judge.” This runs through all their history. Their exaltation lifts them

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up to higher tests. The valleys may compare themselves with one another and see which has most of the dim twilight which is all that any of them gain, but Mt, Blanc can only test the whiteness of its snowy dome by the brilliant glory of the sun itself. And this is true of all privilege. You have a chance of education — at once your judgment seat is raised. Your standard of comparison is altered. It will not do for you, the educated man, to look around upon the mass of ignorance and say “I know as much as these men know.” You are separated from them by your privilege. You must match yourself against absolute standards. What fraction is that which you know of the entire truth? That is the scholar’s test. The true scholar is known by the way in which he accepts that test and willingly applies it to himself. Or you have influence. Men look to where you stand for guidance. It will not do tor you to say “I do as much good in the community as other men.” You must be driven home into the absolute question “How does the good you do fall short of the best that a man can do for his fellow-men? Or you are where religious opportunity is bright around you. Your education has made you know Christ from your childhood. The Bible has been never shut. The church is always open. Is it for you to say “I am as pious as most men?” Must not your privilege lift you up above all low comparisons and partial estimates until you meet the word of Christ and hear him say “Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father is perfect.”

I think that this stands very high among the advantages which are given to a life of privilege. It has an opportunity of coming, as it were, more directly to the judgment seat of God. The man of privilege may disown this advantage. The king upon the throne may extenuate his cruelty or meanness by comparing himself with the people whom he rules. You, set perhaps where a social circle larger or smaller looks up to you and envies you and copies you, may basely ask of yourself no more than merely to be equal to the average standards of the multitudes who follow you, but if you do so you throw away your opportunity. The boy in school who, climbing to the topmost seat, passes out of comparison with his school-fellows, comes in sight of the higher judgments which prevail among older boys or among men in the great world for which boyhood is a preparation. The world is made up of a vast series of judgment halls, in each of which sits some judge of some degree of dignity. Each judge in his own court has his own order of men who are judged by him. Public opinion sits in one chamber and judges its public; business success sits in another and gives its judgments; and so they rise in dignity. And each degree and kind of privilege takes a man out of the judgment of some lower court, but it brings him into the judgment of a higher. Wealth frees a man from the necessity of business conflict. He is not obliged to show in the wrestle of the Exchange what sort of man he is, but he is summoned by his wealth to a higher and harder test. He is compelled to manifest his manhood not by his skill in getting money but by his generosity in using it. The man born into a host of friends is not tried by the tests of solitary endurance, but his character is brought to the severe analysis of multipHed relations. So everywhere. A man’s privileges release him from one judgment seat only to bring him to another higher, more absolute, and more exacting. And at the head of all stands the judgment of God, the great white throne, to which all lives come at last, to which the lives of highest privilege come most immediately, and which no privilege is lofty enough to fly over and escape.

If this were not true, privilege would grow into insufferable arrogance. Freed from the lower restraint and entering into none higher it would tread upon the necks of men with brutal insolence. Wherever privilege has claimed for itself such freedom from all judgment it has oppressed the world and made itself seem hateful. But there have been privileged men and women, there are such to-day, whose privilege has made them all the more conscious of authority, and their lives are the most beautiful that we see anywhere. There are men whom no necessity of daily bread compels to work, and yet whom no man dreams of calling idle. They labor in some cause of God, some work of charity or culture for mankind as faithfully as any drudge drags out his weary, hated task. There are men and women whom nothing that we call self-interest compels to court the favor of their fellow-creatures by civility, who yet are full of gracious courtesy to all the children of their Father. Such privilege as that does not disgust but wins men. Men do not hate it. It represents to them true kingliness. It opens to them the way by which they themselves may rise to higher standards.

“Ah, great and gentle Lord, Who wast, as is the conscience of a saint Among his warring senses, to thy Knights.”

So speaks his beautiful, false, and repentant queen to King Arthur, who is in romance the perfect picture of privilege that has found its way to higher judgment seats by the very greatness that exempts it from the lower. It is stricter as well as loftier in its obedience as the conscience is more sternly as well as more nobly ruled by the senses. David’s whole kingdom looks up to him, makes him its standard, lives or dies by his smile or frown. But David himself stands upon the summit and cries directly up to God, “Let my sentence come forth from Thy presence.”

Not that the souls which we call privileged alone £an thus directly submit themselves to absolute standards and find out the judgment seat of God. The humblest and most trampled and encumbered life may go there freely. The valley may look up to the sun as boldly as the hill top. Only it must look past the hill top, and I am only picturing the actual state of things when I say that it is apt to catch much of its light from the mountain’s reflection while the mountain must get its directly from the sun.

O men and women with your lives of privilege, do not disown this which is their best prerogative. Let the very certainty that your education or your wealth or your position did not come to you by any merit of your own make it a solemn thing to you. All good comes from Him. But the good that comes by a man’s own labor seems to have come through many hands and to have lost something of the sacredness of its origin. But your good things it seems as if you took directly from the hands of God. His hands touched your hands as He gave them to you. They are warm with His touch, they are bright with His look still. Let them be sacred to you. Let them be symbols to you not so much of your freedom from low authorities as of your loyalty to the highest. Let them signify humility and faith, and make your life strong and gentle by keeping it in God’s presence.

3. But one more truth remains, the deepest truth about the purpose and the proper use of privilege. It is the truth that privilege is given to any man not for himself alone but for the good of other people. We must go back to our Jews again, our types of privilege. The struggle of God with that people was to make them fit for certain offices which they were to render to mankind. There can be nothing more ignoble than to think of God as choosing one nation out of all the world and petting it and making it his favorite, rewarding it when it was good and petulantly punishing it when it was bad, as one might do with a favored wilful child. But there can be nothing finer than the thought of God taking one of His nations and moulding it, training it, fusing its life into transparency so that it might be capable of transmitting Him and His blessing to the rest. That was what their privilege was for. “To the Jew first and also to the Gentile,” The Jew failed over and over again to know God’s purpose. He took the privilege which he was to help other people with and treated it like a luxury of his own. He was like the crew of a ship sent to carry provisions to a sick and starving people over the sea, who on the way forget the purpose of the voyage and drink the wine and eat the bread themselves as if they had been stored there only for their luxurious living. There is something grotesque about it when we state it so. There is something tragically grotesque about all the same misuse of privilege for selfish purposes as we see it everywhere in life. What is that man doing who lives there by the wayside in his gorgeous house and eats and drinks and entertains his friends and thinks how good it is for him that he was born without duties or the necessity of work. Why, he is merely out at sea, floating along before light winds, merrily or gloomily eating and drinking up his cargo. What is that religious Sybarite about, who with the noblest Church, the most exquisite service, the purest associations surrounding his sheltered life, is worshipping God as if he had no missionary duty, saying “O God, thou art my God” so earnestly that it seems as if there were no God left for anybody else. When you think what God made the man a Christian for, there is something tragically grotesque about it. He has lost the purpose of his privilege and is taking for himself what God gave him to transmit to other men, to His great hungry world of men.

This truth regarding privilege is shown in the tendency which every unused privilege manifests to disappear. The naturalists now are tracing many of the varieties of physical structure to the way in which bodily organs which from any circumstances are not used dwindle and shrivel up and pass away. And so it is with privileges of whatever sort when they are not used for the blessing of other men beside the possessor. This certainly was true about our specimens of privilege, the Jews. They were selfish about their privileges, wanted to keep them to themselves, and where are their privileges to-day? The world has taken the truth out of the hands of the faithless priest, and goes its way, using the truth, but leaving the priest helpless and neglected by the wayside. This is men’s belief about the highest gifts always. This was Christ’s story of the talents. There is a legend of the Irish Saint, Columba, and a monk who had some precious religious books. Columba begged that he might see them, but the monk refused. Then Columba broke out indignantly, “May thy books no longer do thee any good, thee, nor those that come after thee, since thou takest occasion by them to show thy inhospitality.” And the monk’s books became unintelligible. “They still exist,” says an author of 300 years later, “but no man can read them.”

I know how with regard to certain kinds of privilege it will seem as if this were not true. “Look,” men will say, “here is a selfish rich man who never uses his wealth for other people and yet his riches do not fly away. He is as rich as ever.” But it is like the unused limb. It does not disappear at once. It shrivels and dries up. The life goes out of it. And so your social position or your wealth shrivels if it is selfish. The respectability and pleasure which are their life pass out of them. They become mere shells which any wind of circumstance may blow away. So the best enthusiasm dies out of selfish learning and all real earnestness out of selfish religion.

These then are the truths concerning privilege. Recount them in your minds. All privilege is to be frankly owned and its responsibilities accepted. All privilege which lifts men above the dependence upon fellow-men ought to bring them more clearly into the sight and the judgment of God. All privilege belongs to the privileged men, not for themselves but for other men. Think of the life of Jesus. It was all full of privilege. A difference from other men which his oneness with other men only made more manifest. A superiority which was so absolute that the common types and symbols of superiority, money and rank, would have seemed most impertinent. And see in Him how all these truths of privilege were evident. He frankly took His place. He did not make believe that He was not different from other men. He said “Come unto me” as if He were the centre of the world. And the more He stood above men, the nearer did He stand to His Father. He was always in God’s sight doing God’s work. And yet all His separateness from men was for men’s sake. He was the divine Saviour for the souls of men. He lived and died as no other man ever did only that all other men, if they would, might come to live and die like Him.

These are the truths concerning privilege. In their degree all the greatest souls of our race have illustrated them. They have frankly accepted their position of genius or of power. They have owned God’s judgment. They have lived for fellow-men. Think of Socrates or Milton.

And now, my friends, you, as I said, are very largely people of privilege. Let me speak plainly with you. Many of you are rich. Many of you have social influence. Many of you have education, almost all of you have had the Church and the blessings of religion all your lives. Now sometimes it seems well to tell privileged people that they must not think about their privileges. But to-day I beg you to think about them very earnestly. Own the great truths concerning them. If you are rich you must frankly own your wealth and take the position which it gives with all the duties that belong to it. If you have been born in the very centre of church light, you must not make believe to yourself or to other people that it is all the same as if you were a heathen. It is as bad for the rich man to make believe that he is poor and so shirk his responsibilities as for the poor man to make believe that he is rich and so ruin himself by extravagance. First own your place with that frank acceptance of the facts of life which is the only real humility, and then let your privilege solemnize you. Frankly owned, not hidden as if it were something of which you ought to be ashamed, let it bring you into and keep you in the very presence of Him who gave it to you. Let it hold you with a grasp that you cannot escape before the judgment seat of God. And, above all, know that it is a trust and never dare to make a luxury out of it. Understand that your wealth or your education, or your religious light is not thoroughly made your own till you have begun to use it for other people.

O if the people of privilege all through this city could get these truths and hold them! How ignorant they are about them now. How they behave like children to whom have been given jewels that might glorify and enrich the world but who hide them under a child’s awkward bushel made of pride and shame or use them only to deck out their foolish baby-houses. O for some voice of Christ to come to them and say “Ye are the light of the world. If the light that is in you is darkness how great is that darkness.”

It is no feeble and fictitious levelhng of the world that we desire. Men are not jealous of privilege if privilege is only worthy of its privileges. You who are rich and lofty and educated and religious, beware, beware, of what befel that Jewish people who were once to the rest of the world what you are now to the rest of the community. They were what you are. Beware lest by repeating their unworthiness you come to be what they are. It is possible for you to be what they might have been, to take all their promises and find the truth they never found in them. God says to you as He said to them, They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever.