Average and Absolute Virtue

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, Resist not evil.” — MATTHEW v. 38 (R. V.).

IT is not of the special injunction of Christ in these words that I want to speak, but of the general spirit which inspires this and a great many others of our Lord’s commandments. Christ found a host of men who had simply accepted the standards of their time. They found a certain type and degree of conscientiousness current around them. Jerusalem expected them to be as good as this standard, and asked of them no more. Moses and David, in the course of centuries, pressed flat by the hard, unsympathetic hands of commentators, pared down and explained away by the necessities of practical liv ing, had degenerated from great spiritual inspirations into sets of rules. Everything had become formal. The world had fixed its standard of how good a man should be, and no man was expected to be better than his world.

We can well imagine with what spirit Christ must have faced that state of things. With His informal soul, with His spontaneous freedom, with His sense of God and man, with His firm conviction that man was the child of God, and that there was no limit to the degree of nearness to his Father into which every man might come, the whole system of hard limitations must have been odious to Him. His soul desired the sky, and men had built a roof against which every man just grazed his head, and which shut the sky out from their aspiration altogether. Therefore came His protests fast and warm. Men say, “You shall not kill”; I say, “You shall not hate.” Men say, “You shall not commit adultery “; I say, “You shall not lust.” Men say, “You shall not swear falsely”; I say, “You shall not swear at all.” Men say, “You shall love your friends “; I say, “You shall love everybody.”

Can we not picture to ourselves how words like these of Jesus must have come to many a generous young spirit in Jerusalem as the Master spoke? “Lo, then, it is not wrong, or foolish, or conceited, this sense of which my heart has been full — that men have got the whole thing too hard and small. It is, then, right, — this desire, this struggle to be better than my world. Listen, my heart, and hear, oh, hear what He is saying now: ‘Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”

No picture of Christ is clearer in the Gospels than that in which He is seen standing face to face with human life, and uttering His call to men. “Be better than your world,” He cries. He opened the great door of a completer life, and said to all His hearers, “Go in there.” Some, the few, heard and obeyed.

Many, the most, drew back. What call was there for them to be more holy than their fellows? But how often, to the best of them, — as afterwards all through their life they went their way, quenching their higher impulses and drilling themselves into conformity with the world’s standards, — the call which they once heard must have come back as the memory of the morning comes back to the hot and dusty noon, and they must have stopped a moment, and dreamed of how, if they had listened to that voice, they might have lived different lives, might have been better than their world.

I wish that I could make you hear that voice to day. You need to hear it; for everywhere around us, when a man aspires after a life in any way larger or better than the average of the life by which he is surrounded, there come two results; first a misgiving in himself, and secondly an outcry from his neighbors. It is so in all departments. You are moved to believe some richer doctrine than the special creed which you have been taught contains. And then your own heart rises up and you say, “Who am I that I should find out truth which my fathers did not know?” Or you are moved to question some thing which has been long and widely held for true; and again your heart is ready with its cry, “Has not this dogma held mankind for generations? Why should I stir myself? Let me quietly accept it.” Or there comes some moan into your ears out of the mass of misery which we call poverty; and you start up to go out and help it; and all the selfishness around you lifts up its voice in wonder. You set yourself against some commonly accepted business fraud, or blunder; and all the business world, according as it thinks your protest dangerous or simply silly, calls you knave or fool. You remonstrate against the action of your political party, and your party is only troubled to know whether you are a hypocrite or a Pharisee. You plead for purer social life, and society gazes at you with a stony stare. You cannot hide so carefully the effort to make your own soul purer and holier but that the world feels this strange thing which is going on in it, and with something almost like indignation wonders why you need be so scrupulous and fine. So it is everywhere.

I would not seem to think that this is the only feeling which the effort of any man to be better than his world excites. I do not ignore, I am sure, either that enthusiastic hope which springs up in the struggling soul itself, or that instinctive homage and respect which, under all contempt and opposition, still exists to greet the man who is not satisfied to live merely in the average of his brethren. Those are real things. But also real is that dislike, that disposition to recall and repress his endeavor, which welcomes the adventurous man. Partly it is because he rebukes the self-satisfied lethargy of other men. That is not all the reason. But, be the reason what it may, the fact exists. Each brave man meets and has to face it. And so I ask you to study it with me a little while.

The first thing which we wish to understand, if we can, is what is the meaning of the fact we have to deal with, and whence it comes. What is this general standard of morality and life, below which a man cannot fall without disgrace, but above which it is not wholly safe for a man to try to rise? It is a strange phenomenon. It is not uniform. It varies most unaccountably in different times and places. It is, no doubt, in a rude way, the expression of the height which the average virtue, in any given place or time, has attained, the tide-mark of the morality of this especial time and place.

But there is more account than that to give of it. The public standard is very apt to bear the mark of three causes which are very temporary and local, but which must make themselves felt where they exist. The first of these is the especial need of the especial time. Certain virtues are particularly valued, and certain vices are made light of, because of the peculiar condition which society has reached. The vices which seem most dangerous are most condemned and hated. Thus, in our newer Western communities, theft is punished with summary severity, while baser crimes are made but little of. To steal a horse has sometimes been thought worse than to kill a man. The second of these influences is the power of reaction. Some long-neglected virtue by and by gets its chance, and wins for itself an excessive prominence. Thus, after a long period of bigotry, toleration for a time appears to be the one excellence worth cultivating. Thirdly, there is the power of some dominant character, or some great public teacher, who for the time makes the form of goodness which he most admires shine before the eyes of the community which has its eyes fixed on him. So Dr. Channing once in Boston, so

Thomas Carlyle in England, gave utterance to types of character which, both in their excellencies and their limitations, became almost the fixed laws of their people and their times.

The peculiar need of a special place in a special stage of development, the reaction from some previous standard, and the force of some strong character, — these, I think, are the elements which unite to make that strange thing which we call the standard of the time. When it is once made, how strange and strong it is! It is tyrannical. For the time it seems to have embodied the absolute and eternal goodness. It is intangible, but very real. The strongest and the weakest feel it. He who suggests that there is much about it which is temporary, and which the next generation will see altered, is counted an enemy of goodness, a traitor to morality. This, which, underneath the immediate and superficial explanations of it, is really the stage in the great onward movement of human life that has been reached at any point of time, is the phenomenon which every man encounters in the present life in which he lives; and it is the sight which every student of history sets himself to study as he looks back into the past. Just as, when you look across a stretch of ocean, you see the different colors in the water which show how various are the degrees of depth; so, as you look across the centuries, you see how every age has its own hue, which reveals to you what virtues it most valued and what vices it most dreaded, and whether the standard of its public and its private life were deep or shallow, high or low.

And now the question is: what ought to be the relation of any one man, living in a particular age, to this moral standard of his age? He evidently cannot be independent of it. He cannot live in a base age just as he would have lived in one of those finer and more spiritual ages which certainly occur, and in which it often seems as if it would be so very easy to be good and brave and pure. On the other hand, he certainly cannot be the slave and puppet of his time, losing his responsibility in its responsibility, and counting it either hopeless or disloyal to think of being better than the world he lives in. What then? What shall he do?

In the first place, he who considers the explanations which we gave of the origin of the general standard of any time must be struck by their temporariness. They certainly are not absolute and eternal. They do not pretend to be. The special need of a particular time, the power of reaction from something which has already been, the accidental presence of some powerful man, — all these concurring do not have any necessary coincidence with the eternal standards which are in the mind of God. The man who most accepts them as his present rule must certainly be ready to say, “They are not final. They may all disappear. Another age may come, must come, with different, it may be with better, loftier exactions.”

There is freedom in a consciousness like that. He who is aware of the temporariness of the standards under which he lives, is at liberty to look above those standards. He may accept the unborn future, as well as the already embodied present, for his home. He belongs not merely to the temporary which already is, and lies upon the surface, but also to the eternal, which is underneath now, and shall come forth visibly in some completer day.

Again, we must remember that our public standard is an average; and the very idea of average involves the absence of uniformity. To make an average you must have some parts lower and some other parts higher than the level at which you finally settle. The common public standards of any age, therefore, are the result of the upward and the downward forces pulling upon one another. As there are multitudes of degraded lives, lives always dragging downward the standard of their time, lives worse than their world; so there must be other lives better than their world, always drawing the standard upward against this base resistance. There must be men better than their time, or the time could not be as good as it is.

Let us remember this when the exceptional and shining lives seem to be wasted in a hopeless world. Some man who dares believe in the absolute truth, and to anticipate the judgment seat of God; some woman like a sunbeam in her purity and unworldliness, — what shall we say of them? They do not make the world to be like themselves; but there is not one of them whose life does not tell upon the world, to keep it from being completely what it would be if only the brutal and false and foul men and women had their way in it. Not one of their lives is wasted, though it may end upon a scaffold or a cross. Was the life of Jesus Christ wasted?

Here too is freedom. If in the very substance of this average itself are mingled purer forces; if these common standards, unaspiring as they appear, can not be maintained unless there be some souls better than these standards, some uncontent, aspiring souls forever tugging at the current standards to draw them up, or at least to keep them from falling lower; — then why should I not be among these souls? Here there is surely room for aspiration. That the world may not be worse than it is, I will be better than my world.

And yet, once more, we always ought to remem ber, when we talk about the standards of the world, that we are of necessity talking very loosely. There are many worlds of many standards, all lying close together in this one, great, strange world of ours. The world is not one evenly kneaded uniformity of moral judgment. Close by the side of the little world in which your birth or business places you, there is, very likely, another world of different standards, of higher hopes and aspirations, into which world perhaps your life may be tranf erred, by the very knowledge of which world’s existence your life may be rebuked and purified. That other world may or may not be at once distinguishable, but it exists. And the very knowledge of that world gives freedom.

Here is the Christian Church, the never-dying testimony of the higher possibility in man. I know how ready we are to say that the Church shares the moral fortunes of the world. I know that there is truth in what we say, when we declare that in a base age the Christian Church grows base. But all the time there is in man a deeper consciousness about the Church than that. The world hungers after, and is not satisfied unless it finds, a Church that is better than the times it lives in, a Church which is a power of God, forever protesting against the evil by which it is surrounded, forever insisting on the lofty moral standards which a base age calls hopeless.

What is a holy Church, unless she awes

The times down from their sins? Did Christ select

Such amiable times to come and teach
Love to, and mercy?

It is this ideal of the Church, always demanded, never lost wholly out of the hearts of men, some times beheld in more or less worthy realization in this poor, blundering, struggling, hoping Church of history, an ideal that is sure, men believe, to come and reveal itself, at last, — this it is which has stood for courage and freedom to multitudes of souls which, without her testimony, would have despaired of rising up above the standards of their age. For the sake of such souls everywhere, in all the ages which are yet to come, may Christ make His Church more and more what she ought to be! — may He make us who are in His Church more earnest to maintain her holiness!

Thus I have mentioned, one by one, some of the helps and provocations which offer themselves to every man who grows discontented with just accepting the standards of his time, to every man who wants to be better than his world. But I know full well that I have not yet touched that which must be, sooner or later, the real strength and freedom of all aspiring men. These things of which I have spoken are but the opening of the prison doors. The real liberty, the real going-forth of the prisoner into freedom, can only come by an intensifying of personal life. That is the great, necessary thing. You may convince a man that the elements which make up the average standards of the world he lives in are local and temporary, and so have no right to hold him in submission. You may make him know that some men are all the time outgoing their generation, and that there is no reason why he should not be one of those men. You may point him to the worlds of higher life, the Church and all its meanings, which lie close beside his lower world all the time. And when you have done this there he sits! With his prison doors wide open, there he sits still! What can make him rise up upon his feet, and go forth in enterprising goodness to be better than his world? Nothing except a personal call, a personal responsibility, a sense of himself which makes him for the time forget his brethren and all their standards, and, just as if he were the one soul to whom such a call ever came, follow the voice which summons him wherever it may lead.

Is there a voice which can speak to the souls of men like that? “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me,” said Jesus Christ. The whole soul of the Christian Gospel is the enforcement of personal responsibility, of personal accountability. “You are God’s child,” it says to every soul.

“God loves you. He has given you your own life to live. He has prepared a judgment seat for you. And then there comes in that wonderful personal appropriation of redemption, which has filled all the history of Christianity and made countless souls feel that they had the right to say, as they looked upon the Cross of Calvary, “The Saviour who is dying there is my Saviour and is dying for me.”

Here we get at the heart and soul of the whole matter. The power of Christ is thoroughly personal. He fills the single soul with its own inspirations, its own hopes, its own consciousness of responsibility and opportunity. He lifts a world or an age by lifting the individuals of which it is composed. Every power of Christ on the masses is but the consequence and aggregate of His power on individuals. Some forces might try to lift the world as a derrick lifts a rock, with a strong, stiff chain bound fast about the whole, so that no particle must lag behind, and no particle must outstrip another particle. But the power of Christ lifts the world, lifts society, as the spirit of flight lifts a flock of birds which fly together towards the sun. They rise together, but only because the same upward impulse tells on each. No doubt they fly the better because they fly in company; but any bird that can outstrip the others may do it. There is a certain general speed with which they fly; but no aspiring wing is bound to fly no faster. The general standard of speed, which is, no doubt, an inspiration to the slower, is no restraint upon the bravest and the strongest as he presses onward towards the sun.

Is not that what we want? I look at Christ Him self, and is not that just what I see? He felt His age and race about Him. He was a Jew in the time of Herod. And yet how freely He outwent His age! And why? Because He had to do directly and most intimately with God. He was the Son of God; and whatever may be the closeness with which the children of a family are bound to one another, the first relation of each is to the father of them all. That is what keeps the freedom and openness of family life. So Christ was free to outgo Judaism, because He knew Himself the child of God.

What Christ was, He tried to make His disciples be, — free by the direct personal relation of each to Himself and to the Father. There was, no doubt, a general average of life and character and knowledge in the twelve apostles; but John or Philip was perfectly at liberty to rise to higher knowledge of the Master, to enter deeper into His Spirit, to win completer consecration to His work. And the charter and assurance of their liberty was their Master’s perpetual exhortation to them to follow Him, and to be perfect even as their Father in Heaven was perfect.

In that same injunction must be the charter and assurance of our liberty to reach forth after the highest, and to be better than our world. We live here in the midst of a certain average of faith. The men about us believe so much, and no more. Wonderful is the quickness and the positiveness with which the least belief beyond the average is hailed as superstition — over-belief, as the word seems to mean. And yet the soul of every man is claimed by God’s own revelations to that soul. The reservoirs of truth — God’s world, God’s Word, the human soul, the human history, the life and light of Christ, — they are open like the sky above the head of every man. Not unhelped by his brethren’s faith, yet making every article of faith his own and following it out as God shall lead him by a special guidance; so every man must press forward into more and more belief.

My dear friends, be sure that you let no man, nor all the tone of all the age you live in — which is nothing but the colossal man of this especial time — dominate over your right and power of believing. The only hope of escape from the contagion and tyranny of unbelief lies in this claiming of the rights and privileges of the individual soul, the right and privilege of the individual soul to seek after truth and to hold immediate converse with God. It is not by going back to borrow the faith of the twelfth century, or of the second, that you can resist the unbelief of the nineteenth. Every true man, while he lives in his century, must live free from his century, must try, at least, to live the timeless and eternal life with Truth, and so to be open to his own uninterrupted, undistorted voice of God speaking directly to him. This is the only hope of escape either from narrow skepticism or from narrow superstition.

And as of faith, so too of life and conduct. How shall you and I, rowing up and down this little land-locked harbor of our class or party standards, gather strength and courage to run up our sails and put out into the broad sea which lies beyond? We cannot do it unless some voice comes out of that sea, distinctly calling us to sail upon a course that leads to some special harbor which we are meant to reach, which the God who built our natures built us for. To undertake a life more self-sacrificing than your friends think it best to live, so that you can aid the poor; to take deliberately on your back the burden of some brother’s life which men think worthless, and only fit just to be left to die; to declare, without uncharitable judgment of your fellow-men, that some well-recognized indulgence of society is hurtful to your purity or conscientiousness, and so you will have no part in it; to set yourself against some popular iniquity or in favor of some unpopular reform; — all of these are acts which can be done quietly, firmly, humbly, only as there comes to your soul a certain sense that you were made by God to do them; that, however it may be for other men, for you God’s word is clear, and there is nothing for you to do but obey it. That was the conviction which came into the hearts of the first apostles when the fiery tongues of the Pentecost were still burning over their heads. “Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye!” said Peter and John to the Council in Jerusalem. They turned, you see, and appealed directly to their world, and said, “Behold we cannot live in your standards, for God is calling us.” And even the hard-souled Council must have felt in its heart the power of the appeal.

Only in this truth, — that the escape from the tyranny of local and temporary standards must lie in personal obedience to a call of God, — only here is found the safeguard of humility. I know full well that in what I have said there must have seemed to lurk the peril of the Pharisee. “We know him,” I have almost seemed to hear you say; “we know the man who sets out to be better than his world. We know him and we hate him! We have had enough of his self-righteous ways. May we be saved from ever being men like him!” The only way in which you can be saved from being men like him, and yet not sink back into the slavery of average life, is by daring to believe that God meant something when He made you; and that the true humility and the true progress will be found in struggling with all your soul after that Divine design. That is the glorious liberty of the children of God.

And so this is our truth! You must go out of the merely temporary and local to meet the absolute and the eternal. To him who sits indoors it may often seem as if the sun were gone out and the winds no longer blew. To him who listens only to what is said by the men about him, or to the men of old time, it must often seem as if there were no absolute righteousness, no voice of God. Arise! Go forth under the open sky; God is still there, and the soul that really listens must hear His voice, and the soul that hears His voice must know that He is King.

I would not have you think that this truth is only for great men, with remarkable things to do in the world. It is for all men. It is for the schoolboy in his school, tempted to swear or cheat because the other boys do. It is for the young man or woman in the boarding-house, crowded upon by the low atmosphere of gossip and frivolity which is hot and heavy there. It is for the shopkeeper shut in by the bad tricks and habits of his trade. It is for the politician, forever encountering the sneers of those who say that politics must be corrupt. It is for the men and women of society; for the students and the lawyers and the ministers; for the mechanics and the laborers; for every human creature who is tempted to slight his work and not to do and be his best. To all such comes the call, “Be better than your world! Break through the slavery of your class and time and set. Enjoy the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

And then, what more? Nothing but this: Of Christ the Saviour and the Master it is written that “To as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.” And no wonder, then, that He said of Himself, “If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” That is the whole history. Christ makes us know that we are, and so makes us be the sons of God. Being God’s sons, we strike directly for God and for His standards. So we are set at liberty to use, but not to be bound by, the standards of our class and time. In the great phrase of the apostle, we “live unto the Lord.” This is the real redemption of the Lord Jesus Christ. Into the very richest heart of that redemption may all of us enter, and there may we find liberty and life.