The Whole Greater Than the Part
Van will not be able to enter into the spirit of the work of Jesus Christ until you have settled a difficulty which inheres in yourself. You must grapple with that difficulty closely and finally before you proceed one step further in this argument. It is very hard for any man to get beyond the mood or aspect of his own nature which may happen to be uppermost at any given time; in other words, it is hard for any one man to see or to realise the sum total of human nature in himself. He can see (and that only imperfectly) the small portion of human nature enclosed within the limits of his own individuality, but beyond those limits he is a stranger even amongst his brethren, speaking a foreign accent, and referring to unfamiliar usages. The generous man can understand the man who is generous, but the mean man is a riddle he can never make out. Now, though you cannot yourself adequately represent the sum total of humanity, you can, by exercising your imagination, come to have some dim and overpowering idea of its vastness, variety, and complexity, by starting with the fact that, so far as you are aware, no two souls are absolutely identical in compass, sympathy, force, or aspiration. No one man is all men. Strange as it may seem, the oversight of this truism is leading to daily contention and misjudgment for which there is absolutely no shadow of defence beyond the most confined and despicable limits. It is, too, leading to controversies, alienations, and distrusts in the Church, which are an offence and a scandal exceedingly. Let us reason it out, and learn what we ought to be and to do.
No one man being all men, it follows that no one man has the whole idea of justice, of mercy, of righteousness, ot love. Whatever idea of justice you have, your brother has an idea which you have overlooked, and which you are bound to take into account before you can say you have realised the sum total; so has a third man, and a fourth, and so on throughout all the generations of mankind from the beginning to the end. So with all your other notions: they are partial, cloudy, and possibly so incomplete as to be false; not only so, the notion which you are to-day quite sure is right, you may condemn to-morrow as the most serious error you ever made. When you think that your reasoning is complete, even positively and finally conclusive, a higher mind than your own may point out an omission which may change the whole purpose and sum of your deduction; another mind higher still may repeat the process, until you begin to feel uncertain of the very thing which at first you thought did not admit of so much as two opinions. And this process, if properly guarded, will do you good. It will accustom your mind to the wholesome truth that you are not infallible, and sometimes it will constrain you to substitute modesty for defiance. It must, however, be properly guarded, or a mischievous effect will ensue; you will begin to think that there is no absolute truth, that truth is a series of guesses, and that he who guesses best knows most. So, too, you may think of justice, and thus your moral nature may become weak and hesitating. The corrective of this mischief lies in the realisation of the fact that there is absolute truth, and that though you have not yet attained, neither are already perfect, you are pressing toward the mark, if haply you may seize the infinite prize. You will thus come to see that you know only in part, and should therefore prophesy only in part, and comfort yourself with the hope that when perfection is reached, that which is in part shall be done away. You will see, as your horizon clears and enlarges, how true it is that any plan which can cover the whole human necessity, as it has been depicted, must come from above. If it is only the idea of a very able man, it may be displaced by the suggestion of a man abler still; but even if it assume to come from above, it will have upon the face of it an advantage over all plans — that have had their origin amongst ourselves.
By way of illustration, take it as simply the suggestion of an undoubtedly able man, and let us take some proposition out of the plan, as Justice ought to be done. The very first question that arises is, Whose justice? Not this man’s, because he is severe; not that man’s, because he is sentimental; not yours, because you are lenient; not mine, because I am ruled by strong prejudices; not a stranger’s, because he knows nothing about the case; not a friend’s, because his prepossessions will mislead him. Whose justice, then? You will say, Surely there must be justice somewhere; and I answer, Certainly; but where? Not exclusively or completely in any indwidual; it is from above: it is a vast aggregate; it is the focal point of all true ideas, notions, principles, and impulses; so we may well say, Great is the mystery of justice! If you narrow the ground, you will see that the reasoning is practical. For example, whose justice is administered in a court of law? Not the justice of the individual judge, much less the justice of the prisoner at the bar. It is the common sentiment of a nation, a sentiment which has undergone the testing and sifting of many generations; and if it be less than this, it will be so much weaker; if opposed to this, it will endanger the integrity of the commonwealth. If the sentiment of one nation be the growth of many years, and the result of processes elaborate and tediously various, how can we expect to gather the common sentiment of the whole world, in all its ages and successions, especially when it is remembered that the world has by its own wickedness disqualified itself for forming a just judgment upon any moral question?
As this doctrine of the part not being the whole is the key of a difficulty which will come up later on, we may usefully extend our acquaintance with it before going further. Let us put an imaginative case, by supposing that we are called upon to send into a world where human nature is unknown, a man who will adequately represent humanity to the inhabitants. The question, could we convoke the whole race to answer it, would be, Whom shall we send, and who will go for us? Whatever proposition is made will instantly bring its own objection or difficulty along with it, Shall we send an Englishman? The Turk instantly answers, No. Shall we send a Negro? The Hindoo laughs the idea to scorn. We may not send a poet, because some practical elements may be wanting; nor a mathematician, because he may be dull of fancy; not a prosperous man, because he may be hard; nor a disappointed man, because he may be sour. Who then? There is another difficulty. Suppose that any considerable section of the race should fix upon a representative with tolerable unanimity, would the man himself go? Certainly not. Just in proportion as he was fit for the work would he feel his unfitness for it, for the greater he was, the more would he feel his relative littleness to the sum total of humanity. What, then, is to be done? Instantly the world will answer, If the inhabitants of another sphere wish to know human nature as it really is, they must come to us and live with us, or they will never understand that most complex and contradictory of all sums. By nerrow-The Whole greater than the Part. Al
ing this ground, again, we can get a still intenser and clearer view of the case. A question will show what I mean. Do you yourself at any one moment fully and adequately represent the whole of your own nature? Will it be just to take you in your sunniest mood, when your mouth is filled with laughter, and your whole life palpitates with joy? Then we shall know nothing of your hours of dejection and complaining. Shall we judge you in the time of distress and temptation, when some great fear is ruling you or some unholy importunity is straining your heart downwards towards evil? Then we shall know nothing of your hopefulness, buoyancy, and trust in God. Admit that man has many moods; that no one man can fully, that is, exhaustively, represent human nature; that one man is not all men; that one mood is not the whole man, and I may be able to help you throughout some difficulties that gather around the priesthood of Christ.
If you make this admission, there is another which will be required as a matter of course, and which had better be made in words at once. As no one man is all men, so no one sin is all sins. Every man is apt to think of Ais sin; and some men can think of sin only as it is expressed in crime. Out of this limitation come such petty and unworthy questions as, Why cannot so trifling a sin as mine be forgiven without the intervention of a tragedy? Why should I require the same process of rectification as a murderer or a thief, when I have kept all the commandments from my youth up? Or thus: How can a young creature of pure thought, sweet in temper, and noble in all womanly excellence, need to go for pardon as if she had done evil with both hands earnestly? All such inquiries proceed upon a false notion of humanity, inasmuch as they treat humanity as a group of separate interests, not as a massive and indissoluble unity; not a unity, in the sense thas it must be lost or saved together, but in the sense that it is ee — — all ruled and directed by a common law, vast enough to have no exterior, minute enough to omit no particle. We find 16 convenient, and even proper, for social purposes, to separate ourselves broadly from the cannibal and the debauchee, and to pluck up the skirts of our respectability as if we were here only by momentary misadventure, and must on no account be confounded with the common herd, At this point every man must fight a battle with himself; and he must not cease until he has utterly expelled such folly from his reasoning, or he cannot understand even so much as what Christ proposed to do. We must own ourselves, with all our dainty distinctions, members of a race that has drunk every cup of sin, and set at nought every holy law. So long as each man counts his sins, and points out that his guilt begins here and ends there, he will only be careful to escape at any expense of logic and sympathy, and will never understand either the scheme of providence or the economy of grace. I know of no better name for this than Cainism. It has its plausible side, but at the last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder.
The same law meets us here that directed us in the case of human nature. A man must be fold what humanity is, so the sinner must be told what sin is. He sees but fractions of it. He sees his own only, and that he sees most indistinctly. He knows he has done wrong, but what wrong is he does not know; the action he can measure by space and time, but the influence of the action he can never overtake; it has gone forward to work its mischief within a widening circle. When we are éold what we are, and what sin is, we have what is well-known as revealed truth; that is, truth we never could have discovered, but which, when revealed or made clear to us, awakens a consciousness with which it in some sense corresponds and harmonises. The voice within answers the Voice from a above. All truth is revealed; all justice is Divine; when we see this we shall deliver religion from many needless and painful entanglements, and abridge the standards of theological science.
This, then, is our point of rest. “If any man think he knoweth anything, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know.” We must be told what man is and what sin is, and this we must be told from above. There is one Teacher who certainly claims to be from above; He may not be so; but we can soon find out, for His speech will betray Him. He is particular, however, to whom He speaks; He will only speak to those who are honestly wishful to learn; He thanks God that His kingdom is hidden from the wise and prudent, and revealed only unto babes. Having brought you to this point, you must say whether you will go forward on Christ’s conditions or not. The conditions are, that He is to be Teacher and you scholar; that you know nothing to begin with but your own ignorance, and that you test His doctrine by living the life to which it points, To this man will Christ look, to the man that is humble and of a contrite heart, and that trembleth at His word. I make no apology for thus interrupting the argument that I may exhort to rectitude of spirit; for in this case the Spirit is absolutely essential to a thorough grasp and mastery of the argument. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” You say you will put into exercise the verifying faculty to which we have referred. Certainly. But do not suppose that the verifying faculty alone has escaped the general wreck of your nature. When the foundations of the house of humanity were shaken, the windows which opened towards heaven were shattered and nearly destroyed.
The sum of this introductory argument is : —
(1.) That human nature is too vast, intricate, and profound to be known in its totality by any one man; (2.) That human sin is too subtle, penetrating, and far-reaching in its effects to be known by any one sinner; (3.) That any scheme that can cover the whole case and meet the complete necessity must be the work of a Mind that comprehends human nature and human sin in their uttermost boundaries and consequences; (4.) That any revelation purporting to come from such a Mind has a prima facre claim to attention; and (5.) That its very claim to such attention should beget in the student a spirit of watchful and dignified docility.
GHRIST. iN THE: GOSPELS.
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