Plough-Work
“And Jesus said, No man having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God.”
Luke ix. 62.
^’ His hand to the plough! ‘^ The Master did not use the figure heedlessly. It was not one of a hundred possible figures, any one of which would have served His purpose as well as the others. It was carefully chosen, to express the emphasis of the immediate need. “His hand to the plough!” The plough-work of the Kingdom! Ploughing is the heaviest work in the toil of the field. Sowing the seed is a comparatively easy ministry; by the side of ploughing it is a time of recreation. Reaping is associated with warmth and triumph, and is pervaded with the light-hearted song of the harvest-home. But ploughing is heavy, laborious work; it is concerned with the disturbance of the commonplace, the breaking up of the hard, familiar surface, the pulverising and loosing of the impermeable mass, and the exposing of the hidden depths of the light and air and dews and rains of the upper world. Ay, ploughing is a strenuous labour, primary and fundamental. And so it is in the Kingdom of God. Sowing the seed may demand no shedding of blood:
it may be as unexacting as the telling of a pleasant story, or a cheery conversation by the fire-side. But to drive your share through the conventional, to overturn the traditional, to pulverise a hard and hoary custom, to break up the popular and well-trodden expediency, to expose the subsoil of a commonplace, to disturb the superficialities and externalities of human life, and to bring to bear upon the hidden depths the light and air and moisture of heaven — all this is labour demanding bloody sweat, the heaviest work in the Kingdom of God. You may drop a seed upon the way-side, it will do no harm, but touch the common ground with your plough, and there are ten thousand guardians of the traditional, massed together in the common resistance of change. There seems to be a deep conservative streak in everybody, and instinctively we linger fondly upon the old — the old home, despite its inconveniences and its smaller rooms, the old hymn-book, the old form of service, the old way in the office — a fond clinging to the venerable, and I think the adhesion is frequently legitimate, healthy and good. But that same conservatism is frequently found buttressing an abuse, and it is often our passionate dislike of a change and disturbance which constitutes the strongest enemy of progress. There is a familiar saying in Yorkshire that the more you disturb a rubbish heap the ranker is the offence, and the proverb is always quoted in defence of the stationary, and in opposition to any policy of advancement. Now the ploughshare is the minister of change, of disturbance, of upheaval, and the heavenly ploughman is confronted by ten thousand massed antagonisms which invest his labour with all the dignity of a chivalrous crusade. Plough-work is therefore very heavy work, pioneer work, often very lonely work, and, taken altogether, the most exacting work in the Kingdom of God.” No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God.’^
Who were these disciples to whom these warning words were spoken? None of them were men of recognised culture, or of wealth, or of conspicuous rank. But, once settled down to their work, they proved themselves to be men of masculine handgrip, of magnificent tenacity of purpose, who, once they had begun upon a field, would see the furrow through. And to what unpromising stretches of land they had to turn their plough! Just think of two or three of the iron-bound fields to which the early apostles had got to put their hands. There was the field of Jewish traditionalism. Why, it was like trying to plough a field of brass. It had been made hard and unreceptive by the formalisms of a score of generations, and it wore the superficial sheen of a shallow and polished Pharisaism. No harder field has the ploughman of the Kingdom ever faced. And yet to this field he must direct his plough; he must turn up the subsoil of its formal and legalised life, he must pulverise its prejudices, and he must expose its innermost and better depths to the fertilising ministry of God’s redeeming grace. What a work it was! What a terrific disturbance it involved! The ploughman who attempts it shall be beaten with the flail from his own threshing-floor!” In the world ye shall have tribuation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.’’
And there was the field of Grecian aestheticism. Think of Athens as a sphere for the Christian ploughman. You have refinement, you have accomplishments, you have a stately and luxurious ease, but you have no healthy, bounding vitality in the secret depths of the life. At this time Athens was not a living heart, but a polished stone. And to this field the ploughman of the Kingdom had to come, with his ministry of upheaval, turning up the deeper self, stirring up the deeper hunger and the deeper thirst. And the ploughman came, and he came of an inferior people, and from a distant and obscure province, and he drove his share into the benumbed life of this astonished people. Astonished? Yes, as princes and elders were astonished in Bethel, when the herdman Amos came from the hamlet Tekoa, and drove the share of prophetic warning into their soddened and luxurious life; astonished, as Sir Philip Warwick and many others were astonished, when a farmer named Oliver Cromwell came from Huntingdon, and stood amid the refinements of the English Parliament, stood there, “in a plain cloth suit, made by an ill country tailor,” and spake to the assembled representatives “with voice sharp and untunable, but with eloquence full of fervour.” So came there a ploughman to hard and polished Athens, “one whose bodily presence was weak and contemptible,” but who, in the strength of the Spirit of God, drove his awakening evangel into the verydepths of her secret need.
And there was the field of Roman materialism. What a piece of land for the plough — hardened bypower, by wealth, by pomp, by victory! And there came a ploughman! He came along the Appian way, but, as if to make his weakness still more manifest, he came not as a freeman, but in the custody of an Imperial guard. And yet he came to plough! The conjunction is tremendous — this aged ploughman with bent back, but with alert and eager spirit, coming to plough his furrow through the amazing antagonisms of Imperial Rome. And he ploughed it, and the influence of that upheaval enriches the life of England to-day.
But we need not go back to apostolic times in order to discover heavy fields and fine ploughmen. Later times have been glorified by the presentation of equally burdensome opportunities, and by the possession of equally heroic and determined men. I think of Henry Martyn, that brilliant Cambridge Wrangler, grasping the coveted honours of his beloved University, and yet strangely hungry in the hour of his academic triumph. “I was surprised to find that I had grasped a shadow! “Ah, but it was a surprise of grace, a blessed disappointment inspired by the Holy Ghost.” The Spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it,” and the coveted glory fades like the withered grass. It was a gracious disillusionment, for Henry Martyn’s eyes were now lifted far above scholastic prizes to the all-satisfying “prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Having gazed upon the glory of the Lord his eyes were washed to discern the vastness of the Lord’s untilled and fruitless fields, and he turned his consecrated life to India. What a field to plough! Read Amy Carmichael’s saddening and yet inspiring book on “Things as they are in India.” Oh, the cold, chilling, rainy desolation of it all! Oh, the cruelty, the heartbreak, the cryless, soaking sorrow, the unconsoled and hopeless pain! Things were no better in Henry Martyn’s time, and it was to this dark, heavy, soddened field that this young University man turned the point of his share. He put his hands to the plough, and with that immortal word upon his lips which expressed both vow and prayer, Now, let me burn out for God! “he began his lonely work. Henry Martyn is worth thinking about if you want a companion in the heroic life. He ploughed away at the furrow, ploughed away, and even when illness came, and the sentence of death was in him, and his friends beseeched him to come home and rest, ‘’ he could not bear the idea of completely abandoning the work,” to which he had given his life, and “so he went to Persia that he might revise his Persian New Testament among the very people for whom it was prepared.’’ No “looking back ‘’ from the plough! No relinquishing the handles even for a holiday! Ay, and we, too, have got a living ploughman whom we cannot entice home for a holiday! We have cooeyed to him, we have hallooed to him, but GriflSth John away in China moves on in the furrow! We would shower our honours on him, but he just gratefully smiles in the midst of the hopeful field. The Chairmanship of the Congregational Union was offered to him, and he quietly replied, ^’ Send me out more ploughmen! ‘’ These are the men who preserve the race from degeneracy and putrefaction. They are” the salt of the earth.’’
I think of James Gilmour. I think of the wild, far-stretching field to which he addressed his uncompanioned life. Get the size of the field. Mongolia stretches from the Sea of Japan on the east to Turkestan on the west, a distance of three thousand miles, and from the southern boundary of Asiatic Russia to the great wall of China, a distance of nine hundred miles. Into that mighty field put down a single man and let him attempt single-handed the heavy work of evangelising it for Christ. Again, I say, “What a field!” and again I say, “What a ploughman!” I greatly like that first entry in his diary when he had just got his share in the uncut field: ‘’ Astir by daybreak. Made porridge and tea.” (How like John Tauler, the mystic, in its combination of homely duty and sublime task!) “Made porridge and tea. Several huts in sight.’’ (Do you feel the thrill of that? These few huts, the fringe of the field, the beginnings of the three thousand miles!) “Several huts in sight. Oh, let me live for Christ, and feel day by day the blessedness of a will given up to God.” And so he ploughed away, and in unthinkable loneliness. “My eyes have filled with tears frequently these last few days in spite of myself! Oh, the intense loneliness of Christ’s life! He bore it! O Jesus, let me follow in Thy steps.” In after days was there much to cheer him in the furrow he had cut? “In the shape of converts I have seen no results. I have not, as far as I am aware, seen any one who even wanted to be a Christian.” He writes again: “Oh, if things would only move!” How then? Did he turn back? Oh, no, he never looked back! He found his sufficiency in his Saviour, and he died in the furrow. In one of his last letters to his brother he wrote, “In Jesus is all fulness. Supply yourself from Him. Heaven’s ahead, brother. Hurrah!” I know of no more heartening word in missionary literature than this “Hurrah!” from this much worn ploughman, cutting his day’s furrow in the tremendous field of Mongolia.
Well, we are not out in Mongolia, in India, or among the islands of the South Seas: but can we do anything to help the man at the plough? Let me tell you. There was a man in our own country who put his hands to a piece of difficult and obnoxious work. James Stansfield was a member of the Liberal Ministry, and for many years represented my native town. He resigned his place in the Cabinet that he might take up the honourable but unpopular cause of restoring honour to the degraded womanhood of our land. It was a tremendous task, exposing him to the opprobrium and contumely of his fellows, and for many years “he wao despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” But my xurpose just now is to say that when he was delivered from Cabinet discipline, and made his first appearance, pale and nervous, in the Colston Hall at Bristol, he passed a little note along the platform to Mrs. Josephine Butler, and on the note were these words: “I am so thankful for the women’s prayers.” Was not that strengthening the ploughman? David Hill, the Methodist missionary in China, once wrote in his diary, ‘^ I feel very buoyant this morning “— shall we say he was whistling at the plough — “I feel very buoyant this morning: somebody must be ardently praying for me at home!” Yes, it is true. By prayer we can establish the hands of the distant ploughman; you and I can know “the fellowship of His sufferings,” and, in the bonds of Holy Communion you and I and the far-off ploughman can even now meet together at the mercy-seat of God.
But there is plough-work needed nearer home. Here in our own land there is hard and intractable ground to be broken up. This hard, unpromising ground is not the peculiar characteristic of any one particular class of people. There are the masses of the poor, hardened by the winter of their discontent, or partially petrified by a still more perilous indifference. Their life is trodden and crushed by the iron feet of poverty and by a multitude of petty cares. And the work of the Lord’s ploughman is just this — to turn up the subsoil, to lift the buried self into the light, to bring their hidden potencies under the marvellous influences of God’s redeeming grace. Hard work for the ploughman? Ay, heart-breaking work! And there are the classes, hardened by the bright and lengthy summer of their opulence. The ground of their life is baked hard by their contined noon. The ploughman who understakes this work must have a firm hand and a stout heart. A book was recently published entitled “Seven Years’ Hard.” It describes the arduous ministry of* a worthy ploughman who drove his share for seven years through the field of a London slum. I wish some one would give us a book on plough-work among the suburbs, among the privileged fields of the wellto-do. I can imagine that such a story would have to be written in blood. But be that as it may, to go to rich or poor, be they hardened by luxury or by want, and seek to upheave the sub-soil in both — the deeper, better, buried self — is the work of the Lord’s ploughman, and is a most Christly thing.
“Down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter, Feelings lie buried, which grace can restore.”
But away from the individual life of the people, in the common and corporate life, there is also plough-work to be done. What upheavals are demanded in the commonwealth! And yet it is burdensome and exhausting work. Any man who puts his hand to the plough in the field of social reform will find that he has to encounter a rigid and frigid conservatism. I do not use the word with a political significance, but to express that multiplicity of iron-bound traditions and of vested interests which permeate the soil of the common life like wire entanglements, and which fetter and embarrass the progress of the reforming plough.
What, then, shall the ploughman do in his slow, disappointing and laborious work? Shall he turn back, and leave his idle share to rust? Shall he leave the rich and the poor, with their manifold indifference, and shall he leave the great broad field of possible social redemption; shall he leave his Sunday school class, and those two or three feet of furrow which he has cut in an obscure place: and shall he hie him away home, and shelter himself in cushioned ease? ‘^ ISTo man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God! ‘’ Ay, that is the peril of the heavenly ploughman, the danger of “looking back.” Get your imagination upon the figure. It is the figure of a man who has got his hands upon the plough, but who has lost the forward cast from his eyes. He is trying to go forward while looking backward. He is
20a THE TRANSFIGURED CHURCH
seeking to embody the spirit of progress while he hugs the vision of retrospect. He is going one way and looking another! Now, that cannot last. The Master says such retrospects are disabling. They unfit a man for the work of the Kingdom of God. And for this reason, that ultimately one’s goings are determined by one’s lookings. In the long run, we turn our feet in the direction of our gaze. The ploughman, who begins to look backward, first of all spoils his work and cuts a crooked furrow, and then he turns away from the work he has spoiled. It matters not what it is that deflects the vision — whether it is that we are dismayed by the difiiculties that confront us, and we turn a lingering and covetous glance to the ease we have left behind: or whether, like Demas, we are seduced by the glittering prizes of this world, and we lose the fascination of the golden crowns of the ripened ears; or whether we are tired of being alone in the furrow, and we seek the genial company of the vast and idle crowd. I say it matters not what deflects our forward vision, the backward look begins the backward turning, and hastens our disendowment in the Kingdom of God. ‘^ We are saved by hope “; yes, and we save by hope, we cut our furrow in hope, we work for the harvest in hope, in the power of a long and forward-cast expectancy, and ‘’ no man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God,” for the work of the Kingdom he can never do.
What, then, is to be the inspiration of the ploughman? He must be moved by more than impulse, for the freshness and ecstasy may pass, and leave him sad and forlorn. His constraint must be more than an ideal, for some day the ideal may mock and chill him with the impossibility of its own attainment. ‘Noy to a higher inspiration still must the ploughman turn, even to the unfailing companionship of the ever faithful Lord. There need be no lonely furrow. Drive in thy share; thy Lord is with thee; with thee in the very strength of thine arm, and in the very purpose and vision of thine heart. And if there is any man or woman, some fellow-labourer of the Lord, who is now standing doubting in the furrow, the unfinished furrow, and looking back, let me urge such to set their hands to the work again, and fix their heart upon the steadying fellowship of the Christ. And when all is over, and ‘’ curfew tolls the knell of parting day,” and the tired ploughman ^’ homeward plods his weary way,” it shall once again be told in the fair abode of light how a full day’s work has led to the grander labours of the eternal rest.