Bulk and Essence

“A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory.” — MATTHEW xii. 20.

MATTHEW is telling us how his Master loved to work in quietness, and how, when His works of mercy were the most abundant and the crowd grew greatest, Christ withdrew Himself, and charged those whom He had healed that they should not make Him known.

And Matthew goes on to declare that this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet; and then he goes back and quotes the words in which 750 years before, Isaiah had written the description of the servant of the Lord who was to come. In that description are these words: “A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench. He shall bring forth judgment unto truth.”

We cannot doubt that Matthew had often heard his Master quote these words, and take them to Himself. As Christ grew up to maturity, and recognized the purpose of His life, and found how exceptional He was among men, we can well understand what a strength and delight it must have been for Him to look back and see that, here and there, words had been spoken and lives had been lived, which had anticipated and prepared for Him. The world was not all unready for His coming. Men in other times had dreamed of such a life as He had at last come to live; and though they had not succeeded in realizing their dream, and, so far as they had attempted it, the world had always hated it and cast it out; yet still their shining presences in history made a true line of light which might now lead the eyes of men to Him, and cause Him to be com prehensible to them. There were souls which were His own, to which He could come. Some of them would perhaps receive Him. He was not astray in the world. He was in fulfilment of its loftiest purposes and divinest hopes. Its highest standards, which had been partially realized by its best men, bore witness to Him that it was His Father’s world. Therefore in it, though it ignored Him and misunderstood Him, and even crucified Him, He could still count Himself at home. This is the pathetic side of Christ’s quotations of prophecies, with regard to Himself, from the Old Testament prophets. This is the feeling which we can discover beating underneath this, His quotation from Isaiah.

Let us study that word of Isaiah and of Christ. It is a declaration of the way in which the true servant of God will always do his best and most creative work. Through the tumult of the old Hebrew history, through the uproar of the temple and the days of Herod, through each there is seen walking some one figure which bears the true impress of creative energy. In each of these times it is from this figure that the power is to proceed which is to draw forth and keep all of the good that the past has in it, and which is to make all things new. And the great characteristic of each of those figures is its quietness. Of each of them it is said, “He shall not strive, nor cry, neither shall his voice be heard in the streets.” How that gives us a new key with which to unlock the puzzles of History! The creative powers are quiet. It is the destructive forces which make the noise. The tornado, the hailstorm, and the thunderbolt shake the earth and make it tremble. The dew, the shower, and the sunshine come noiselessly.

The destructive forces, indeed, cannot be spared. The earth needs them again and again to clear the way for the work of creation which is to follow. No book resounds more than some parts of the Bible do with the fury of the forces of destruction doing their terrible work. From the flashing of the fiery swords over the closed gate of Eden, to the plunge of the beast and the false prophet as they are cast together into the lake of brimstone, in the Apocalypse, the voice of destruction, of revolution, of restraint, is ever breaking forth from time to time. But he reads the Bible very feebly and superficially who does not know that it is not these passages which make the Bible to really be the Bible, the Book of God. It is in the record of creative force; it is in the story of the soundless Genesis of life; it is in the peaceful harmony of harps that the real power and music of the Book abide.

Oh, that we could realize that this is true through all the history of man! that we could see how it is almost always the destructive forces which make the noise and win the wonder and applause of men, and realize that however the destructive forces may have their true place, and the noisy outcry may be some times necessary, the real strength of life is in creative effort which moves as quietly among the tasks of men as Jesus Christ walked along the lanes of Galilee.

You who are called to fight for truth — it may be your duty to take error by the throat and drown its war-cries with loud denunciation. If that is your duty, do it! Do it unsparingly and bravely. Do it so that your destruction of the error may be as final and complete as possible. But be thoroughly glad when it is done, and you may go on to better work. Do not let yourself think that noisy denunciation, however necessary it may be, is the best work that a man can do. Honor and do not despise the men who are quietly creative. Value it as the best part of your life if, anywhere in the midst of the tumult of destruction, you are able to put your finger under any load and lift it, or fasten with your encouragement any stone of real purposeful achievement in its place.

But I must come more directly to the point of my sermon. In the text, Jesus Christ is speaking of the treatment which He and all the true servants of God will give to weakness and limitation. It is surely something which we should like to know. Here is our world all full of failure. Here are our lives which, all of them, more or less, are failures. We know a little, but we do not know enough. We can do something, but our strength speedily breaks down. There is a little character and a little faith, but they are very little; and to think for a moment that they are more than little only proves what feeble standards of faith and character we have. So it is to-day; and so it has been always.

Now, suppose that it becomes clearly known to us that into this world there is coming an absolutely perfect Being, a Being positively perfect, a Being who not merely never does what is wrong, but who is vividly, eagerly, thoroughly alive in every good activity. Will not the question spring up in our hearts: “How will this Perfect One, who sets no limits to His own duty and enthusiasm, deal with the poor half-hearted folk into whose streets and houses He has come?”

We know the answer to that question which our experience of men suggests. We know how often men who have reached proficiency in any good attainment grow contemptuous about the feeble, fitful efforts after the same attainment which less devoted or less able men are making. The man whose whole life is given up to one great cause, to the freeing of the slave or the rescue of the drunkard, loses all patience with his neighbor who gives to either of these pressing needs only a little share of the interest which he divides among many causes. The devoted student of a special science thinks less than nothing of the amateur trifling with his favorite study, which is all that the man who is busily occupied with pressing duties has time for.

Most noteworthy of all, the passionate searcher after character, the man who is struggling to resist temptation and to do his duty, he is not able always to see value in these poor, temporary outbursts of ambition to be holy which occasionally break forth out of the lives of men, who in general are given up to selfishness. It must be hard for him. He is a man to whom life has come to mean simply one long, intense struggle after goodness. He sleeps and wakes in the presence of his enemies, which are his passions and temptations. His armor is never off. His every thought is trying to devise some new means for his warfare. And then he looks about him and sees you and me feebly praising virtue, provided it is not too excessively and fanatic ally virtuous, feebly tying a riband in our cap and marching in processions in honor of goodness, when the road is safe and when the day is bright. No wonder that he is moved with something like contempt! It is the feeling of the regular army for the holiday militia. No wonder that he is almost ready to say, “If you are not ready for more serious work than that, put off your armor altogether. Do not pretend to be struggling for righteousness, if you have no more energy to put into the fight than that. If the reed is so bruised, better break it altogether. If the lamp with its smoking flaxen wick is so nearly gone out, better let it die, — aye, better even quench and extinguish it.”

This is all natural enough — natural, that is, in the lower range of probability, as an expression of the baser and weaker side of men.

But now here comes Jesus Christ, and at Him we look with anxious curiosity, for in Him we know that we shall see this problem, like so many problems, lighted up with new illumination. He comes, a burning and a shining light; and all around Him are these flickering and smoking wicks. He comes with the true divine fibre of humanity unharmed in Him; and all around him are these twisted, crushed, broken lives, bruised from without and with subtle, lurking poison corrupting them within. Look at Him, as He shines there in the pages of the Gospels! What do you see? Is there a symptom of contempt? Is there not, on the contrary, the tenderest and most reverent care for everything which there is of good, or of effort to be good, in every man or woman, no matter how little it may be?

I think of Jesus Christ as He sat by the woman of Samaria beside the well; I think of Him as He stretched out His hand to raise the faithless, sinking Peter; I think of Him as He turned His weary head upon the cross to catch the mere whisper of faith that fluttered on the last breath of the dying thief; I let these, and a multitude of other remembrances of Him, open to me the whole spirit of His life. I bid that spirit of His life stand out in general from the whole body of the graphic record, and how plain it all is! There could not be a grain of true gold in any life, that Jesus Christ did not see it and love it. There could not be the lightest tremble of desire for good in any soul of all the multitude before Him, that did not touch His heart and make it tremble too. Not one indication is there anywhere in His life of that which I have just described, — the despising, by Him who stands upon the summit of the pyramid, of the poor crawling aspirants who are just starting at the base.

This is surely one of the most noteworthy things in the whole history of Christ. When we look for its explanation, and try to see what characteristic of His nature lay at the root of this habit of His action, I think we find what we are seeking in that intense appreciation of the real qualities of things which belonged supremely to Him, as it belongs, in its degree, to all true and fine characters. The common nature, the vulgar man, cares not so much for qualities as for quantities. His eye is fixed on bulk, not essence. He thinks more of a great villain than of a little saint. And no sainthood is a real thing to him, unless it is clothed in light, and brilliantly shines upon the world. He can perceive no fragrance, unless the air is heavy with it. He can hear no zephyr till it swells into a whirlwind. The fact that an act has the true quality of greatness, though it has so little of it that the act itself is not a great act, — this fact does not interest the vulgar man. The fact that a man has the true quality of unselfishness or devotion, though it is so broken and distorted that it can make no great and brilliant sacrifices, seems to him insignificant.

Do you not recognize what I mean when I say that, with Christ and with men who are like Christ, all this is different? With them the perception of the quality of things is instant and unerring; and when good quality is found in anything it wins from them precisely the same kind of honor, whatever may be its degree. The same true quality of fire is in the smouldering lamp-wick that is in the blazing sun. The true quality of woody fibre is in the poor twig, crushed and trampled out of shape under men’s feet in the muddy roadway, as well as in the splendid oak that fronts the sunlight on the hill! Whatever value belongs essentially to fire and fibre, the wise and fine man gives to the qualities of those things always, in their least as well as in their greatest exhibitions. They are precious in themselves, and the hope of the growth which is proper to fire and to fibre is never lost so long as those qualities are truly there.

How many are the instances in which this distinction between the reverence for pure quality, or essence, and the reverence for quantity, or bulk, applies. Take our pride in our country. What a difference there is between the patriot who simply boats of her that she is “big,” and the other patriot whose eye is fastened with anxiety on the things which, great or little, make her an object of interest and value, a true, fresh contribution to the multitude of national life which fills the world. Let her be little, let her be inglorious, if only she is pure, and gives her people freedom, and helps them in their freedom to live useful, happy, upright lives. What a difference there is between the traveller who, in foreign lands, boasts of his country’s population, and the other traveller who, wherever he goes, praises and maintains his country’s principles! The country which is proud of its bulk is sure to be contemptuous and, if the temptation comes, to be a bully towards the nations that are small. The country that believes and rejoices in her principles will be quick with sympathy and help for any least and most degraded nations in whose heart the faintest fire of those principles is burning.

Then think in the same way of the Church. It was recently said to me that the most important question for the Church in our time is the financial question. Alas for us, if the Church came to think like that! The financial question is a question of bulk. It has no relation to character. It inquires, “How great can we make the Church?” not,” What can we make the Church?” You might make the Church as rich as you please, and make her narrower and baser all the time. The questions of faith, of worship, of spiritual life, of missions, are questions of essential quality. No Church is healthy which is not ready to see herself made indefinitely small and poor, if only she can keep and feel growing within her the love of God and love of man which are the essence of the Church’s life.

Or, think of your own faith. The question must be, my dear friends, first of all, not “What do we believe?” but, “How do we believe?” It is not the length of our creed, but the way in which we hold it, long or short, that marks our real worth as believers. What we have most of all to dread is not the limitation, but the degradation of belief. I know that He who desires for us that we should hold all truth, who means for us that ultimately every one of us shall hold all truth, would far rather, as He looks into our hearts, see one fragment of truth spiritually, unselfishly, lovingly held there, than a great mass of truth, however true, feebly grasped, and valued, in any degree, for the advantage which it brings to us the holders.

Bulk has, indeed, its value. A great deal of a good thing is more precious than a little of the same good thing. The oak-tree on the hillside is worth more than the twig lying bruised and trampled in the muddy road. The sun gives more light than the smoking flax. I do not forget that the same Bible which has the Book of Acts has also the Book of the Revelation. The same New Testament which has the story of the little company gathered trembling behind closed doors in the upper chamber at Jerusalem, has also the gorgeous picture of the multitude which no man can number, of all nations and kindreds and people and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. The Book of Acts has the indignant Church casting out Simon Magus, and crying to him, “Thy money perish with thee!” insisting on purity even when purity could only be secured at the sacrifice of numbers and of wealth. But the Book of the Revelation has the vision of the open-gated City, where there shall be no night, and into which shall be brought the glory and honor of the nations, the Church gathering into herself all the richness and greatness of the whole world.

It is possible, in other words, to take what I have been saying and misread it into an affected love of littleness for its own sake, a praise of constraint and limitation even when they are not necessary as the price of purity. So the narrow sectarian not merely is willing to see his sect small, if so only it can be orthodox. He has often been ready to think it orthodox just in proportion as it was small, and to grudge it the growth which, if it really held the truth of God, it ought to crave. In a healthily constituted world like ours, in a world over which God rules, the Good always ought to be reaching out to become the Large. Only, our truth is this: that before the Good becomes the Large, while it still remains the Small, it ought to honor itself, and it ought to receive honor from others, for its essential quality of goodness.

Do not the young men need to understand this, they whose standards of life are every day being formed? It is no easy thing to keep at once the deep love of reality which insists that what we have be true, however small it be; and at the same time to keep the aspiration and ambition which desire to hold as richly as possible every good possession of a human soul. It is easy to fall into the way of saying: “I believe very little, but, at least, what I do believe I believe really; and I do not pretend to believe what I do not believe, and I do not care to believe very much”; or to say about action, “I do not undertake to do much for fellow-man; but, at any rate, in what I do undertake I am no hypocrite, and I am satisfied with that.”

Do you not know such talk, and is there not something very shallow in it? To believe a great deal, and yet to believe it all as really as you now believe your little; to undertake everything in your power to help your fellow-man, and yet to be no hypocrite in any of it, — that alone is the worthy ambition of a manly man. The deliberate sacrifice of bulk to essence, to genuineness, of quantity to quality, is a temporary act, done for a temporary purpose. The time must come when the best shall be universal. “The earth is the Lord’s”; “He is the King of the whole earth.” If, for the moment, any part of the earth must be reckoned to be not His but His enemy’s, it must be only in order that on what is really and already His, His power may gather itself to go forth and conquer and possess the whole. Great is the power of the young man who, at the beginning of and throughout an earnest life, can be possessed with the double power of profound thoroughness and illimitable hope.

The identity of essence in things which are very different from one another in size and shape and look, is one of the most interesting and important principles alike in the physical and in the moral world. It is a principle the application of which is illuminating modern science. A simplicity which gives new unguessed majesty to nature is seen and felt everywhere issuing from beneath the complexity which makes her superficial aspect. In the world of morals the same principle clears up many obscurities, and scatters many sophistries. It takes two lives: one of them arrogant, brutal, overbearing; the other of them gentle, compliant, unobtrusive; and, unveiling the power and meaning which lie at the heart of each, it says, “The real essence of the two is the same. They both mean selfishness.” It takes the feeble sin of the puppet of society, cruel and heartless in the little world in which he lives, and makes it evident that it is the same kind of sin with the stupendous inhumanity of a Roman Emperor or an Inquisitor of Spain. Thus it makes that which is insignificant in degree seem horrible in kind. It brings out the color in what we call a small trangression, by the lurid light which stares out from the more flagrant sin.

The truth which we have been studying from the words of Christ simply presents this principle upon the other side. Then it becomes very rich and gracious. It declares the hope that is in the least goodness just as the other application of the principle declared the danger that is in the least wickedness. Are not these two things the things we need to know? The great goodnesses and the great wickednesses it is easy to discern. It must be easy, we think, for the martyrs to know that they are meeting God’s will, and to get the inspiration of that knowledge. It must be easy for the murderers to know that they are horribly wicked, and to be haunted by the horror of their wickedness. But for the schoolboy to know that his struggle not to tell a lie is a steadfastness of the same sort as the martyr’s unflinching constancy before the flame; and for the quarrelsome slanderer to know that his petulance belongs in the same category with the crime of murder — those are the hard things. Modern mechanics largely employs itself in turning to use and effect little streams of force which have heretofore been usually wasted. It is the waste of the hope which is in the heart of small endeavors to be good, and of the fear which ought to come out of the least flagrant developments of evil, that is always robbing our moral life of strength.

Christ sets Himself to remedy that waste. He would fain make the least endeavor for a better life a ground of hope, and a starting point of higher struggle. Look at Christ and Simon Peter! See them some day, as they walk along the road talking together. We have grown used to the sight and have forgotten how strange it is, but it is very strange! How far apart these beings are! One is the very embodiment of the eternal righteousness, pure as the spotless heavens, deep and strong as the vast profundity of space. The other is a poor, stumbling Jew from Bethsaida. One is a smoking lamp that hardly keeps itself alive; the other is the Sun of Righteousness. One is a bruised reed, all torn and broken; the other is the Tree of Life whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

Yet look! See the clear eyes of Jesus gazing into the thick and muddy soul of Peter. He finds Him self there. He finds a child of the God whose Son He is, in that poor fragmentary character. He finds, in this poor Jew’s frantic and fitful struggles, a bit of the same holiness which fills His own life with peace. What then? Do you not see what grows up in the soul of each as they thus walk together and as Christ thus discerns Peter, and as Peter knows that Christ has discerned him? Peter is filled with hope; Christ is filled with pity. There is no scorn in the heart of Christ, and in the heart of Peter there is no despair.

Remember David in the 28th Psalm: “Unto thee will I cry, my God, my strength!” He knows how weak the cry is! It seems not possible that God can hear it! He is a bruised reed, a smoking flax! We can see him look up to God with most pathetic appeal: “Think no scorn of me; lest, if thou make as though thou hearest not, I become like them that go down into the pit.” It is the prayer of the smoking flax not to be quenched, of the bruised reed not to be broken. Can there be any answer but one from God to such a prayer as that — the answer of encouragement and hope? Can there be any surprise when, by and by, breaks forth from the Psalmist’s soul the triumphant verse: “Blessed be the Lord, because he hath heard the voice of my supplications. The Lord is my strength and my shield.”

Two exhortations come, I think, from all our study.

The first bids us be very tolerant and hopeful about all the limitation and deadness which we lament in our fellow-men. You are giving your life’s blood for a great cause, and your friend gives it nothing but a casual approval, perhaps now and then a casual dollar or a moment’s help. You are overwhelmed with pity or amazement to see the little strength which men put out against their sins, who nevertheless are really fighting them. Be patient. Make much of the good effort which there is, small though it be. Never dare to say, “It might as well not be at all, it is so little.” Be sure that there is no proof so strong that you yourself are growing rich in righteousness as is to be found in the growing reverence and value which you feel for the slightest beginnings of righteousness in other men.

Then apply all this to God, and the other exhortation comes. Because He is the supreme Righteousness, therefore, just for that reason, the least beginning of righteousness in you is supremely precious in His sight. Make it, then, precious in your own. Treasure the smallest faith. Guard the least flame of love. Take your poor, battered, broken resolution, smooth it out, cleanse and confirm it with new consecration, set it up in your safest and most sacred chamber. Do all this not desperately, but hopefully; for God is strong, eternity is long, and that which lives to-day with any spark or fibre of true life, has in it the promise and potency of all the holiness of heaven.