on all your parties. I’m too busy with my studies and the living of my own life. I do not covet any of these positions, let those who want them have them.” It all sounds very humble. In reality it is often selfish slacking. The inevitable happens. Because worthy men and women will not undertake public service and sit in committees, the work gets into the hands of the incompetent and unscrupulous. That is not to say that all men in public life are either incompetent or unworthy. One gladly bears testimony to able and unselfish service of those who run up and down to serve the community. One honors such people and it is to help them and to multiply their numbers that this is said. But we all know that the old fable is true to life and that the bramble rules because the olive declines.
In the church. But my main concern is with the church. Listen to these words. “There is, perhaps, no danger more threatening to the efficiency and peace of the church in these realms than the grievous tendency of men of culture and refinement to decline from its communion and its service.” That was written by Dr. Cox in 1872. It might have been written yesterday for it is true to the facts. Many of those who are best fitted to guide a congregation are either outside the church or, if within it, are content to pursue their own path rather than share its responsibilities and duties. They try, so they tell us, to be good in their own homes and that they are better and happier outside the organizations of the church. Anyway, it would be a waste of time.
Boiled down, it’s the old excuse of the olive and the vine, “Should I leave my fatness and my good cheer to run up and down after others?” The temptation we can all understand. When men are wise and happy, cultured and refined, pursuing their own ways in peace and context, it is a peculiar temptation to leave the wild to go its own way. From the days of the disciples, men who have stood on the Mount of Vision and Contemplation have wanted to abide there and leave the demoniacs and sufferers to others. Some of the tasks can be so vulgar and some monstrous, some of the people helped are so ungrateful, fellow workers can be small and mean and jealous. It is always easy to persuade ourselves that we are doing better by keeping aloof. No useful end will be served by simply indulging in condemnation. So, let me translate the lesson into other terms.
THE CALL TO THE CAPABLE
You have special culture, refinement, goodness. You might not keep them to yourself. “If our virtues go not forth from us, tis all alike as if we had them not.” A call comes through the special lesson of this fable. You are fitted for service, if you do not undertake it, other less fitted will have to do it. It will be idle for you to blame them or complain that the work is ill done. You say, “We need better men in the pulpit, in the leader’s meetings, in the Sunday School.” Exactly! What about you? It is because men and women of education and ability are shrinking that those of us who are less competent have to do the best we can.
The common life constitutes a call. We are a fellowship, a communion and no man is to live to himself. It would be a strange and quaint spectacle, says Dr. Cox, to see all the trees of a great forest stamping up and down in their roots to forward each other’s welfare. But, he continues, there is a spectacle far stranger than that, and very common: it is that of a Christian church whose members do not go up and down, helping forward the common welfare, each according to his ability. If we have any special gifts of mind and heart we are debtors to our fellow members. To think only of our comfort and ease, ever only of saving our own souls, comes near to meaning, “Every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.”
Not to use our gifts is to lose them. Here the figure of the material fails us. The olive tree will not lose its fatness nor the fig tree its sweetness by not serving the other trees. But in the spiritual realm service is the law of increase and idleness means loss. All God’s gifts thrive in work and increase in proportion as we are faithful stewards. From him that hath not is taken away that which he hath.
THE CALL TO THE LOWLY
There is one more word to be said. I can take nothing back that I have said, but I am anxious not to be misunderstood. And the last thing I desire is to discourage any lowly worker. There are some who are, and who know they are, not typified by stately and kingly cedars and oaks, but by the lowly bramble or hawthorns. Ask the hands of the people who go blackberrying. Let every tree bear its own fruit and do the best it can for the whole forest.
So, in the church, there are diversities of gifts and operations. Do the best you can with the best you have. If others who are better equipped than you shirk, try to make up for their indifference. Do not strive for mastery or place, do what you can, not in the spirit of lordliness, but in the spirit of lowliness. I can best drive home this closing lesson if I let that veteran warrior, Dr. Clifford, being dead, yet speak to us. Speaking of the great Earl of Shaftesbury, who sacrificed place and ease to serve chimney sweeps and ill-used toilers, Dr. Clifford said that the remedial acts got through were not so much acts of Parliament as acts of an apostle. And the doctor quoted these lines: “Does it make you mad when you read about some poor, stained devil who flickered out because he never had a decent chance in the tangled meshes of circumstance? If it makes you burn like the fires of sin, brother, you’re fit for the ranks—fall in!”
“Whoever has blood that will flood his face at the sight of a beast in the holy place. Whoever has rage for the tyrant’s might, for the powers that prey in the day and night. Whoever has hate for the ravening brute that strips the tree of the goodly fruit. Whoever knows wrath at the sight of pain, of needless sorrow and heedless gain, brother, you’re fit for the ranks—fall in!”15
15. This is a quote from a Masonic hymn, the author of which is unknown. It can sometimes be found in full under the heading “Our Social Problem” on Masonic websites.
“SAMSON—A CHARACTER STUDY”—Judges 16.20
(Preached eleven times from Fentiman Road 3/12/22 to Mount Zion, Cornwall 5/16/43)
Judges 16.20 “And he awoke out of his sleep, and said, ‘I will go out as at other times and shake myself.’ But he wist not that the Lord was departed from him.”
The story of Samson has so often been treated as a story for the entertainment of children that it is difficult to get for it the serious consideration it deserves. We will insist on thinking of Samson simply as an old-time Sandow, a slayer of lions, a fighter of Philistines, a man strong enough to pick up massive iron gates and walk away with them. We regard the story of his life as a giant story written to fascinate the infant imagination. Now all these things are in the picture, but they are as certainly not all the picture. I want to suggest to you that you have here a pregnant study in temptation and character that serious men and women cannot afford to neglect. You have a luminous illustration of how the decay of moral principle paralyzes power, and how the lust of the eye and the pride of life lead on to tragedy and failure.
If you have imagined that there is neither dignity nor profit in this story, let me remind you that one of the greatest of all Englishmen, himself blind and in danger, though with no moral fall behind him turned his thoughts to this story we have neglected. And if my setting of the story fails to move you, let me urge you to ponder Milton’s Samson Agonistes. The story, as told in the book of Judges, is too long for detailed consideration in this hour of service, but we may get the heart of it under three propositions.
THE DECAY OF MORAL PRINCIPLE MEANS THE PARALYSIS OF POWER
Think of the Jewish Hercules as he stepped on to the stage of action. He was a giant in more senses than one. He was prayed into the world and born into an atmosphere of piety. The smile of God was on his birth and nature added her choicest gifts. In body, he was brawny and strong, and he was keen and smart in intelligence and wit, and his courage matched his strength and intelligence. The Philistines, the enemies of his country and his religion, were like witless clay in his hands.
Here we instinctively feel he was the destined leader and deliverer of his people. Everything promised that. Yet the life that opened so brilliantly went out in tragedy. The opportunities