The Law of Growth

“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have.” — LUKE viii. 18.

IT is interesting to know, of any one whose character and ways of thought we are studying, what words are oftenest upon his tongue. And it would seem as if this proverb, which I have just quoted from Him, were a favorite utterance of Jesus. Three of the Evangelists record it, and the circumstances with which they connect it are different. St. Matthew mentions two occasions on which Christ used the words.

It would seem, then, as if the truth which these words record seemed to Christ very impressive and important. He found in it the occasion for the most earnest exhortation to faithfulness. Such a fact must deserve our best study and come very close to our life. Let us try to see what it is.

‘To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have.” In one case when Jesus used the proverb the parable of the talents had come just before. The immortal picture was just fresh in the Disciples’ minds, — the careful, prudent, faithful merchant, whose five talents had attracted five others, and turned themselves to ten; the poor, timid, helpless creature who brought his one talent, all caked and useless with the earth in which it had been lying. And while the people were listening with that suspicion of injustice, that uneasy sense of something wrong, which almost always comes when prosperity and misery, success and unsuccess, stand side by side, Jesus went on frankly to declare that the truth of the parable was a truth every where; that everywhere there was a law of growth, a law of accumulation and of loss, which drew more blessing where blessing was already, and condemned to decay that which had no real vitality. It was a sort of “survival of the fittest” declared to be existing throughout the world.

And, just as soon as such a truth is announced, there are a multitude of voices which proclaim how true it is. Many of them speak in bitterness and anger. Indeed, it is the taunt of every disappointed soul. “Look,” he who has failed says, “look and see how everywhere the prosperous prosper and the unhappy attract unhappiness by a terrible affinity. Behold how, when a man is rich, riches fly to his overloaded coffers of their own accord, while the poor man by his side grows poorer every day. Yes, it is true enough; let a man be going up and all the world hurries to help him; let him begin to go down, and where is the friend that will not push him lower?” So men speak with all the exaggeration of bitterness. Now, we want to leave out all the bitterness, for that is an element that never helps men to the truth. We shall see by and by whether the truth is one that ought to make us bitter. We want to stand now calmly and look over all the broad world, and see how true it is, — this centralization of blessing, this tendency of all privilege to attract other privilege.

It appears in the distributions of business. He who is fullest of work, he to whom the multitude are resorting to buy their goods, or to secure the building of their houses, is the man whom each new customer seeks out, while his neighbor sits with his tools around him, waiting for work which flows in a full stream past his doors, and lets no drop free to trickle in. It is true in learning. The more a man knows, the more the sources of learning open to him on every side. All the mouths of the world seem to be opened to tell him everything they know. The same is true of wealth. When a man reaches a certain point of wealth, his money reduplicates itself almost without his efforts, even drawing into itself the hard-earned profits of the toil of poorer men. And it is true of public favor. The man whom all are praising is the man whom all men praise. Popularity draws the eyes and voices of the crowd, and gathers with most unneeded profusion about some one or two people in the town. And of that far more sacred thing, Friendship, see how true it is. To him who has friends, friends are given. They come crowding up to claim some little fragment of the kindness of the much-loved man, leaving the other man, who has a whole heart to give away, with no one to ask him for it.

Or think of usefulness. One man cannot walk anywhere but at his feet there start innumerable opportunities to help his fellow-men. Need flies to him, and if he had a hundred hands, and each day were a hundred hours long, he could not satisfy the opportunities for doing good which crowd themselves tumultuously upon him. And then, right in the resounding echoes of his busy work, you will find that other sight — always so sad! — of one who wants to help his brethren, and round whose life there shuts a wall of uselessness, within which he can only sit and feed upon himself.

Or think of health. The well man breathes it in from every breeze. The sick man feels every touch of the life-giving nature stealing what little life he has away. And so of healthiness of soul, — that cordial, fresh, and kindly interest in things which makes the joy of living. All the complications of life, all the touchings of life on life, are always pouring more of this red wine into the cup that is already full, while they make more morbid the soul that is filled with suspicion and discontent already. And so of enthusiasms and devotions. Your mind is full of an idea, your soul is given to a cause, and inspiration and encouragement flow in to you from every side. You find assurances that you are right and will succeed everywhere. Nature and man both become the prophets of your strong belief.

But to your friend who, working with you, has no such faith as yours, all nature and all men have only voices of discouragement. All that comes to him frightens him.

We might go on and catalogue everything that there is good and fine in human life. We make our theories of compensation and of equal distribution. We go on expecting that somehow, some time, everything will be adjusted and equality proclaimed: the conditions are to be reversed; the outs are to come in and the ins are to go out. We try to make it appear that everything is mechanically adjusted by what we call “impartial justice” every Saturday night, or at that great Saturday night of all which we call death. And all the time, underneath all our theories and expectations, breaking up through them constantly with its contradictions, there runs this vast law with its countless illustrations, — the law that the happy always tend to become happier, and the good better, and the wise wiser, and the rich richer, and the bad wickeder, and the fools more foolish, and the poor poorer. All the while to him that hath it is being given, and from him that hath not is being taken away that which he seemeth to have.

And now what shall we say about this law? In the first place, there can be no doubt that in the operation of the law there is wrought out the greater part of the picturesqueness and interest of human life. That which some amiable theorists delineate, and try to establish as the actual condition of things, would certainly make a very tame and monotonous world. The strong, emphatic characters and careers which, having much, are always drawing to them selves more and more of the things which make life rich, — these certainly give to humanity a various strength and beauty which none of us, not even the humblest and the least endowed, would really be content to lose. Do you suppose that the obscure man who finds that everything like fame or notice drifts away from his life and gathers about the lives of one or two preeminent men of his time would really wish, in all his discontent, that all the world of reputation could be rolled level and no man be thought more of than any other man in the great, flat expanse of average existence? I think not. There are — and it is one of the signs of goodness that there are — new emotions and sources of pleasure which come out and exercise themselves when a man finds that his is not to be one of the privileged points of human life. The pleasure and growth which come by admiration of what is greater than himself; the unselfish joy in helping to complete the good work of some one who is supremely qualified to do it; the growing conviction that the world is richer for these concentrations of power which at first only excited jealousy, — all of these, which are among the truest and most cultivating pleasures which a man can have, become available to him who accepts and rejoices in the law which makes some lives supremely rich, even though his be not one of the rich but of the poor. The valley may wish it were the mountain up to which it gazes from its humble depth, but it would rather be the ralley with the glorious mountain towering above it, and drinking in its sustenance from the mountain’s side, than to have the whole earth rolled smooth, mountain and valley obliterated together in one indistinguishable level of dreary, barren plain.

Believe me, my friends, there is something better for you to do than to accept the patent inequalities of life with forlorn resignation. There was never any champion of individuality like Jesus, and yet He recognized and found no fault with the law of privilege, the law by which wealth and culture and the patent forms of happiness flow together and collect in the rich lives of certain men. It is possible for you, though a poor man, to take so wide a view of the world, and of your race, that you shall be thoroughly glad that some other men are rich. In conscious ignorance and inability to learn, you may delight to know that some man whom you see is very learned, and learns more and more every day. Nay, you may be very wretched, and yet have your wretchedness not deepened, but lightened, by the sight of some brother’s life, into which happiness seems to have poured its most profuse abundance, and who goes singing under the windows of your sorrow.

You have anticipated me, I know, in thinking that the perplexity and difficulty come when we apply our law to moral life, and find that goodness and badness also have the same principle of accumulation. Then it is often very bewildering. There is a man who has the love of goodness in him. Something of the divine passion of holiness has touched him. He is very far indeed from perfect, but he is a good man as distinct from a bad man. The direction of his life is set toward righteousness. To him come trooping all good influences from all regions of the earth. Everything he reads and sees and does, everything that other people do to him or around him, seems to give him some new opportunity of good. The very temptations that beset him seem compelled to render up to him their strength, and help him to grow better. The world of things seems to have taken his goodness into its charge, to bring it to completeness.

Close by his side, it may be, is another man, whom all the world calls bad. He does a good thing here and there, but the choice of his life is wickedness. The deeper dispositions which run under all the casual events are deliberately set toward sin. What is it that makes that man’s life terrible to watch? What is it that makes gradually gather in his own eyes a hopelessness that sometimes enrages him, and sometimes only serves him for an excuse? Is it not the way in which everything that happens to him seems to increase his wickedness. The evil element in everything seems to fly to him. Out of the quietest scenes there rise up voices calling him to sin. If there is a bad man, he meets him. If there is a combination of circumstances which can bewilder faith and shake responsibility, it seems to gather around him. This is the way in which life easily comes to look to us like a great machine for making good people better and making bad people worse. It matters not that round the good man there do gather manifold temptations to be wicked and round the wicked man come crowding the persuasions to be good, — nay, the very subtlety with which goodness draws out of the worst temptation some ministry of grace, the dreadful ingenuity with which sin draws out of the best influences some provocation of evil, only makes the truth more manifest of how easy it is for the good to grow better and for the wicked to grow worse in this great, mysterious, fertile world.

You wonder sometimes how men can believe in heaven and hell. My friends, the wonder is how, with this sight before them which I have described, men can help it. The belief in heaven and hell is but the carrying out into the long vista of eternity of what men see about them every day, — the law of spiritual accumulation and acceleration, the law by which sin and goodness increase each after its kind. The more clearly a man believes in the life to come, and thinks of it as under the same great moral forces that pervade this life, the more im pressive grow to him its spiritual necessities. He believes in a mercy which runs beyond the grave; but unless it be a mercy which does what mercy never does now, and compels to goodness the soul refusing to be good, there still stretches out the possibility of a wickedness forever obstinate, and so forever wretched.

But think of it, if you will, only as it concerns this present life. It would be impressive enough even if there were no life to come, this tendency of everything to make the good grow better and the

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evil worse. If the fact is as clear as I have stated it, then it must stand as one of those things, like the wind or the sunshine, of which it is quite unnecessary that we should spend our time in asking whether it ought to be, as we can see very plainly that it is. What we do need to ask is the value of such a truth, so fundamental, so pervasive, set right into the midst of our life. How will it affect our living? What good effects is it intended to produce? The answer to that question seems to me to be twofold. It will emphasize individuality; and it will keep ever vivid the difference between right and wrong. Let us look at these, and see if they are not what the world very much needs.

The emphasis of individuality, the conviction of a man’s self as having a personal character and living a personal life, is not this the thing the lack of which has made the weakest moments of all our lives? There are two classes of sins, — those that come from our feeble yielding and those that come of our wanton obstinacy. Of the latter class we may say sometimes that they result from our exaggerated individuality. Really they come of our distorted and diseased individuality. But the other class comes surely from the absence of any strong sense of individual life at all. From the boy who catches his first oath from the lips of the boy three years older than himself, whose impressive age and experience swallow up the personal responsibility of the admiring youngster by his side, on to the old man who dies rich, with a fortune that he has made by some of the conventional unrighteousnesses — where is the trouble in it all? Is it not in the feebleness of the boy’s and the man’s conception of himself? Duty, duty, that great, personal idea, something that he owes to God, something that he must do, whatever anybody or everybody beside him in the world may do, — that has not taken hold of him. He knows nothing about it. If he gets deep enough to have any philosophy about it all, his whole philosophy will be this, — that goodness and wickedness, like happiness or unhappiness, come by chance, that neither is to be struggled after or avoided.

Oh, it is terrible to think how full our streets and houses are of that philosophy! The man you do your business with, the friend you take your pleasure with, the brother or sister with whom you live in the same house, it is terrible to think how all moral life seems to him an accident, that it is as perfectly uncertain whether he will be noble or base to-morrow as whether the wind will blow east or blow west. There can be no strong sense of personality there. There personal life resolves itself into a bundle of tastes, and the man recognizes himself only by what he likes or hates. But now suppose that man can come into our law. Growing cognizant of moral life, trying to be a good man or coming to know himself a bad man, he finds all the world declaring a disposition towards him, helping him on in the way which he has chosen. He has called it a world of accidents, and thought himself its puppet. But the minute he makes any moral declaration of himself he finds the world all devoting itself to the fulfilment of that declaration, all tending to make him more and more what he has set out to be. He has been floating on the waves, tossed where they pleased to toss him, but the minute that he says, “I will go thither,” and begins to swim, the water under him becomes his helper; it lifts him up and floats him; it answers to the beating of his hands; it bears him on and lands him where he wants to be. Now that is thoroughly personal. It cannot be anything else. A man setting a moral destiny before himself, and feeling the whole current and power of things immediately bearing him on to it, must come to the certainty that he is a self-determined being and that God helps his self-determination.

Oh, my dear friend, this is what you want. In your parlor, at your club, you are losing yourself, you are losing your soul, you are getting to seem to yourself the mere creature of accidents. What do you need? Go and undertake some duty. Go and be moral. Go and be good. Go and find the soul that you have lost. Go, and in the midst of your self-indulgent life surprise yourself by doing what perhaps you have not done for years, — by doing something that you ought to do because you ought to do it. As you enter that moral region you have no idea of the revolution that will come in all these accidents and their relation to your life. It will be as if a general had forgotten his generalship, and gone to playing games and running races with his soldiers, who have forgotten it, too. But by and by the bugle sounds, and he recalls himself. He flings his play aside, and arms him for the battle. And then they, too, reverence him again, and cry, “Oh, let us help you, for we are only your servants as soon as you have really undertaken to be worthy of yourself.” So all the world will help you as soon as you try to do your duty. When you claim your manhood it will own your manhood, and you, who have counted yourself a mere playfellow of the blind chances of the world, will find yourself recognized by the world as a true moral creature, to whom it is commissioned, by the God who made it, to render its humble help in working out your moral life.

I said, again, that the truth which Jesus emphasizes so, and on which we have been dwelling, is of value because it keeps ever vivid the difference between right and wrong. The idea that out of the mass of influences about us the good character appropriates the elements which belong to it, so that it grows ever better, and the bad character appropriates its own elements and grows ever worse — that seems to me to be one of the most profoundly impressive declarations of what essentially different things the good and evil are. I take two seeds which look so much alike that only the skilled eye can tell the difference between them. I plant them side by side in the same soil. Immediately each of them sends out its summons. Each demands of the ground the elements of growth which its peculiar nature craves. The earth hears and acknowledges the summons, and renders up to each what it demands. So two men, who seem just alike, are set down in the same city. Instantly to one there fly all the influences of good; to the other there gather all the powers of evil that pervade that city’s life. Or, into a man’s life is dropped a purpose. That purpose instantly declares its character by the way in which it divides the forces of his life. If it is good, it calls all that is good within him or around him to its aid. All that is noble gives its strength willingly to this new, feeble plan. All that is sluggish, base, selfish, in his nature or his circumstances sets itself against his new desire.

It is in such discriminations that the essential differences of the qualities of the good and bad display themselves. In the least atom of good there lies a power to attract goodness and repel wickedness. In the least atom of wickedness there lies a power to repel the good and to attract the bad. That is the qualitative power of moral natures. Ah, when we think how everywhere we are imposed upon by quantities, do we not need, do we not welcome, this strong statement, that the real power of things lies in their qualities — in what they really are, whether there be much of them or little? See how we are deluded. We take some vice which, in its larger manifestations, we know is flagrant and destructive. We make it small. Without changing its character in the least, we bring down its dimensions. We turn the great public cheat into the little personal deception; we transform the large, insulting slander into base, personal, gossiping detraction; and what was acknowledgedly bad on the large scale is accepted as graceful and venial in its smallness. Or, just the opposite: we take some action which in its petty forms everybody owns to be bad and mean, like the bullying of the weaker by the stronger, and, lifting it to a higher degree, we crown it with dignity and honor, as when we glorify the oppressor and the tyrant. Oh, we do need everywhere more of that conscientiousness which looks at the qualities, less of that superficialness which is overcome by the mere quantities of things.

The other side of this is to me even more impressive. If we lose sight of the essential nature of evil very often by dwelling upon the increase or diminution of its size, so that the very great or the very little evil seems to us to be almost absolutely good, the same is true about the quality of goodness. There, too, we are imposed upon by quantity till we forget that quality alone is vital. If we could all see, and always see, the essential force which is in every good act, however slight it is, and in every true belief, however meagre it is, how different our lives would be! But our goodness and our faith grow very small; and, instead of valuing all the more intensely what is left, our ordinary impulse is to throw the remnant away. It is so little, we think, that it is not worth the keeping.

Suppose that out of the world there should be slowly or suddenly destroyed all the seed of corn except one handful, just so much as one man could hold in his palm. Can you picture to yourself the care with which that handful would be guarded? Can you imagine the interest that would gather about it, the poetry and dearness that would be in it; how men, looking at it and knowing it to be the real thing, — true, real corn, — would see in it the assurance of days yet to come when all the fields should wave once more with harvests? That is the way in which you ought to treasure your faith if there is not much of it, if little by little it has slipped away from you. You say it has grown to be very little. You say that many things which you used to believe seem to you no longer to be true. You stand holding in your hand the remnant of a faith. What then? Is it real? Is it true faith? Whether it be little or great, do you really believe it? If you do, then surely that belief ought to be very precious to you. A little, a very little, belief it may be, — nevertheless treasure it because it is belief, instead of despising it because it is little. Value it for its quality, instead of dis honoring it for its quantity. As you look into it behold its possibilities. See in its meagreness the promise and power of a great and manifold belief that may yet some day cover your whole life with verdure. Put it where it will be safe; and the only place where a faith ever can be safe is in the shrine of an action. Put it there. Do what that belief would tempt you and command you to do; and trust to its true quality to grow under the care of God, who knows in heaven every particle of true faith that there is scattered about the earth. In His sight it is all too precious to forget.

What a great many people need to-day is to for get for a while their care about the quantity of their belief, and to give their anxious attention to its

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quality. Not, how much do I believe? but, how do I believe? It is well worth while for you to learn to ask that deeper question. Seek reality, even though it be by casting aside much that you have carried about with you that was unreal. It is a glad day for a true man when at last he plucks off and casts away a faith which he has not believed, or a hypocritical habit which has not been truly his. “Coming down to reality,” he calls it. It really is coming up to reality. The fresh, strong, hopeful future opens before him.

Of every other experience that is true which I have been stating thus about belief. You need to learn, when you hear Christ your Master insisting on repentance, on love for Himself, on love for fellow-man, on devoted work, that His desire is, first of all and deepest of all, for the qualities of those things. He wants a real repentance, a real love, a real devotion. If He sees reality, we can well understand how He can be infinitely patient with littleness; for where He stands eternity is all in sight. He sees forever. He knows through what summer of cloudless sunshine the least grace will have time to ripen to the richest. He knows in what rich fields the seed will find eternal lodgment. So there is time enough, if only the seed is real. If it is not real, eternity is not long enough and heaven is not rich enough to bring it to any thing.

How impressive this is in the story of Christ’s earthly life! How patient He was with imperfection! How intolerant He always was of unreality!

He could wait for a publican while he unsnarled himself out of the meshes of his low vocation, but He cut with a word like a sword through the solemn trifling of the Pharisees. He never was impatient with His disciples. Their graces were very small, but they were real. Eternity was long, and He could wait till the graces which He saw to be real opened into all the possibility which He discerned in them; till the Peter who paraded his genuine but feeble resolution of devotion at the Supper grew to the Peter who could die for Him at Rome, and live with Him in some high doing of His will in heaven.

It is good for us if we can treat ourselves as our Lord treats us. Try to find out whether your repentance for sin is real — a genuine sorrow for a wrong life. If it is, no matter if it falls far short of the complete contrition which you picture to your self, still keep it, hold it fast. Do not let it slip away and drop back into the placid content which you felt before you were penitent at all. So with your love to your Saviour, — do not throw it away because it is not that large-winged devotion which soars up into the very sunshine of His closest company. Keep it. Feed it on all you know of Him. Never trifle with it, or surround it with any unreality of profession merely to make it seem larger than it is. Reverence it, not because it is great enough to be worthy of Him, but because for such a being as you are to love at all such a being as He is, is a sublime act, — the glorification of your nature, and the promise of infinite growth.

I long for every Christian, especially for every young Christian, to see this first Christian truth of the value of the essential qualities of things set deep into his life. Christ was full of it. Christ showed us how full God is of it. In it is the secret of endless patience. In it is the power of enthusiasm at every stage of growth. Can the soul just come to Christ, just trembling with its first love, its first hope, lift up itself and sing enthusiastically? Yes, if it can know indeed that “to him which hath shall be given,” that it is in the very essential nature of the life it has begun to go on, and never stop, until it stands in the glory which is before the Throne of God.

In the truth which Jesus taught, then, in the proverb which was so often on His lips, there lie still the warning and the inspiration which He put there. It is the truth of a live world, a world so full of life that into it nothing can fall without partaking of its life, a world that makes the good grow better and the bad grow worse always. If the world is making us worse, then not to change the world, but to be changed ourselves, is what we need. We must be regenerate by Christ, and then the world shall become His schoolroom, by all its ministries bringing us more and more perfectly to Him. May He give us His new life, that the world may become new to us!