The Man with Two Talents

“To another he gave two ta len is.” — MATTHEW xxv. 15.

IN the parable of Jesus the master stands with three servants before him. He is just ready to start upon his journey, and he is giving them his last commissions. For reasons of his own, he makes a difference between them. To one he gives five talents, and to another two, and to another one. “To every man according to his several ability,” the story adds. Then he goes off and leaves them, and each is faithful or faithless in the use of the money with which he is entrusted.

I want to speak to-day about the man with the two talents. He has his own peculiar interest, as he stands in the little group of three before the master. He is significant, we may almost say, because of his insignificance. As their Lord puts the money in their hands, we can see them look at it, and can guess what they think about it. The man to whom five talents are given, is surprised that he should re ceive so much. He is exhilarated and inspired; or perhaps, on the other hand, he is paralyzed and overcome. The man to whom one talent is given is startled at the smallness of the trust. He too feels a positive emotion. Either he is stung to energy and determines that he will do something strong and good, even with this little gift. Or else he is crushed into despair. Is this then all of which his Master thinks him worthy? Both of these men are interesting. They represent extremes. But the man of two talents stands and looks at his trust, and it is just about what he might have expected. It is neither very great nor very small. It does not exalt him, and ir does not make him ashamed. He turns away and goes out to use it with a calm, unexcited face. He is the type of common mediocrity. He is the average man.

It is very easy to be interested in the man of five talents, or in the man of one talent. Their interest takes hold of us at once. But I think that, as we look at life longer and study it more deeply, we feel more and more the importance of their less sensational brother, the man of the two talents, and are more and more interested in seeing what he does with his money, have more and more respect for him when we see him going conscientiously to work to turn it to its best result. Let us think of him awhile this morning; the man who is neither very rich nor very poor, not notable because of excess or of defect, the man with gifts like a million others, the average man.

He ought to interest us, for he presents the type

194 The Man with Two Talents.

to which we almost all belong. T ne of

us probably who are conscious of anything which separates us as notably superior to the great mass of our fellow-men. On the other hand it is not pmbublethat many of us count ourselves distinctly In-low tinaverage of human life. We do not lay claim to the five talents; we will not confess to the one. It is as men and women of two talents that we ordinarily count ourselves, and ask to be counted by our bivthreii. Therefore this quiet, common-place, unnoticed man, going his faithful way in his dull dress which makes no mark and draws no eye, doing his duty in significantly and thoroughly, winning so unobtru sively at last his master’s praise, ought to be interesting to us all.

He ought to be interesting also because he represents so much the largest element in universal human life. The average man is by far the most numerous man. The man who goes beyond the average, the man who falls short of the average, both of them, by their very definition, are exceptions. They are the outskirts and fringes, the capes and promontories of humanity. The great continent of human life is made up of the average existences, the mass of two- talented capacity and action.

It is so even in the simplest and most superficial matter of the possession of wealth. The great fortunes, with their splendid opportunities, and their tremendous responsibilities, rise like gigantic nioun- - which everybody sees out of the general level of comfortable life. On the other hand, excessive poverty, actual suffering for the necessities of life, terrible as it is, is comparatively rare. A part of its terribleness comes from its rarity. The great multitude of men are neither very rich nor very poor. The real character and strength of a community lies neither in its millionaires nor in its paupers, but in the men of middle life, who neither have more money than they know how to spend nor are pressed and embarrassed for the necessities of life.

The same is true in the matter of joy and sorrow. The great mass of men during the greater part of their lives are neither exultant and triumphant with delight, nor are they crushed and broken down with grief. They do not go shouting their rapture to the skies, and they do not go wailing their misery to the sympathetic winds. They are moderately happy. Joy flecked and toned down by troubles; troubles constantly relieved and lighted up by joy; that is their general condition; that seems to be their best capacity. The power of the intensest joy and the intensest pain belongs only to rare, peculiar men.

Or if you think about mental capacity. Most men are neither sages nor fools. Or if you think about learning, few men are either scholars or dunces. Or if you think about popularity and fame, those whom the whole world praises and those whom all men despise are both of them exceptional. You can count them easily. The great multitude whom you cannot begin to count, who fill the vast middle-ground of the great picture of humanity, is made up of men who are simply well enough liked by their fellow-men. They are crowned with no piH:mds. and they are pelted with no stones. They have their sliaiv of kindly interest and esteem. You cannot well think of them as either losing that or as gaining much beyond it.

And when you come to the profounder and the more personal things, when you come to character and to religion, there too it is the average that fills your eye. Where are the heroes? You can find them if you look. Where are the rascals? You can find them too. Where are the saints? They shine where no true man’s eyes can fail to see them. And the blasphemers, likewise, no one can shut out of his ears. But the great host of men, do you not know how little reason they give you to expect of them either great goodness or great wickedness? You do not look to see their faces kindle when you talk to them of Christ You do not either look to see them grow scornful or angry at his name. You do not count upon their going to the stake for principle. But you do count upon their paying their honest debts. You have to shut your thoughts about them in to this world, for when you think of them in eternity heav en seems as much too good for them as hell serins too bad.

Sometimes, when we let it crowd itself upon us, this fact of the predominance of mediocrity, or of the average in life, becomes oppressive. It seeniv to level life into a great, broad, flat, dreary plain. The men of two talents seem to have the world to them selves. Finding ourselves men of two talents, we sometimes seem to be simply adding by our existence a little more monotony and oppression to the monotonous and oppressive life of the great world.

We cannot get rid of such oppression, and the demoralization which it brings, by simply denying or ignoring the fact of the preponderance of mediocrity. The fact is too unquestionable. Only by redeeming mediocrity, in our own and other men’s esteem; only by asserting and believing that the man of two talents has a great place and a great chance in the world, only so can we restore the healthy thought of life which the first sight of his numerousness disturbs. This is what I want to try to do this morning. I want to speak first of the dangers which come to us when we know ourselves to be two-talent men, and then of the escape from those dangers as we come to know the special powers and privileges which belong to our limited and middle life.

We need to remember very clearly that what we are speaking of all along is the possession of powers, not the use of powers. Every man is bound to use the powers he possesses to their fullest. But the limit of the powers which each man possesses is not in his own hands, and there is where the vast majority of men are obliged to make up their minds to mediocrity.

It is not always an easy thing for men to make up their minds to mediocrity. We cannot tell in how many natures there comes deep struggle and sad disappointment before the lot of the average man is cordially accepted. A young man starts untried.

198 The Man with Two T a leu Is.

He is a prolpl»’in to himself and everybody els.-. Ylio can BUY what strange capacity is folded in tinunopened life? It is a young man’s ri-ht, almost his duty, to hope, almost to believe, that he has singular capacity, and is not merely another repetition of the constantly repeated average of men. P..-1 «>re he unfolds the bundle which his Lord has given him, he may well see in his imagination the five bright talents shining through its folds. We would not give much for the young man to whom there came no such visions and dreams of extraordinary life. To see those dreams and visions gradually fade away; little by little to discover that one lias no such exceptional capacity; to try one and another, of the adventurous ways which lead to the high heights and the great prizes, and find the feet unequal to them; to come back at last to the great trodden highway, and plod on among the undistinguished millions, that is often very hard. The fight is fought, the defeat is met, in silence; but it is no less, it is more terrible. The hour in which it becomes clear to a young man that that is to be his life, that there is nothing else for him to do except to swell the great average of humanity, is often filled with dangers. Let us see what some of those dangers are. In the first place, the man of two talents has to make up his mind to do without both of the different kinds of inspiration which come to the men who are better off and the men who are worse off than h< is. The man of five talents, the man of exceptional and opportunities excites admiration and e<’il pectation. He is conscious of abilities, and of the demands which other men make of him because of those abilities. He feels men’s eyes upon him. Wherever he goes there is a hush to see what he will do. He is surrounded with an atmosphere of responsibility. Men hang upon him lor his help. Men’s jealousy even, and their readiness to criticise him, and his own fear lest he fall short of his possibilities, are continual safeguards and incentives. This must be more to him than we can begin to estimate. And on the other hand, the man who labors under constant disadvantages, he also has a sting and a spur of quite another kind. To do great things in spite of difficulties, that is a very bugle-call to many men. There comes a desperation which is inspiration. To hear all men saying, “you can do everything,” there is great strength in that. To hear men saying, “you can do nothing,” in that too there is strength. Have you read the delightful biography of Henry Fawcett the English statesman, who, in total blindness, fought his way to the House of Commons and became a power in the realm? It has been the hopelessness of their lot that has made the noble lives of many of the noblest men the world has seen.

But now to the middle man, the man who is neither very much nor very little — the man who has two talents, but only two — both of these forms of impulse are denied. He is neither high enough to hear the calling of the stars, nor low enough to feel the tumult of the earthquake. What wonder if he often falls asleep for sheer lack of sting and spur. What wonder if IK- does the moderate things that seem to !><• within his power unenthusiastically, and thru stops, making no demand upon himself, since other men make no demand upon him.

And then again the work which the five-talent men and the work which the one-talent men undertake is apt to have a definiteness and distinctness which the work of the average man is very liable to lose. Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path «>f fire for its vivid power. Conscious limitation, on the other hand, knows there is no hope for it except in one direction. Both have the strength which comes by narrowness. But the man who knows himself to be only moderately strong, is apt to think that his strength has no peculiar mission. He wastes himself on this and that in general, and aims at nothing in particular. The commonplace man is the discursive man. He has neither the impetuosity of the torrent nor the direct gravitation of the single drop of water. He lies a loose and sluggish pool, and flows nowhither and grows stagnant by-and-by.

And yet again, there is the constant danger of being made light of by other men. The man of whom we speak becomes uninteresting to other people, and so loses interest in himself. He attracts no reverence and he enlists no pity. Men do not say of him, u How great he is!” nor do they say, “Poor fellow!” He finds himself unnoticed. He must originate out of himself all that he comes to. I Ithangs between the heaven and the earth, and i out of neither. What he does seems to be of no consequence, because it wakens no emotion in his brethren. He has no influence on other men, and so there is no effluence, no putting forth of life from him. Am I not telling a familiar story? Suppose your self an apostle of the Lord, a gospel exhorter, trying to stir men’s souls to repentance and to faith. Do you not know what you would say to the man of brilliant genius, how you would adjure him to consecrate his splendid powers to God? Do you not know what you would say to the poor hum an creature who seemed hardly more than a brute, begging him to claim his place in spite of everything among God’s children? But to the man of ordinary faculties and decent life and sluggish will, what can you say? I think of Jesus looking in the face of John, and John’s whole soul is stirred. I think of Jesus gazing mournfully at Judas, and I cannot estimate the power of that sorrowful reproach. There must have been a middle class; a temperate zone of the apostolic life — James the son of Alphseus, and Lebbaeus whose surname was Thaddaeus — between whom and the Master, life and the giving and receiving of emotion was more tame and less intense. However that may have been, the dangers of the temperate zone in life, less immediately under the Lord’s eye, are manifest. Routine respectability in conduct, unenterprising orthodoxy in opinion, an absence of high self-respect, which easily makes way for petty self-conceit, humbleness which is not true humility, and calmness which is not energetic peace, these are the dangers of the men who have counted the talents which th«-ir Lord has given them and found them only two.

Of course the other nn-n, the richer and the poorer men, have both of them their dangers, of “which one easily might speak iii other sermons. Whether they are greater or less than this man’s dangers, is but an idle and unanswerable question. This man’s are very real and very great.

And yet in spite of all of them (to come to the second of my two divisions), the man with two talents has a great chance in the world. Alas, for the world, if he had not I For, as I said, it is of him that the world mainly is composed. Let us turn now and try to see what his chances are. I would fain seem to my self to be looking, as I speak, into his oppressed and discouraged face, and would try to stir him to a more vigorous and hopeful and enthusiastic spirit. And I would say first, ought you not to remember that it is the quality, more than in the quantity of talents that their true value lies? Your talents may be two, another’s five, another’s one; the real point of importance is that yours, whether they be few or many, that yours, as much as anybody’s, were given you by God and constitute a true, direct, and sacred connection and channel of intercourse between your soul and His. That belongs to the very fact of gift. What matters it that hundreds of millions of other men have received about the BI amount of gift from God as you? What would it matter if hundreds of millions of other men’s p ft s had been exactly and absolutely identical with yours? That is not true. Your gifts, whatever they may be in bulk, are .different in kind from any other man’s that ever lived. But what if that were true? Would not your gift be still as truly yours, and open to your soul as true a possible communion with God as if you had been chosen to be the one only two-talented man in all his kingdom of humanity? You must forget your brethren, and think of Him. You must get beyond the relative and get into the absolute.

And if your place in the great crowd of mediocrity makes it the harder for you to attain to this, it ought to make the attainment all the more clear and sure -when it id won. It is easy for the mountain to trace the sun’s ray direct from the sun to its illuminated peak. It is harder for one wave on the tossing sea to believe that it too has its bridge of sun light to the sun; but when it once has found it, the undiscriminated wave must cling to that radiant bridge even more eagerly and strongly than the single separate mountain summit.

But then, when you have once separated yourself from the great mass, and realized your direct relationship to God, then you may come back into the mass again and see what are the special advantages which belong to a faithful life lived in the average condition, lived with the average capacities of man. Such a life brings out and makes manifest the solid strength which belongs to the simple qualities of manhood. We are so apt to grow frantic and fantastic in our struggles. We paint our heroes fighting their battles in the clouds or in the depths. Types of power which can only be developed in supreme joy or supreme sorrow enthrall our imagination; and then some plain man comes who knows not either rapture or despair, who simply has his daily work to do, his friends to help, his enemies to forgive, his children to love and train, his trials to bear, his temptations to conquer, his soul to save; and what a healthiness he brings into our standards, with what a genuine refreshment he fills our hearts. Behold how great are these primary eternal qualities — patience, hope, kindness, intelligence, trust self-sacrifice. We do riot accept them because we cannot have something finer. They show us their intrinsic fineness and we do them reverence. The arctic frost! The torrid heat! behold the true strength, the real life of the planet is not in these. It is in the temperate lands that the grape ripens and the wheat turns calmly yellow in the constant sun. Blessed is the life which grows it self into the consciousness of how strong a man is who with the average powers of a man keeps his integrity and purity, becomes ever more upright and pure, and also encourages the lives of other men. Blessed is the life which becomes always more aware of this, and makes it more evident to its brethren.

It is perhaps only saying the same thing in another way to claim that the man conscious of mediocrity has the advantage of displaying in his life and character the intrinsic and essential life of human nature. I have already said that he need not be lacking in the sense of personal distinctness. He gets that from his immediate connection with God. But the other sense, the sense of being thoroughly one with fellow-men, that too is very necessary for the fullest life. Let it exist alone,, and it may only amount to being lost in the great mass. Let it exist along with a clear consciousness of personal commission from the hand of God, and it is full of value. It backs the single career with all the history of man. It surrounds it with the warm domestic atmosphere of human society. Anything which breaks in upon that sense of living the intrinsic life of humanity and makes the personal life seem to be exceptional and original and solitary, whatever compensations it may bring, brings surely harm. It cannot be good for any man to live constantly in a condition which makes him count himself exceptional, or rather in a condition which makes him think more of the exceptional than of the universal element in his life. Sometimes, as a separate and temporary experience, it may be good. Sometimes to count oneself happy beyond any other man’s experience of happiness, sometimes to be compelled to cry “Behold and .see, was there ever sorrow like to my sor row!” that may be very good. It is veiy good for the single drop of water here and there to be cast up out of the stream and flash an instant in the sun alone, or be whirled alone a moment by the furious wind; but its great normal strength is for it to be part of the great current, to feel the universal purpose round and in itself. So only does it flow on in power and peace, and at hist come to the sea.

And if the man of two talents is able thus p<-< -uliarly to feel his oneness with his race, that does not only make him calm and happy. It also makes him strong. It is a source of power. It gives him the ability to help his fellow-men in ways which, whether they be greater or less than other men’s ways, are peculiarly his own. We naturally exaggerate the influence of notable people. I would not underestimate it. When God sends forth some shining herald of Himself, whose supreme felicity makes all men gaze in wonder; or when he opens and displays in some one of his children’s lives the depths of man’s capacity of pain, so that all other men stand over whelmed with brother-pain and pity; in either case he dowers those exceptional careers with special capacity of helpfulness. But the world does not, cannot rest for its perpetual needs on lives like those. It is not the wind which breathes upon the planet from without. It is the instinct which resides in each particle bedded deep in the mass of the planet, and which draws it always to the centre of its gravitation, that keeps the planet in its place. The man in whom men recognize simply an average human nature like their own, no greater and no less, who they know has all their passions and infirmities and no more than their strength to meet them with, he is the man who, being faithful, pure, serene, brave, hopeful, has power to make his brethren all that he tries to be, of a kind which no brilliant leader of his race can show.

For he can at once show men what is good and make it seem possible. These two together make the moral need of humankind. Men have perverted and false standards; and when they see what the true standard is, the life to which it seems to call them seems impossible. But here, lo! is a man whom they cannot call exceptional. And see, with just their tools he does this finer work. The thing they call impossible for men like them, he, being a man like them, does. Is there not here a power, and is it not a power which belongs distinctly to the man’s mediocrity, to the fact that he is an average man, and no exception?

Can you not conceive of a man’s feeling that inspiration, and is it not a noble inspiration for a man to feel? You answer me, perhaps, “Yes, but for the average man to feel that inspiration would prove that he was not an average man. The power to feel an inspiration such as that, constitutes him immediately an exception.” But T remind you that I am not talking of any mediocrity except that of powers or of circumstances. Not of a mediocrity in will or purpose. I am supposing a man of thoroughly commonplace and ordinary powers, and of perfectly monotonous life, who at the same time wants to serve his fellow-men. There is nothing violent, nothing incongruous in such a supposition; and what I claim is that such a man has, in the very 1 hings which make his chance seem most hopeless, a chance of influence and usefulness and power which is peculiarly his own.

Two other possible advantages of average lif<- I can do no more than just suggest to you. May it not find a self-surrender to the help of oth«T lives more easy, and make that self-surrender more complete just in proportion as it is released from that desire for self-assertion, that consciousness of being something which is worthy of men’s observation, that self- value which must haunt the lives of those who, in any way, on either side, find themselves separated from the great bulk of their fellow-creatures?

And is it not true that all that assertion of the intrinsic value of every life, which is the very essence of our Christian faith, all that redemption of the soul, in the profoundest and the truest sense, which was the work of Christ, must come with special welcome and appreciation and delight to any man who feels his insignificance, and is in danger of losing himself in the vague mass of his fellows. Christ redeems him. Christ says, “Behold yourself in me, and see that you are not insignificant.” Christ says, “I died for you.” Set thus upon his made a new man, or made to be the man he is, with what gratitude and faith and obedience must that man follow the Christ who is his Saviour!

Here let us pause. Shall we not seem to see this man of the two talents standing with what seem to be the respectable and comfortable, but uninspiring .•Hid uninteresting conditions of his life, this man for whom the prophecy of Agur, the son of Jakeh has been fulfilled, and who has been given “neither poverty nor riches.” What shall he do? If he were strong and abundant, he would stand up joyously and sweep away evil, and set wrong right, and build some corner of the kingdom of God, to the sound of psalms and trumpets. If he were wretched and destitute, he would defy his circumstances, and make their very desperation sting him into strength. But now what shall he do? Just settle down into a life of uselessness and thoughtlessness and harmlessness and base animal comfort? That is what the temptation is so strong to do. Oh, that we might see to day that something else is possible. Oh that we might know that no child of God is lost into indiscriminateness from his Father’s sight! Oh, that we might see how out of the very fact of our mediocrity come opportunities of special faithfulness and of peculiar service to God and to our fellow-men.

“He that had received two talents, he also gained other two.” Those words, two verses on, complete the story of the average man, faithful in mediocrity. What an epitaph those words would make to write upon the tombstone of a man who, neither very rich nor very poor, neither very joyous nor very sad, neither very wise nor very ignorant, neither very strong nor very weak, had done his duty bravely and unselfishly, and then passed on, to be lost again among the hundred and forty and four thousand who follow the Lamb, but to do his portion of God’s work in heaven as he has done it on the earth. What soul

could ask for better destiny or praise than that?