The Man with One Talent

“Then he which hath received the one talent came.” — MATT. xxv. 84

WE must all have reproached ourselves sometimes for the difficulty which we found in liking the best people best. We wondered why it was. A man who was estimable in every way, prudent, just, honest, doing all his duties faithfully and well, did not interest us. If he prospered we were not specially glad. If he met with disaster we could not say that we were sorry. While some mere vagabond of fortune, who, doing nothing to deserve prosperity, was always in ill-luck, has drawn out our kindest feeling. I think that there is something of this kind in our feeling about the people in this parable of our Lord’s. The man with the five talents and the man with the two talents come up with their orderly reports. They have been faithful and industrious. We know that they have deserved the “well-done” that greets them, and we look on with calm approval as they pass off to enter into the joy of their Lord. And then the poor fellow who had received the one talent comes. He brings his napkin, a poor show of carefulness that covers up his carelessness, and holds it out with his talent in it. We hear his slipshod and cowardly attempt at an excuse. He Btands forlorn and helpless as the rebuke falls on him, and a sort of pity that is close to love springs up in our hearts, and makes us mourn for him as he is dragged off to the outer darkness.

And a large part of what inclines us to like him and such as him is the show of modesty which appears in what they have to say about themselves. We shall see by and by what their modesty is really worth; but their first defence of their inefficiency sounds modest. “I had but one talent,” the poor man exclaims, “what could J do? What place for me among the workers and ex changers? How could I dare to front the world and its responsibilities and dangers? I could have done so little even if I had succeeded. What does it matter whether such a little brain and such weak hands as mine worked or were idle, and so I took the safest and the easiest way. Lo, here is thy talent done up in a napkin.” How modest, even if weak, it sounds beside the manly confidence which seems touched with pride as it reports: “Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents; behold I have gained beside them five talents more.”

Let us speak to-day about the one talented men, — the men who are crushed and enfeebled by a sense of their own insignificance. By and by they become cowardly and hide themselves behind their own good-for-nothingness, away from care, away from effort; but at first it is a mere weakening of the joints and stifling of the courage by a feeling of how little there is to them, and so that whether they do ill or well it is not of much consequence; that any attainment really worth attaining is totally out of their reach. What multitudes of such men we see. A young man starts with aspirations after culture. He will make something out of this brain of his. Very soon he comes in contact with the great, the wise, the witty of his own time and of the past, and then he discovers how little brain he really has to cultivate, and he gives up in despair. Let him be a drudge and make his money, or manage his house, or drive his horses. That is all that he is good for. A young man begins to be a Christian. Great wide visions of free and exalted thought open be fore him. He will not be a mere traditional believer. He will seek devoutly to understand his faith, and to send his spiritual reason as near as he may to the heart of the great problems of God’s providence and man’s life. How soon he finds his thought baffled and gives up, and, saying to himself, “Poor fool, what right have such as you to think about the high things of religion?” he subsides into another of the unthinking routine believers who fill our churches. A man is deeply conscious of the misery that is in the world. He tries to help it, but when he sees how little he can do, how big the bulk of wretchedness is against which his poor effort at relief is flung, it seems to him so utterly not worth his while that he lets it all go, and sinks back into the prudent merchant or the self-indulgent philosopher, looking on at woes that he no longer tries to help.

This is the history of so much of the inefficiency of so many of the inefficient men that we see about us. These men have looked at life and given up in despair. Once, long ago, when they were in college, when they first went into business, they took their talent out and gazed at it and wondered how they should invest in; but it looked so little that they lost all heart, and rapped it in the napkin where it has been ever since, and that is the whole story of their useless lives. And yet one thing seems cleai that only by the waking up of men like these, only by new courage put into their hopelessness, can the world really make trustworthy growth. It seems very certain that the world is to grow better and richer in the future, however it has been in the past, not by the magnificent achievements of the highly-gifted few, but by the patient faithfulness of the one-talented many. If we could draw back the curtains of the millennium and look in, we should see not a Hercules here and there standing on the world-wasting monsters he had killed; but a world full of men each with an arm of moderate muscle, but each triumphant over his own little piece of the obstinacy of earth or the ferocity of the brutes. It seems as if the heroes had done almost all for the world that they can do, and not much more can come till common men awake and take their common tasks. I do believe the common man’s task is the hardest. The hero has the hero’s aspiration that lifts him to his labor. All great duties are easier than the little ones, though they cost far more blood and agony. That is a truth we all find out. And this is part of the reason why we make allowance for our poor friend in the parable. But if we look at it in a higher way, surely we may come to feel that the very certainty that the world must be saved by the faithfulness of commonplace people is what is needed to rescue such people from commonplaceness in their own eyes, and clothe their lives with the dignity which they seem so wofully to lack, and which, if any man does not see some where shining through the rusty texture of his life, he cannot live it well.

lput we may go deeper than this into the causes and the cure of that self-disgust which makes a man think it not worth while to try to do anything in the world. The real root of it is in the very presence of self-consciousness at all. Any man who is good for anything, 11 he is al ways thinking about himself, will come to think himself good for nothing very soon. It is only a fop or a fool who can bear to look at himself all day long, without disgust. And so the first thing for a man to do, who wants to use his best powers at their best, is to get rid of self-consciousness, to stop thinking about himself and how he is working, altogether. Ah, that is so easy to say and so hard to do! Of course it is; but there are two powers which God put into the human breast at the beginning, whose very purpose is to help men do just this. These are the power of loving and working for an absolute duty, and the power of loving and working for our fellow-men. In those two powers lies man’s hope to be rescued from self-consciousness, with all its curses. These are the champions that take a man’s heavy self off from him when it is getting him down. A man is testing his powers, wondering whether he can do this, wondering whether he can do that, almost despairing when he sees how little he can do. He is lost if he goes on in that way; but then he suddenly discovers that a thing is right and must be done, or the cry of a world, or of a fellow-man, that must have help, rises up and appals him, and the man no longer thinks whether he is strong enough, any more than the mother lion thinks whether it is worth while for her to try, when she springs to help her cub who must be rescued. When a man becomes aware of these great necessities, he is rescued from the consideration of himself altogether. The despotism of such a necessity sets him free, and he just goes and does what must be done with all his might. This is the history of every brave effective man that ever lived. Moses, Luther, Cromwell, every one of them dallied with the corners of the napkin, and almost folded up the talent; but the call was too strong, and each forgot his weakness and went and worked his fragment of the world’s salvation.

I know the answer that suggests itself at once. “These motives are strong enough,” you say, “when they are felt. Let them take hold of a man, and they will save him. But the trouble is that they cannot save common men, because common men will, not feel them. They are too abstract and too high.” And there is truth in that. And to relieve that difficulty something else comes in. These abstract and far-off necessities are taken up and embodied in a new necessity which every man can feel. That new necessity is a personal God. Appealing to the simplest feelings, full of His love, mighty with all the obligation of His fatherhood and mercy, God takes the abstract right and the duties of a half-felt human brotherhood, and blends them both into obedience to Him. The absolute necessity that we should do His will becomes the despot of the life. He may be real to the most feebly perceptive of His children. His is a voice which, stern with majesty, may find its way into the dullest ears. And when He finds a sluggish soul and claims it, He is that soul’s rescue from self-consciousness, and self-measurement, and self-disgust. He sets a man free from himself. “I will walk at liberty, for I keep thy commandments.” That is at least one meaning of that profound cry of David’s. This is the truth of all this parable. “Thou knewest me, thy master, therefore thou shouldst have worked!” How often it has come! How many men have forgotten themselves when they saw God! Oh, wonderful release! You who are wishing you could do a thing you ought to do, and hiding behind your weakness; you must hear God saying, “Do it!” and feel the necessity of obeying Him, the joy of pleasing Him run through your being like the strong blood of a new life; and then, then only, you are on your feet, and the impossible thing is done. You will not stop then to ask whether you can do it till you feel upon your head the crown of victory. And then you will take that crown off and cast it at His feet, for you will know that really He did it and not you.

Does not this turn the tables entirely? If this sort of inefficiency has its root in self-consciousness, if it can be released only by forgetfulness of self, what has become of the modesty which we thought we saw in the man’s face, who came up with his feeble excuse for his unprofitable talent? It is only a thin-veiled pride, not modesty at all. And he who comes with all his faithful work, and offers it to the Lord by whom alone he did it — his is the true humility. I beg you to think of this and feel it. If you are hiding yourself behind your commonness and littleness, come out! That shelter is a citadel of pride. Come out, and take the work that God has given you. Do it for Him and by Him. Cease to parade your feebleness. Work in His light, and so escape the outer darkness.

And now that I have said thus much in general, there is one special application of our subject which interests me very deeply, and I should like to narrow our view to that, and deal with it a little more particularly. Of all the powers of which men easily think that they are wholly or almost destitute, and so from whose exercise

they think themselves excused, the one most commonly alleged, I think, is the religious power, the whole spirit ual faculty in general. How familiar it all sounds from constant repetition. A man says, “I know that people are religious. It is no fancy; it is a reality with them. I know their souls do apprehend a supernatural. They live in the presence of spiritual forces which they never see. Eternity is as real to them as time. They love God; they serve Christ; and the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, is with them and in them constantly. But for me, simply, all this is impossible. I have no spiritual capacity. It is like asking me to use a sense I have not got; like asking a blind man to see, when you ask me to be religious. I can take only what the senses set before me. I can believe intensely only what I see.” And so, not scotfingly, but sadly, he counts himself to tally outside the possibility of all the joy and all the culture which he knows comes to his brethren out of the spiritual life, the life of faith.

When I see such a man, all thought of indignation in my mind passes off entirely, and a profound pity, a complete sense of what he might be, and of what he is losing, takes possession of me. It is too serious a matter for mere indignation. I may be angry with a man who might carve statues and paint pictures, if he spent his life in making mock flowers out of wax and paper; but when a man who might have God for company shuts up and disowns those doors of his nature through which God can enter, and lives the emptied life which every man lives who lives without God, his loss is too dreadful to be angry with. You merely mourn for him, and long and try to help him if you can.

And what shall we say of this phenomenon? The first thing that we must say will be this: That religion to that man has, in all probability, been wrongly put. Some temporary, accidental, special form of spiritual life has been set up before him, either by himself or by some one to whom he has listened, as if it were eternal and essential. He has looked at that, and said, truly, that there was nothing in him that could live such a life as that. And so because men said, narrowly, that to be that waa to be religious, he has said that there was no possibility of religion for him, while all the time there slept in his nature a rich capacity for some new characteristic type of spiritual force, which, once set free, should flower into luxuriant beauty, and glorify the world. The man has not got hold of the heart of religion at all, only of some body’s special embodiment of it, and sunk back, heart less, because he could not copy that. In the old days, when the accepted type of saintship was found in contemplative mortals who grew haggard on the tops of lofty columns, or starved in the caves of desolate mountains, a brave, full-blooded man, eager for work, and little capable of speculation, might well conclude that he could never be a saint. Two centuries ago a man full of the precious love of Christ, who was told, according to the intense error of the time, that he could not love Christ truly unless he was willing to give up his hope of happiness in Him forever, might well have settled down on the conviction that for him the love of Jesus, whom he longed to love, was impossible. Nowadays, if to worship is made to mean to worship in a certain way, either with an invariable richness, or an invariable simplicity of liturgy, there will always be multitudes 7?ho reluctantly feel that they were not made to worship at all. After all, the fatal fault, the fault that makes one glow most earnestly into hatred of the narrowness of sectarianism, the making that essential which is only accidental, the confining of Christianity to this or that form of Christian life, is that it throws off thousands of earnest men and women who cannot be Christians after that accepted type, and makes them straightway conclude that for them there is no Christianity at all. Worse even than the stifling of the souls within it, by a narrow church, is the starving of the souls without it who have a right to all the richness of religion which religious narrowness involves.

But if he feels this, then the earnest man who believes that all men have in them the capacity for Christianity which many of them are leaving unused because of their incapacity for certain of its special forms, sets himself seriously to asking what is there that is universal and essential, and so really in all men’s power. All men will not be Calvinists, or Quakers, or Methodists, or Episcopalians. But underneath and through them all there is something which every man may reach and fasten him self to, and be a Christian under some form or other. What is that something? What will the soul be that finds it? To ask that question is to go back through the dark tortuous ravines of church history, up onto that broad, open table-land of the New Testament, from which all the ravines come down. There it becomes all plain. The man who is a Christian there, with Peter, with John, nay with Jesus, will be a man, spiritual, reverent, and penitent. That is the heart of the matter; he will be conscious of his own soul and its capacities; conscious of God, and full of humble love to Him; con«

BCIOUS of his sin and humbly dependent upon Christ for forgiveness and for help. Some things he will know are not universal; he will feel his soul bearing witness of itself on whatever may be its most sensitive and needy side; he will cling to what attribute or attitude of God most nearly and powerfully touches him; he will seem to see this or that method, or sort of efficacy in the work and life of Christ. On all these things he will be him self; none of these things will be the substance of his religion. But the great facts that he was not born to die, that there is a God who loves him and whom he may love, that that God has manifested Himself in the Christ, who will forgive him, and help him, and save him, if he trusts in Him, this is his religion; and when this comes to his soul, and the nature which has been trying to comprehend puzzling doctrines and shape itself into the figure of hard forms, just finds the simplicity of the whole thing, and rests with utter satisfaction on the profoundness of the divine life, and the richness of the divine love; then who shall tell with what surprised delight the impossible opens into the possible, and the spirituality which has been trying to warm itself at the moonlight, and has concluded that it has no capacity for warmth, sees the great sun arise and fills itself with great heartf uls of his heat?

Is this true? Am I right in thinking that the reason why many people are not Christians is that they misrepresent Christianity to themselves, that they have not conceived its simplicity? Am I right when I believe that there is in every man the power to take it in this simplicity and make it his new life? I do believe so fully, and for various reasons. The first reason of all is one that is no reason except to him who is already a believer, but surely to him it must come very strongly. It does seem to me that no man can really seem to him self to be living a spiritual life, and not hold with all his heart as a possibility, and long to see realized as a fact, the spiritual life in every soul of every son of man. If I truly thought that there was any one man who really was, as so many men have told me that they were, incapable of spirituality, bound down inevitably to carnality and the drudgery of material life, I should lose my whole faith in the capacity of spirituality in any man. The whole would melt and flutter off into a thin dreamy delusion. I think that that same character of God which makes it possible for Him to give the spiritual life to any of His children, makes it necessary that He should give the free opportunity of the same spiritual life to all His children. I am sure that there are men enough in Africa, in Asia, out in the wigwams, nay, right here by my side, to whom many of the statements of truth which are dear to me are and always will be unintelligible; many of the forms of worship which are rich to me are and always will be barren. To know that does not trouble me; but to know that there was anywhere on God’s earth a human being who was, and necessarily always must be, incapable of the sense of soul, the love for God, the repentance of sin, the reliance of salvation, I could not know that and yet believe in God.

2. And then another reason why we have a right to believe that there is in every man a capacity for this fundamental and essential Christianity lies in the fact that the activities of such a Christianity really demand only those powers which in ordinary human life we all hold to be absolutely universal. In higher degrees, straining them to loftier reaches, refining them, exalting them unspeakably, yet still keeping their essence unimpaired, religion takes the powers that belong to all men, and makes them the instruments of her sublimest tasks. When we shall find a man who is entirely incapable of realizing what he has never seen, entirely unable to answer love with a responsive gratitude, entirely unsensitive to the sorrowfulness of doing wrong; a man, I say, not who has not all these powers at their best, but a man who has no spark of them to fan to life, no seed of them to foster and to ripen; then we have found a man of whom it will be as impossible to make a Christian as it would be to make a Christian of a mountain or a tree. But these simple first powers are just what in their universality characterize our humanity. It is largely by their possession that we know a man from a piece of wood or stone carved in the human likeness. These powers are in all humanity, and according to the richness with which they inhabit and inspire it, humanity becomes more. truly human. These are the powers that play through life and make its poetry, that breathe through history and make the music to which the centuries move and by which they know each other’s deeper life. They are the soul of human character, the bond of human brotherhood. They make the beauty of the family, the majesty of the state. They culminate in Christianity and make it seem to be indeed the great faith of humanity, — the land of spiritual truth in which each man by his pure humanity has a true place. 3. If thus the spiritual life is something not strange in its essence, but familiar; if its working force consists of the simplest and most fundamental of the powers of humanity brought into contact with and filled full of a divine influence, then another thing which we see continually is not strange. And this other thing constitutes another reason for believing that in every man the capacity of the spiritual life abides, hidden if it is not seen, sleeping if it is not awake. There are certain experiences in every life which have their power just in this, that they break through the elaborate surface, and get down to the simplest thoughts and emotions of the human heart. Great sickness, sudden bereavement, great joy, intense love or enthusiasm, fatherhood, the near sight of death, — all of these supreme experiences of life are characterized by the breadth, the largeness of the simple thoughts and feelings they awaken. In them you have the crust broken to fragments, and the great heart of the life laid open. And if that heart, laid open, is inevitably, universally spiritual; if, as we always see in these supreme moments of the life, a soul most vividly asserts itself, and the man insists upon another world and on a God, and takes the story of the Christhood into his heart with hungry eagerness, what does it prove but this, that when the simplest base of any man’s life is reached, when the ground above it is torn off by an earthquake, or melted bare by the sunshine of happiness, there is the capacity for spirituality, the soil in which the spiritual seed must grow. When I see what we see so often, the man in great trouble or great joy grown suddenly religious, the glad “Thank God!” or the agonized “God help me!” bursting out of unaccustomed lips, I think it does not mean desperation, and it does not mean hypocrisy It means that for once in that man’s life the true soil

oJ his nature has been laid bare, and it has claimed the di« vine relations for which, it was made; just as you strip the layer of rock off from abed of earth that lay below it, and in a day the newly exposed earth is sprouting all over with grass that you never planted. It has caught the grass seeds out of the air. The wandering birds have brought them to it. It has found them treasured in it self. It puts forth upon them its own simple nature, and grows green from side to side. The man’s hard surface may close over when the great agony or the great joy is past, and all may seem just as before, but he who once has known the movements of this new capacity never can think of himself as he was used to think. He must remember. He may go on living a most earthly life, but he knows forever that there is a spiritual heaven and a spiritual hell. He never can say of himself again, “I have no spiritual capacity.” He has discovered what he often has denied. New regions of joy and sorrow, both infinite, have opened to his sight around, beyond the poor vexations and amazements of his daily life. He has looked upon God, and his soul never can forget how it answered when it met the gaze of the love and power which made it, and for which it was made.

4. But all these indications of the universal spiritual capacity in man seem to me, after all, only to be leading up to one consummate exhibition. I wish that I could set that consummate exhibition worthily before you. To the believer in the New Testament the Incarnation of Christ must stand as the supreme event of history. Whatever it meant must be the deepest truth that man can know. And, amid all the various speculations and opinions about Christ’s person, all believers in Him agree in this: that He most perfectly represented the typt of human life not a humanity exceptional in its qualities, but the true human, drawn in lines of exceptional light and fire, but recognizable still by every man who deeply studied his own nature. Here is the first unshaken power of that wonderful life. The Jew and the Saxon have found the man of Nazareth their brother. The man of the first century and the man of the nineteenth have found in Him the interpretation of themselves. The hero on the battle-field, the martyr at the stake, the school-boy at his desk, the mother in her anxieties, all pour out to Him their fears, and draw out from Him their courage. What is most wonderful, even in a struggle with sin, the sinless man does not fail his human brethren; and the paths up the mountain of the temptation, and into the garden of Gethsemane, are worn with the feet of men and women going to gather from His struggles the power of victory over the terrors and weaknesses that are besetting them. And now it must be forever a fact of unspeakable impor tance that when the typal man appeared, he was not only one who hungered and who thirsted, who loved and hated, who dreaded and hoped, who suffered and enjoyed, but he was one whose nature leaped beyond the mere material and grasped the spiritual. He was one who loved God. He was one who felt sin and shuddered at its touch. If in the Incarnation I behold the elevation of the lowest faculties of man, I cannot help seeing, too, the naturalization, the familiarizing of the highest. Just suppose that wt stood back before the birth of Christ. We knew that He was coming. We knew that one was to be born who, while He should represent our humanity at its best, would yet represent our humanity perfectly. How we should have watched for Him. When He comes we shall know what this strange puzzle of humanity means. When He comes we shall know what man is, and so what men shall be. At last He comes! Here is the unmistakable humanity. Here is the baby’s weakness, the boy’s growth. Here are the appetites, the passions, that we know so well. But here, clear from the earliest consciousness and growing with His growth, there is the consuming appetite of spirituality. This representative man is a man who sees all material things only as the means of spirit ual culture, to whom immortality is a first fact of human existence, to whom God is more real than his brethren, to whom sin is the one evil of all the groaning and complaining world. And when, staggered by such a prevalence and strength of what is rare and feeble in the humanity we know, our faith in His representativeness is shaken, and we begin to say, “He cannot represent us now. These, must be qualities in Him that we can have no share in. He cannot expect us, certainly not all of us, to be like Him here.” He answers, “No! I will not be cut off from you, my brethren.” He cries to all men, “Follow me! Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me. So only can you find rest unto your souls. I go to my Father and to your Father! Yours as well as mine.” By every type and symbol, by every degradation of the outward life down to the level of His lowest children, by the eager avoidance of everything which might seem to associate Him in limited sympathy with any part or portion of mankind, He was forever claiming the whole humanity for His great purposes and standards. He was forever crying, as He cried there in the temple, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.”

That was the Incarnation. That was the Christ who came! To believe in the Incarnation, really to understand that Christ, and yet to think that we or any other men in all the world are essentially incapable of spiritual living, is an impossibility. It is through Him that millions of men have come, as He said that they should come, to the Father. See what that means. Millions of men have seen in Him first what they were meant for, have believed in their own spiritual capacity by the conviction of His life, and then, believing that they could, they have lived the life that He lived; not stopped the storms or raised the dead; those were but external forms of operation; but entered into the joy of the Lord, the reliance upon spiritual truth, the certainty of spiritual privilege, which was His life.

In face of all that I behold in man, in face especially of all that I behold in this man who shows humanity to itself, I do not know how to believe that there is any man living who is incapable of spiritual life; any man who may not know and value his own soul; know and love God; know and dread and repent of sin. I may understand that this or that expression of spirituality in dogma, this or that incorporation of spirituality in formal ceremonies, is unintelligible, unattainable by you; but that does not justify you in giving up the thought of spirituality altogether and living a carnal life. Somewhere, for your soul, there is an entrance into that love of God for which all our souls were made, and for which the Son of God claimed them all. It may be, nay, in the deepest sense, it must be that your way is new, — a different spiritual career leading into a different spiritual attainment from any that any man ever followed or attained before. Do not stunt your own growth, do not hamper the free grace of God by making up your mind beforehand what kind of a Christian you must be. There is a faith which, out of all the world, and, above all, out of Christ, gathers a per feet conviction that the soul is divine, and can come to its God; then faithfully takes the next step towards Him. by the faithful doing of the next known duty, the faith ful acceptance of the next opened truth; and so choosing no way for itself, but only sure that it is God’s, and that God is leading it, ever advances in His growing light and comes at last to Him. Such faith may Christ increase in us.

Let us do what we ought and what we can for our own souls at once. For the judgment is coming not only at the last day, but all the time. Every day the power that we will not use is failing from us. Every day the God whose voice speaks through all the inevitable necessities of our moral life is saying of the men who keep their talents wrapped in napkins, “Take the talent from him;” and since he will not enter into the perfect light he must be “cast into the outer darkness.”