The Gift and Its Return

“For with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” — Matthew vii. 2.

The New Testament is full of the idea of a natural and necessary reciprocity between man and the things by which he is surrounded. “Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap,” writes St. Paul to the Galatians. “He that soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly, and he that soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully.” The world seems to be a great field in which every man drops his seed, and which gives back to every man, not just the same thing which he dropped there, any more than the brown earth holds up to you in the autumn the same black berry which you hid under its bosom in the spring, but something which has its true correspondence and proportion to the seed to which it

1 Preached in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, Sunday evening, 8th July 1883. is the legitimate and natural reply. Evengift has its return, every act has its consequence, every call has its answer in this great live, alert world, where man stands central, and all things have their eyes on Him and their ears open to His voice.

And I think that what impresses a thoughtful reader of the New Testament most is the way in which this fact of the reciprocity between man and his surroundings is the very clement in which all life goes on. It is not something artificially arranged; it is inherent in the very natures of man and of the world. They could not be what they are and this fact not be true. True, it is constantly spoken of as the issue and result of the will of God. The New Testament is personal always, and it is personal here. What the world gives us in answer to what we give to it is constantly spoken of as given to us by God. “Ask and you shall have;” “Seek and you shall find,” says Jesus. “Forgive and you shall be forgiven;” “Judge not and you shall not be judged;” “Give and it shall be given unto you;” “He that confesseth Me before men, him will I also confess.” Here it is the will of an observant God that sends the answer to the thing we do. But God, in the New Testament idea of Him, is not merely the arranger of certain correspondences, the adjuster of rewards and punishments; He is the spiritual element in the embrace of which all our life and all our relationships are born and work. As a man grows in the sunshine, as two men meet and look into each other’s eyes and catch one another’s sympathy, and share one another’s life in the midst of warm, soft, vital ether, which at once supplies the vitality of both of them, and also carries the trembling sound of their voices and the living pictures of their faces to each other’s ears and eyes; so we develop our own life and relate our own life to other lives within God, if we may say so. And why should we not say so when it is just what Paul said to the Athenians, as he declared upon Mars’ Hill, “In Him we live, and move, and have our being”? Therefore it is that what the world returns to any man in answer to the force which he lays out upon it, comes to him in God, comes to him from God, and may truly be taken as God’s encouragement or God’s warning. God’s will is not something separable from the essential and necessary working of the fundamental laws of the world; it is the element in which those laws work, and which decrees their character. Let us understand this fully, and then we shall not be confused to-night as we speak of the necessary replies which a man’s surroundings always make to what he is and docs; we shall be able freely to

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hear in those replies at once the working of an essential law, and at the same time the utterances of the will of God.

The necessary replies which a man’s surroundings make to what he is and does, — this is our subject for this evening. “With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” It is a law of vast extent and wonderful exactness. The world is far more orderly than we believe; a deeper and a truer justice runs through it than we imagine. We all go about calling ourselves victims, discoursing on the cruel world, and wondering that it should treat us so, when really we are only meeting the rebound of our own lives. What we have been to things about us has made it necessary that they should be this to us. As we have given ourselves to them, so they have given themselves to us. This is the law I want to trace with you, only begging you again to keep your minds, as I speak, clear of an)- materialism which would think that in mere earth itself resides this power of just and discriminating reply. It is as we and all things exist together in the great embracing and pervading clement of God that all tilings give themselves to us as we give ourselves to them. So all the phenomena of life are at the same time divine judgments if we arc only wise enough to read them.

It would be possible to trace our law even in physical nature. Newton’s great generalisation, which he called the “Third Law of Motion,” was, that “action and reaction are always equal to each other;” and that law has been one of the most pregnant of all truths about the mystery of force, one of the brightest windows through which modern eyes have looked into the world of nature. It has shown the whole world throbbing with the responsiveness of part to part. It has made men know that no force could work without another force replying to it. Every pressure involves resistance, every blow is answered by a blow in return. It fills the universe with life. Nothing is passive and nothing is uncaused; life and causation run through the lowest and the highest things. The trees and the plants are ready to reply to the least or the mightiest touch. Still, as in the prophecy of Habakkuk, “The stone cries on the wall, and the beam out of the timber answers it.” Still, as in the book of Job, “The morning stars sing together,” in the great rhythm of action and reaction which pervades the earth.

But it is of man and his reactions that I want to speak, tracing them briefly from the lowest region to the highest. Where shall we begin? Even with man’s relations to the material earth the law is true. What different things she is to

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all of us, this earth we live in! Why is it that one man laughs at another’s view about the earth, and thinks him mad because of some strange value that he places on it? Three men stand in the same field and look around them; and then they all cry out together. One of them exclaims, Howrich! another cries, How strange! another cries, How beautiful! and then the three divide the field between them, and they build their houses there; and in a year you come back and see what answer the same earth has made to each of her three questioners. They have all talked with the ground on which they lived, and heard its answers. They have all held out their several hands, and the same ground has put its own gift into each of them. What have they got to show you? One cries, “Come here and see my barn;” another cries, “Come here and sec my museum;” the other says, “Let me read you my poem.” That is a picture of the way in which a generation or the race takes the great earth and makes it different things to all its children. With what measure we mete to it, it measures to us again. This is the rebound of the hard earth — sensitive and soft, although we call it hard, and feeling with an instant keen discrimination the different touch of each different human nature which is laid upon it. Reaction is equal to action. Some of you may remember how our

New England poets’ poet sings to the farmer over whose fields he has been wandering: —

u One harvest from thy field

Homeward brought the oxen strong;
A second crop thine acres yield,
Which I gather in a song.”

This is what makes the everlasting interest of nature; her capacity of endless association with man, from whom all real interest in the world must radiate, and to whom it always must return. As Emerson sings again of those whom he had loved, and who made the landscape in the midst of which he had loved them for ever dear: —

“They took this valley for their toy,

They played with it in every mood;
A cell for prayer, a hall for joy, — They treated nature as they would.

“They coloured the horizon round;

Stars flamed and faded as they bade;
All echoes hearkened for their sound, — They made the woodlands glad or mad.”

“They treated nature as they would.” So all men, all races, treat nature according to their wills, whether their wills be the deep utterances of their characters or only the light and fickle impulses of self-indulgence. And what they are to nature, nature is to them — to one man the siren, who

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fascinates him to drunkenness and death; to another, the wise friend, who teaches him all lessons of self-restraint and sobriety and patient hope and work.

But, after all, our relations to the world of nature are little more than illustrations of our relations to the world of men. With them our true relations arc; and so let us pass on and sec how true the law which we arc looking at is there. I think that all of us come to feel very strongly, as we grow older, that what we get from fellow-men in all these close and pressing contacts into which life brings us with one another depends not nearly so much upon what the men arc whom we touch, as upon what sort of men we arc who touch them; and so, as we grow older, we ought to grow more careless about where we live, just in proportion as we become careful about what we arc. What docs it mean, that one man cannot go among any kind of men, however base and low, without getting happiness and good; while another man cannot go into the midst of the noblest and sweetest company without bringing out misery and despair and sin? I think there grows in us a strong conviction with our growing years that for a man to get bad out of the world of fellow-mcn is not necessarily a disgrace to the world of fellow-men, but is certainly a disgrace to him. Here are Jesus xin.] THE GIFT AND ITS RETURN. 273

and Judas: both go and give themselves to the Pharisees; both stand in the Pharisees’ presence and hear what they have to say. To Jesus these Pharisees give back in return every day a deeper consciousness of His own wondrous nature, a devouter consecration to His Father, and a more earnest pity for them. To Judas they give only blacker dreams of treason, a falser disregard of friendship and loyalty and honour. Let the two tell the story of the men whom they have been among — the Pharisees, whom both of them have touched. Both will declare the sin which they have felt; but Jesus will declare how those sinners have helped Him to Himself, and given Him new chance to glorify His Father; Judas, with bitter cowardice, will curse them for his ruin. Unroll the centuries and come down to our own day. Take two boys in a class at college; two clerks in a shop in town. It is not good when either of them is made cynical, and sneers at the possibility of virtue because of the vice which he has felt in its contamination at his side. The true soul, with a character of its own, will learn the possibility of being good from his own consciousness, all the more strongly because of the vice that touches him. No soul, bad in itself, can really learn the possibility of goodness by mere sight and touch even of a world of saints, and no soul really good can

T lose the noble consciousness that man was made for goodness, even though all the world but him is steeped in wickedness, — nay, in subtle ways he will feed that consciousness there.

And so there is a perpetual qualification, an ever-recurring limitation to the truth of all that we can say about the influence of friendship. You hear men say to you, “Seek the society of noble men. Live with the true, the faithful, and the brave; so you shall be true and brave and faithful.” It is most wise advice; it is the thing you ought to do; but if you think that that is all, if men talk to you as if that were all, and as if the working of that law were certain, you both are wrong. There are men enough in the world to-day who are being made worse by living with the best and purest. Judas could never have come to be the wretch he was if he had lived out his quiet stupid days among the men in Kcrioth, and Jesus of Nazareth had never crossed his path. Many an unbeliever is being made more unbelieving by the faith which is filling the house he lives in. Many an impure heart is growing viler because of the purity with which it lives in daily company. Many a narrow soul is not broadened but narrowed, pinched into a more wretched selfishness, by the large thought and sweet charity which bathes it. Souls arc darker for the sunxin.] THE GIFT AND ITS RETURN. 275

shine, souls are colder for the warmth, with which they live in daily company. And why? Because heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven; because if you do not give yourself in sympathy to goodness, goodness cannot give itself in influence to you, because with what measure ye mete it shall be measured unto you.

I know that words like these may well create misgivings in the minds of some of you who hear them as you think over your experience. You have really given yourself to men; you know that you have given yourself sympathetically and unselfishly; and where is your return? Reaction has not equalled action; they have not given themselves to you; they have misunderstood you; they have shut their doors the closer the more you knocked. After years of devotion you stand alone among an unregardful, perhaps among a contemptuous worldful of fellow - men. But oh, my friend, do not think that the only way in which a man can give you of himself is by an honour and affection of which he is conscious and of which you are aware. Let me not think that I get nothing from the man who misunderstands all my attempts to serve him and who scorns me when I know that I deserve his sympathy. Love and respect are the wrappings in which men give their best gifts of character to one another. We learn to think of the gifts by their bright beautiful wrappings. The gifts are beautiful to us, in part because of the beautiful enfoldings in which they have come to us. But if some day a man thrusts into my hands the gift all naked and stripped of its natural legitimate adornments, shall I not take it? Shall I not see all the more the real essential beauty and preciousness that is in it just because the silk and silver which I looked for to proclaim its preciousness are swept away. Ah! it would be sad enough if only the men who understood us and were grateful to us when we gave ourselves to them, had help to give us in return! The good reformer whom you try to help in his reform, and who turns off from you contemptuously because he distrusts you, seeing that your ways arc different from his, he does not make you happy — he makes you unhappy; but he makes you good, he leads you to a truer insight, a more profound unselfishness. And so (it is the old lesson), not until goodness becomes the one thing that you desire, not until you gauge all growth and gain by that, not until then can you really know that the law has worked, the promise has been fulfilled. With what measure you gave yourself to him, he has given himself — the heart of himself, which is not his favour, not his love, but his goodness, the real heart of himself to you.

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For the rest you can easily wait until you both come to the better world, where misconceptions shall have passed away and the outward forms and envelopes of things shall correspond perfectly with their inner substances for ever.

This is the way in which good men give us their goodness if we really give ourselves unselfishly to them. And how is it if he to whom you give yourselves is not a good man but a bad man? How is it when the patient father devotes himself to a reckless child, or the long-suffering wife to the brutal husband? Who of us has not seen how the devoted life, even if it failed to develop the better life in the soul for which it sacrificed itself, and so did not win that soul as it longed to do for its reward, still drew for itself out of its labour for the degraded soul a new abundance of the very virtues which it could not plant in such reluctant soil. The pure nature may fail to make the wretch it loves pure, but it becomes more pure itself in the long struggle. The tender soul wins deeper tenderness in its despairing effort to soften the brutal soul beside it. The brave patriot cannot make the sluggish nation spring upon its feet for liberty, but his appeals summon a deeper patriotism and love of freedom in his own patriotic liberty-loving heart. Alas for us if we only gave to those who help us a return proportioned to our

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poor acceptance and appropriation of their help. It is not how we take them, but how they give themselves to us, that settles what shall be the rebound from us to their own lives. Often it is good to know that if the light that -has shone upon us seems to have left us wholly dark, it has at least drawn out of our darkness some new, deeper, and finer brightness for him from whom it came.

So each man gets out of the world of men the rebound, the increase and development of what he brings there. Let us see how the same law applies to the truths which men believe, or the causes for which they labour. Every thoughtful observer sees two things, I think, about men’s relations to their creeds and their occupations: first, that every creed or profession has a great influence upon the man who believes or practises it; and second, that no creed or occupation can ever give anything to a man except what his own nature brings a demand and fitness for. The first of these truths makes our creeds and occupations seem of vast importance; the second makes us know that of yet vaster moment is the personal character of the believer and the worker. Indeed, to speak first of our occupations, I think there is no more striking illustration of the working of the law of action and reaction than appears in what goes on between a man and the cause or profession to which his life is given. Nowhere is it so true that with what measure you mete it shall be measured to you again. You are a young man just in business, perhaps; you have heard a great deal, it may be, of the influences of business life upon a man. If you are at all reflective — if you care at all what happens to the inner part of you — you will begin by and by to look for the signs of the working of those influences of which you have heard upon yourself. You will be surprised to see that some of them come, and some of them fail to come entirely. It is impossible to say of you, “The influence of trade is this and this; therefore in time this new trader will be so and so.” No doubt it is true in general, but in the particular case it will be yourself that decides what business is to make of you. Generous or stingy, large-idead or small-idead, appreciative or unappreciative of other occupations than your own; these things you will be, not invariably according to the kind of trade you are engaged in, but distinctively according to the kind of manhood which you put into your trade. So it is everywhere. Plenty of young men studying law, and coming out full of prejudice and the very essential spirit of injustice; plenty of young men studying medicine, and coming out coarse instead of fine, brutal instead of reverent; plenty of young men studying divinity, and gathering unspirituality and uncharitableness out of the very marrow of the gospel; plenty of men, old and young, giving their days and nights to philanthropy and the public weal, and growing more selfish and jealous out of the very substance of practical benevolence. Nay, shall we not say it? plenty of churchmen, earnest, true, devoted, who, bringing to the Church unchurchly hearts, hearts lacking in the breadth and simplicity and freedom and devotion of the true catholicity, are made unchurchly by all their Church associations, and come in the end to partisanship, which is the most unchurchly thing on earth. And then see how it is with creeds. We try to bring one friend to hold some certain faith, certain that if he does hold it, it will influence his character; and we arc right. Great is the power of truth! As he thinketh in his heart so is he! And yet behind this fact there always is the other, that no truth can give its treasure up to any man except through that in him which is conformable to it. A creed must fill a man’s character before it really takes possession of his mind, as the ocean has ‘to fill a vessel with its water before it can swallow it up into its depth. Take, for instance, the single truth of the Incarnation of Christ; that God has manifested Himself in intimate union with humanity. You love that truth and live by xiii.] THE GIFT AND ITS RETURX. 2S1

it. It gives you out of its heart stores of help and strength and comfort. Then you bring your child or your friend to it and say, “Believe this blessed truth and it shall help you too.” He does believe it so far as arguments can make him, and it does not help him in the least. He gets out of it nothing. And by and by you begin to feel where the difficulty is. He brings to the intellectual conception no spiritual condition which can summon forth its virtue. He has no craving after higher company, no hungry need of God, no high perception of the possibility of man. No self, rich and at the same time needy with all these, does he give to the sublime truth of the Incarnation, and so it gives nothing back to him.

Happily the truth has a previous power to make men conscious of their need of it before it offers itself to them for their belief. So it is able, as all great truths are, first to create the spirituality which can believe it; as a great nature not merely offers itself to us to love and honour, but before that, lifts and refines us, so that we shall be capable of loving and honouring it. But until a creed has done that for a man, it cannot give him its real truth. The more he believes it, the more he may get out of it just exactly the opposite of its real sense and meaning. This is the reason why you cannot finally judge men by their creeds.

A man may hold the most spiritual doctrine, and be carnal and mercenary; a man may hold the broadest truth, and be a bigot; and, on the other hand, all our religious history bears witness that a man may hold hard, crude, narrow doctrine, and yet gather out of his belief in it rich, warm, sweet holiness which men and God must love. It does not prove, as men so often superficially and feebly say, that there is no value in the differences of doctrines; but it does keep always superior, always supreme, the greater value that is in the differences of men. I turn to one more illustration of the working of our law — the highest, the completest of them all. A man gives himself to nature, he gives himself to the world and fellow-man, he gives himself to truth; and then, as the crown of all, as that which ought to come first and be the comprehending power of all the rest, he gives himself to Jesus. They are old and familiar words. They are words which have been precious to so many souls, words which have been held, as it were, in so many hands of all degrees of purity and earnestness, that it is no wonder if they come to us with some memory of the lowncss and insincerity which has sometimes been laid upon them. Men have put many meanings into them. The cxhortcr in the inquiry meeting has assailed the soul of some anxious disciple, and questioned him, “Have you given yourself to Jesus?” and urged him, “Will you not give yourself to Jesus now?” until the act has seemed to be some strange external transaction which a man might do almost as he would draw money out of one bank and deposit it in another which was safer. All this has made the words seem misty sometimes, and unreal; but yet they are great words which we cannot, which the world never can, let go. There are no other words to take their place. They describe the completest action that the spiritual man can do. When a man most completely gathers up himself, his standards, his wishes, his resolutions, his loves, his plans, his powers, and transfers them all together to a new region where holiness shall be the law and love the motive of their life, there are no words to tell what that change is that are so comprehensive and complete as these, That man has given himself to Jesus. When I want to urge my friend to one entire salvation, in which all the partial salvations of conduct, of happiness, of taste shall be included, I can ask him nothing larger than this old question,which has summoned such multitudes of people to the higher life, and so which will be dear in their remembrance throughout all eternity — the question of questions, Will you not give yourself to Jesus?

And now, in that great giving, in that supreme

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self-consecration, does our law still hold, the law of action and reaction, the law that only in the measure in which the gift is given can the answer come? Indeed it does. Nowhere, as all our experience bears witness, does it so completely hold. For there are different measures in which men give themselves to Christ, and Christ despises none of them; but in different measures He again is compelled to give Himself back to them. See how they come! One man approaches the divine Redeemer asking no divine redemption, but touched and fascinated by the beauty of that perfect life. He would feed his wonder, he would cultivate his taste, upon it. To him Jesus gives what he asks, and with delighted wonder and with cultivated I the satisfied asker goes away. It is as if a man painted a mountain for its picturesqueness, and carried off his picture in delight, never dreaming that he left behind him in the mountain’s besom treasures of gold which only waited for his hand to gather them. Another man comes to Jesus with a self that is all alive with curiosity. He t. Christ’s revelations — for Christ does not refuse him either — and goes away content to know much of God and man, and what there is beyond this world. Another man comes to Jesus with a self all trembling with fear, all eager for safety, and Jesus satisfies him; He lets him know that even the humblest, and most ignorant, and least aspiring soul, which repents of and forsakes its sin, and seeks forgiveness, shall not be lost. Each gets from Jesus that which the nature which He brings can take. With what measure each gives himself to the Saviour, the Saviour gives Himself in His salvation back to each. Only when at last there comes a man with his self all open, with door behind door, back into the most secret chambers, all unclosed, ready to give himself entirely, wanting everything, ready to take everything that Jesus has to give, wanting and ready to take the whole of Jesus into the whole of himself, only then are the last gates withdrawn; and as when the ocean gathers itself up and enters with its tide the open mouth of the river, like a conqueror riding into a surrendered town, so does the Lord in all His richness, with His perfect standards, His mighty motives, His infinite hopes, give Himself to the soul which has been utterly given to Him.

Men talk as if it were not always so. Men talk as if because Christ is the same loving, willing Christ for all of us, and all of us are nothing and can have nothing but for Him, therefore the meagre mercenary saint ought to shine with the same lustre as the pure spirit passionate for holiness, and ready for all the completed will of God. As if one said that because the sun is the same sun always, and because there is no light except from Him, therefore the rose and the daisy ought to look alike. No! He in His love outgoes our prayers. He gives us more of what we ask than we know how to ask for; more beauty to the seeker after beauty, more wisdom to the student, more safety to the poor culprit asking forgiveness. And He is always trying to make the self which asks a larger self that He may give it other things of higher kinds. But yet the truth remains, that at each moment He can give Himself to us only as at that moment we give ourselves to Him. As when in some foreign land, in some strange shrine of Romish or Pagan religion, all glorious with art, all blazing with the light of precious stones, there bend around the altar the true devotees who believe with all their souls; while at the door, with heads uncovered and with faces solemnised by the presence of a ceremony in which they do not believe and in which they take no part, lingers a group of travellers full of joy at the wondrous beauty of the place; and as when the music ceases and the lights go out they go away, each carrying what it was in him to receive, — the devotee his spiritual peace, the artistic tourist his aesthetic joy: so men bestow themselves on Christ, and by the selves that they bestow on Him the giving of Himself to them must of necessity be measured.

I close in haste with what must be the necessary consequence of this. It is not enough that Christ should stand ready to give us His blessings. He must give us the nature to which those blessings can be given. What we want of Him is not merely His gifts; it is ourselves; He must give us them first. To them only can He give Himself, which is His perfect gift. Not merely with outstretched hands but with open hearts we must stand before Him. We must pray not merely that the kingdom of heaven may come, but that we may be born again, so that we may see it. If that prayer shall be answered, then to each of us even here upon the earth shall begin that which is to be the everlasting wonder and delight of heaven, the perfect giving of the Lord to souls that are perfectly given to Him, the everlasting action and reaction, the unhindered beating back and forth of need and grace between the Saviour on His throne and His servants at their tireless work for Him.