New Incentives to Giving
The modern notions of giving are not only far below the Scripture level; they contradict Bible standards. An article in the “Nineteenth Century” told men how to live on seven hundred and fifty pounds a year: allowance was made for all needful outlay on food and clothing, house rent and house service; and a generous provision for culture and amusements. But not one penny was set aside for charity, which was not reckoned among necessities or even luxuries. An advertisement appears, offering a very large reward for a poodle, whose diamondset collar was worth two hundred and fifty pounds sterling, and the silver chain, seven pounds more; but that is to be accounted among the reasonable indulgences, whether any provision is made for perishing millions or not!
The old doctrine will be unpopular in this degenerate day of a secularized Church, but it is still to be proclaimed, for the offence of the cross is not ceased. No setting apart of a tithe, or Lord’s portion, will, in these days, suffice. It never did. The tithe was the Jews* minimum, not maximum; it represents what the poorest must give, not what the richest might use to buy off the right to keep the other nine-tenths! Instead of asking. How little can I spare for God and satisfy His claim and my conscience? we should invert the terms, and ask. How little can I expend upon myself and yet satisfy my actual needs, and how much can I thus spare for God?
The missionary age ‘affords new opportunity and incentive for the culture of this supreme grace. Giving will bring its true blessing, its greater blessing, only when systematic and self-denying.
“Mammon” is simply another name for money, when, instead of a servant, it becomes a master, practically served — an idol worshipped. There is no difficulty in understanding how what is so grossly material as wealth came to be associated with divine attributes; for, as we have seen, its power to achieve great results suggests omnipotence; its power to represent the giver, wherever his gifts are bestowed and their blessings scattered, suggests omnipresence; and its power to perpetuate his influence when he is dead, suggests eternity. What a pity, what a crime, when such power is put in the fetters of selfishness, and locked up in the narrow cell of personal indulgence! when it achieves no result but to fatten and satiate the lust of greed, finds no sphere outside of a luxurious home, and perpetuates no influence but the example of the miser!
One of the foremost incentives to missions is found in the blessedness of giving. Christ spake a new beatitude, recorded and preserved by Paul, who said to the Ephesian elders:” Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He said. It is more blessed to give than to receive!” The full meaning and truth of that last beatitude is yet to be known, and can be known only as this work of missions is done as He meant it should be done.
This may be called a new motive, for its power is as yet unfelt. Our giving is not only imperfect and inadequate, it is radically defective; for its basis is, in a measure, wrong and unsound. The ministry of money is not imderstood, and stewardship is practically denied. That is a virtually effete notion, that all I have belongs to God; that it is not mine to do as I will with it, to hoard, or spend, to use in selfish indulgence or bestow in unselfish ministries; but that it is held in trust for God, and to be put to holy uses, so that even what I eat and drink and wear is to glorify Him. This may be treated with contemptuous scorn as an antiquated doctrine, but it will never be no longer binding while the word of God is our guide and a world waits to be saved.
This beatitude represents the crown of all beatitudes. There are three stages of experience: first, where joy is found only in getting; second, where joy is found in both getting and giving; third, where giving is the only real joy, and getting is valued only in order to giving. The first shows the purely worldly spirit; the next indexes the average disciple; the last marks the closest identity with the Lord. To this last only the few attain or even aspire. But to such it is the foretaste of heaven on earth. The curse even of our Churches is that getting is recognized as the one thing to be desired and sought; giving is at best recognized as a duty, not a privilege to be sought but an obligation to be accepted, and a thousand expedients are adoped to evade and avoid that self-denial which represents the very enrichment of giving. If money is to be raised, instead of counting it a blessing to give, and to give what costs self-sacrifice, the constant effort is to give what costs nothing; and resort is had to secular entertainments, concerts and exhibitions, tea-drinkings and picnics, bazaars and raffles, charades and tableaux, lantern shows and comic recitations — the whole alphabet of the world’s amusements supplies the Church with easy expedients to gather a little money and escape self-denial; and modes, not only secular but unhallowed, are often adopted to secure funds for the most sacred cause of missions. The mistake is the more serious because it not only secularizes the Church, but it makes even our giving selfish; the cause of God must buy our support by some price paid to the eye, in the spectacular; to the ear, in the musical or the amusing; to the palate, in the delicate or the delicious.
Let us stop and once more ask zvhy and zvhen it is more blessed to give than to receive. Getting without giving is absolutely disastrous; even getting %vith giving is dangerous. And the only way to prevent the disaster and avert the danger is to give constantly, systematically, abundantly, cheerfully, self-denyingly. Fire that has no vent, has soon no flame; if the flame cannot get out the fire goes out. A spring without outlet cannot have inlet; the water must give forth a stream, or it seeks a new channel underground. The Christian life is the fire of which giving is the vent; it is the spring of which active benevolence is the stream. He who hoards and withholds, cramps and crushes and cripples his own better nature.
But, as Lowell makes Christ to say, in the ‘’Vision of Sir Launfal,”
“He who gives himself with his alms, feeds three: Himself, his hungering neighbour, and Me.”
The miser is an idolater and worships the golden calf. The law of all idolatry, twice thundered from the Psalms, is universal:
‘’They that make them are like unto them.
So is every one that trusteth in them.”
All idols make the maker and worshipper like themselves. If man worships a beast he becomes beastly and brutal; if it be a god of wood and stone, dumb and senseless like the image; if it be a clod of earth, earthy like the clod. He who worships gold — to whom the” almighty dollar, “the” sovereign, “the” Napoleon,” is, as the names suggest, his practical monarch and master, becomes, as we have before hinted, a kind of coin himself. He gets to have a sort of metallic hardness and insensibility to impression, and a kind of metallic ring. His utterances, his preferences, his tastes, his actions have the sound of the brass trumpet, the silver cymbal, the gold-piece. And when he falls in death, it is not a man who has disappeared from among men — not some bright star suddenly fading into darkness, or some musical melody sinking into silence, or some fruitful tree torn up by the roots — only a sack of hoarded treasure falling upon the stony pavement of fate, and, as Death cuts the knot that has held its mouth closed, scattering its coins to be picked up by lawful heirs, or, more likely, by greedy lawyers! One who worships fashion becomes nothing but a tailor’s dummy, a walking advertisement, a suit of clothes on legs, miscalled a man; or a wax-doll, trimmed with furs and feathers, and miscalled a woman. The worshippers of fast horses come to have the savour and flavour of the stall and the turf; they smell of the horse; life is to them a race for stakes, and their back is a saddle for jockeys.
The objection commonly raised against giving to foreign missions — that we shall never see the money again — the field is too far off to make returns — is itself an example of how a Scripture motive may be turned into a hindrance. Christ bids us, do good, hoping for nothing again — give to those from whom we can expect 710 returns. That alone is giving. If I invite to my supper those whom I expect to invite me again; or bestow a favour where I look for reciprocal favours, it is all selfish and breeds only selfishness. It is lending, not giving, for the loan is to be returned, perhaps with interest. To carry this principle into our benevolence makes benevolence impossible. If I put money into a savings bank, I have certainly given nothing to the bank. And if I put money into a Christian church or school, expecting returns in any form of self-gain, it may be a good investment, but is it true giving?
Our whole Christian life is in danger of being mammonized. The little boy who slipped his penny into the contribution box, and asked his mother what sort of sweets would drop out, whether caromels or lozenges, was a good representative of older people, who look on all so-called benevolent schemes as automatic sweetmeat machines, into which you drop your penny, or your shilling, your dollar or your pound, to get sooner or later some adequate returns.
Once more let it be learned by tis that God’s poorest ones need our gifts far less than zvc need the discipline of giving. To say “no” to my selfish greed and appetite, to curb my carnal self and give reins to my spiritual nature, to learn to give without thought of any returns — simply to confer good and impart blessing — ah! that is to be like unto God! The devil delights in returning evil for good; man is quite willing to return good for good; but God’s joy is to give the best where is returned only the worst! Giving is God’s corrective and antidote to selfishness, and, because the remotest field brings the slowest returns, and the most destitute objects leave the least hope of personal gains to tempt cupidity, missions to the heathen furnish the grandest opportunity we can enjoy for cultivating self-oblivion — pure, disinterested, unselfish, Christ-like ministry to want and woe.
In one sense, this is a new incentive, for there is a new appeal in the cJiangcd conditions of CJiurch life. The primitive Church of the Acts was a poor Church, so poor that the few who had possessions felt constrained to dispose of their houses and lands and turn the proceeds into the common treasury. That was a simple, frugal age, in which there were no great monopolies and colossal fortunes as now. It was not, as this is, a materialistic age — when the very atmosphere was laden with the miasma of miserliness and incited to greed. We are living in a time when the rich are very rich and the poor very poor, and the gulf between them is becoming unbridgeable and hopeless alienation is the outcome. These are days when there is far greater risk of Christians’ becoming electro-plated with fashionable avarice and hardened into a respectable insensibility to human sorrow and suffering; when it shall be easy to feed and fatten upon dainties, while Lazarus is left to the dogs; when it shall be common to be comfortable in luxury while a world is dying of poverty and in sin — than in any previous age. And hence the power of the new appeal. Because the very social life tends to dull our ears to human need, God permits the voice of the heathen’s want and woe to be the louder and more clamorous and the more ceaseless. Intelligence is now so widespread that ignorance of the world’s need is well-nigh impossible, and at least culpable; and, to know that a thousand millions of souls are starving for the bread of life, and that we can give it to them, and yet not to do it, implies an indifference, an apathy, whose crime and curse are proportioned to our greater information, ability and opportunity. In the days of the Apostles there were neither such chances of good, nor such risks of harm to the Church.
So important is this element of unselfishness in giving, that to avoid or evade it is to take away its vital principle. It is, then, the flower without the colour or odour — the gem without its radiance. As Mr. J. A. Froude says: ‘’ Sacrifice is the first element in religion, and resolves itself into the love of God. Let the thought of self intrude, let the painter but pause to consider how much reward his work will bring to him, and the cunning will forsake his hand and the power of genius will be gone. Excellence is proportioned to the oblivion of self.” No doubt money may be raised for missions in ways that obviate self-sacrifice, but in proportion to our success is our failure — and the greater the success the worse the disaster. For this means that we have found a way to make the sacred ointment and leave out the perfume that, to God, gives it all its sweet savour.
And hence also it is that the more we succeed in making large gifts from the few supply the place of the many small offerings of the self-denying poor, the less practical power is there in our very gifts themselves. It is one of the mysteries of chemical galvanism that an increase of its power cannot be got by increasing the dimensions of the cells of the battery, but can be secured only by increasing the miviber of those cells. This peculiarity illustrates Christian service in giving. The cumulative energy of our gifts depends not on their amount, but on the sacrifice they involve, and so, the more the givers in whom this sacrifice is developed, the grander the spiritual force and impetus given by the aggregate of gifts. Hence, the highest Church power hangs on all sJiaring in the giving.
As Jeanie Deans said to the Queen: “It is not when we sleep soft and wake merrily ourselves that we think on other people’s sufferings. Our hearts are waxed light within us then, and we are for righting our ain wrangs, and fighting our ain battles. But when the hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the body, and when the hour of death comes, that comes to high and low — long and late may it be yours O my leddy! — then it is na what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly.”
God has shown us, by nearly two millenniums of Church history, that missions have a vital relation to Christian life, and that their reflex action is so unspeakably precious that all the cost of money and men is far more than repaid in this returning tide of blessing. The vigorous pulsation which drives the blood to the ends of the body, invigorates the heart itself and strengthens its muscular walls. To nourish a missionary spirit is to enlarge, expand, ennoble our whole spiritual life. Take one example. Nothing is a greater perplexity and anxiety to true disciples than this — how to ensure a sanctified /<7w?*/y life. It is lamentable that children of Christian parents so often grow up, not only strangers to God but open enemies and infidels. There seems to be some influence at work to annul and neutralize all the power of holy example. The fact is that nothing is so subtly fatal to all true symmetry of character as simple selfishness. There is a curious fact in botany. If you take out a scion from a tree, cut off the branch and set the scion downward, all others that grow out of that branch afterward, will grow downward — and hence, the ornamental gardener gets his drooping trees. The scions in our family tree get early set downward, and all future growths are earthward. There is as truly peril in a self-indulgent home as in a positively vicious one — let a child begin by being pampered, petted, indulged, taught to gratify whims and selfish impulses, and you have given a carnal tendency to the whole life. Now there is this precious fruit of very early training in the missionary spirit, that your boy or girl gets another centre of revolution outside of self. Others’ wants and woes are thought of, and the penny that would be wasted on sweets, is saved for the missionary box. It seems a very small matter, but the scion gets an upward growth and all the future life, a tendency upward. Where missionary hymns are the lullaby sung at the cradle, and prayer for the heathen is taught to lisping lips at the mother’s knee; where simple facts about the awful needs of pagan homes and hearts are fed to the child as food for the thought and tonic for self-denial, and the habit is thus early imparted of looking beyond personal comfort and pleasure, and feeling sympathy for lost souls — a new and strange quality is given to character. It is no strange thing, therefore, that in the homes where a true missionary atmosphere is habitually breathed we find children insensibly growing up to devote themselves and their substance to God.
And so in that larger family, the Church. Nothing so cripples even home work as neglect of the wider field. To withhold from the farthest is to cramp sympathy for the nearest. And so it comes to pass that what is often assigned as a reason or cause for a lack of missionary zeal and effort, is rather the effect of it. The Church that apologizes for doing nothing for missions abroad, because of its weakness and poverty, owes its feebleness and sickliness to turning all attention upon itself. If we but knew it, it is because we have such burdens to be borne in the home work, that we need the stimulus and strength imparted by active missionary effort for the most distant and destitute. As Bishop Brooks used to say, such excuses resemble the plea of a parricide who first kills his own father, and then pleads for the pity of the court, in remitting the penalty in view of his orphanhood!
No vice is more destructive of Christian character than greed. Avarice turns a man into a miser who has no thought beyond his hoarded gold, like that respectable manufacturer in Britain who spent every day for twenty years in counting his sovereigns that he might gloat over his treasures. And it works harm as much to the poor in his penury as to the rich in his affluence; as it led a wretched victim of avarice, in one of our American cities, to split hicifer matches so as to make one into four. On the other hand, he who learns the true uses of sanctified money understands how it can wield a power next to divine, spread the influence of a single life over a wide sphere, and perpetuate divine omnipotence in the power it may wield; omnipresence, in the wide sphere over which it spreads the influence of one life; and eternity, in the perpetuation of such influence long after death.