Chapter IV: Part 4

I can put it in a little story that a friend of some of us, George Truett, told to a little group some years ago in a western city. “I am fond,” he said, “of recalling the first soul it was ever given me to win to Jesus. I was a lad barely grown and a teacher in the mountains of Carolina. One morning, as we were ready for prayers in the chapel, there hobbled down the aisle to the front seat a boy of about sixteen years old. He was an eager, lonely-looking lad. I read the Scriptures and prayed and then sent the teachers to their classes. But my little cripple lad stayed. I supposed that he was a beggar. And I said to myself, ‘Surely this boy deserves alms. His condition betokens his need.’ So I went to him at recess and said, ‘My lad, what do you want?’ He looked me eagerly in the face and said: ‘Mr. Truett, I want to go to school. Oh, sir, I want to be somebody in the world. I will always be a cripple. The doctors have told me that, but,’ he said, ‘I want to be somebody.’

“He had won me. He told me of their poverty, and that was taken care of. I watched that lad for weeks and weeks. How bright his mind was! How eager he was to know! One day I called him into my office and said to him: ‘My boy, I want you to tell me something more about yourself.’ He told me how, a few months before, his father had been killed in the great cotton mill where he worked, and the few dollars he had saved up were soon gone. They tried to do their best in the county where they were, but found it difficult; so his mother said one day: ‘Let us move to the next county, where they do not know us. Perhaps we can do better where we are not known.’ So they moved and now he had come into my school. He said, ‘I want to help mother, and I want to be somebody in the world; so I made my appeal to you to come to your school.’ It was time in a moment for the bell to ring for books. I laid my hand on the head of the little fellow and said to him: ‘Jim, I am for you, my boy. I believe in you thoroughly, and I want you to know that I love you, my boy.’ And when I said that last word, the little pinched face looked up into my face almost in a lightning flash, and he said: ‘Mr. Truett, did you say you loved me? Did you say that?’ I said, ‘I said that, Jim.’ And then with a great sob he said: ‘I did not know anybody loved me but mother and the two little girls. Mr. Truett, if you love me, I am going to be a man yet, by the help of God.’ And when a few Friday nights afterwards I was leading the boys in their chapel meeting, as was the custom, I heard the boy’s crutches over in the corner. There Jim sat, in a chair away from the other boys to protect his leg. And a little later he got up, sobbing and laughing at the same time, and said, ‘Mr. Truett, I have found the Saviour, and that time you told me you loved me started me towards Him.’” And then our friend added, “Brothers, working men in the shops and everywhere are dying for love. Your grammar may be broken, your plans may be imperfect, your machinery may be crude, your organization may be rough; but if you love men and pour your hearts out to them honestly and directly, there will be a response that will fill your hearts with joy and heaven with praises.”

And the need and functions of hope should be viewed in no narrow personal way. We want to-day men who have a large and courageous faith in God for the nation and the world. Of recent years a mood of pessimism has spread through America. In one sense it represents a wholesome reaction from the spirit of braggadocio and spreadeagleism of an earlier day. So far it is wholesome. We need to be sobered and made modest and quiet in our national spirit. But it is a bad thing when a nation loses the zest of a great consciousness and a brave patriotism, and thinks meanly of what God can do with it. Our nation needs now not a timid and fearful sense of its impotence and incapacity, but a realization that, whatever its difficulties and defects, God has a mission for us which only we can fulfill for Him. For this mission those men must be the nation’s soul of hope and expectation who know that our greatest duty and service lie ahead of us and are waiting to be grasped by men whose hearts face the untried without fear.

And now shall we have this hope that nothing can slay? Do we want it? Well, it is so near to us that we do not need to reach out after it. You know where it is, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” “The Lord Jesus Christ,” as Saint Paul says in the opening words of his first Epistle to Timothy, “The Lord Jesus Christ, our hope.” This hope is not something that we work up out of the fragments of moral ideals that we find lying around in our lives or our nation. Jesus Christ is the hope for a man and a people. If we want it, why not now take Him? Genuinely, I mean, in a deep, living, religious way, take Him in His fullness of life? God and the nation want the men who are filled with His courage and hope:

“God’s trumpet wakes the slumbering world,
Now each man to his post.
The red cross banner is unfurl’d,
Who joins the glorious host? Who joins the glorious host?
He who in fealty to the truth
And counting all the cost
Doth consecrate his gen’rous youth,
He joins the noble host! He joins the noble host!

“He who, no anger on his tongue
Nor any idle boast,
Bears steadfast witness ’gainst the wrong,
He joins the sacred host! He joins the sacred host!
He who with calm, undaunted will
Ne’er counts the battle lost
But though defeated battles still,
He joins the faithful host! He joins the faithful host!

“He who is ready for the cross,
The cause despised loves most,
And shows not pain or shame or loss,
He joins the martyr host! He joins the martyr host!
God’s trumpet wakes the slumbering world.
Now each man to his post.
The red cross banner is unfurled.
We join the glorious host! We join the glorious host!”

LECTURE IV

THE JOY OF THE MINORITY

There are two forms of disloyalty. One is flinching, the other is compromise. Of course, the compromiser will never allow that he is disloyal. He is a practical man who realizes that theories and ideals have to be adapted to a practical world, and he gives up a part, and as unimportant a part as possible, in order that he may gain the rest. He feels himself quite capable of judging how much to give up and what part may rightly be given up. He will simply abate the unreason of a God who demands all righteousness, and to Whom the whole truth is truth. Let us set up against such men the uncompromising principle of the duty of non-compromise. It is a principle from which the wisest and best of men are sometimes won away in the supposed interest of the great ends which they seek, and for which they feel that they may rightly sacrifice subordinate issues. There is what some regard as a striking incident of this character in the life of that uncompromising man, Saint Paul. It is an exciting and instructive story. This is the way it is told in the twenty-first chapter of Acts (vs. 17–30):

“And when we were come to Jerusalem, the brethren received
us gladly. And the day following Paul went in with us unto
James; and all the elders were present. And when he had saluted
them, he rehearsed one by one the things which God had wrought
among the Gentiles through his ministry. And they, when they
heard it, glorified God; and they said unto him, Thou seest,
brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of them
that have believed; and they are all zealous for the law: and
they have been informed concerning thee, that thou teachest all
the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling
them not to circumcise their children, neither to walk after
the customs. What is it therefore? they will certainly hear
that thou art come. Do therefore this that we say to thee: We
have four men that have a vow on them; these take, and purify
thyself with them, and be at charges for them, that they may
shave their heads: and all shall know that there is no truth
in the things whereof they have been informed concerning
thee; but that thou thyself also walkest orderly, keeping
the law. But as touching the Gentiles that have believed, we
wrote, giving judgment that they should keep themselves from
things sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what is
strangled, and from fornication. Then Paul took the men, and
the next day purifying himself with them went into the temple,
declaring the fulfillment of the days of purification, until
the offering was offered for every one of them.

“And when the seven days were almost completed, the Jews from
Asia, when they saw him in the temple, stirred up all the
multitude and laid hands on him, crying out, Men of Israel,
help: This is the man that teacheth all men everywhere against
the people, and the law, and this place; and moreover he
brought Greeks also into the temple, and hath defiled this holy
place. For they had before seen with him in the city Trophimus
the Ephesian, whom they supposed that Paul had brought into
the temple. And all the city was moved, and the people ran
together; and they laid hold on Paul, and dragged him out of
the temple: and straightway the doors were shut.”

And that was the disastrous end of this conscientious experiment. Paul never tried another like it. Perhaps there is a construction of the story which forbids the idea that it was compromise but it suffices at any rate to raise the whole question of the wisdom of compromise as a principle of action. It is the one incident in Paul’s life where he might be thought even for a moment to have embarked on that course. Wherever else we see him, he is a man of firm and unflinching principles, who made no concealment of what he believed, and did not try to adjust his convictions and practices to other convictions and practices that were at variance with them.

In the second chapter of Galatians, you will remember, Paul is telling of a visit he made to Jerusalem some time before with Barnabas and Titus, in which they went up to consider these very questions. Some of the brethren in Jerusalem had endeavoured to persuade Paul to have Titus, who was a Gentile, circumcised, and Paul says, “To whom we gave place ... no, not for an hour.” And then he tells of the time when Peter came to Antioch and he withstood him to his face because he had been a trimmer and compromiser; for Peter, acting on the generous impulse of his own heart as to what was right, had indeed bravely eaten with the converted Gentiles, but when some men came down from Jerusalem who were close to James, he withdrew himself from the Gentiles, fearing, no doubt, that it might injure him in Jerusalem.

Paul does not say anything in any letter about this particular incident in Jerusalem, in which, for the one time in his life, he was overpersuaded by his friends and put in a position where he was very much misunderstood, and where he appeared to be compromising the great principles in which he earnestly believed. We know what the far-reaching consequences were. A great deal of trouble was brought into his life by this act. It was out of it that all those succeeding events came which took him at last to Rome to be tried before Cæsar. Some may say that these results were good. Undoubtedly God led Paul’s course on, but we may believe that God might have had even greater things for him to do if only he had in this incident pursued his customary course.

But we want to go far beyond the question as to whether the consequences may ever appear to justify acts of compromise. A course of action is right or wrong, not according to the consequences, but according to its conformity or unconformity to the character of God. And the point now raised is whether it is ever right for us to compromise our own firm convictions of truth and principle.

Now, the world tells us that such compromise is to-day absolutely unavoidable. Men and women, we are assured, cannot get along in a world like this without adaptations. If it is meant by this only that we are often obliged to adapt ourselves to that with which we do not agree, why, of course, we have to assent, because we are in a world of give and take of which we have to be a part, and it is necessary for us to live our life and do our work in this world. Here in many of our communities, for example, the saloons flourish. There is not one of us here in this audience who believes that it is wise that the saloon should exist under the protection of the government, but we have to live in a land where the principle with which we disagree prevails, and the only way we can escape is to go to some other land, and we would only find there some other principle with which we could not agree. We cannot live at all unless we are willing to adjust ourselves to an actual world. “Compromise” when used as the principle of such adjustment means simply that we must of necessity find room for ourselves among the crossing strands of life. “All government,” says Burke, “indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every vital and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.” “It cannot be too emphatically asserted,” says Spencer, “that this policy of compromise alike in institution, in action and in belief which especially characterizes English life is a policy essential to a society going through the transition caused by continuous growth and development.” And Emerson remarks, “Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other.”

If it is meant by compromise that we have to live under conditions with which we do not agree and to which we must adjust ourselves, why, of course, we must assent to that――it is perfectly obvious; but we do not need to live under those conditions assenting to them. We can bear our testimony against whatever we morally disapprove. We can assert our conviction by word or by the silent protest of life that those conditions are not right, and so to live in the midst of conditions in which we do not believe, but from which we cannot escape, is not compromise. It is compromise when we surrender our principles so that others do not understand what those principles are, or when we hold back something that is vital, or cover over deceptively or misleadingly something essential. When we take before men a position that is inconsistent with the position that in our hearts we are taking before God, that is compromise, and that is wrong. Regarding the truth in which we believe, the principles by which we know life ought to be lived, regarding these things there cannot be compromise, in our lives or in the Christian Church.

There is a noble essay by Mr. John Morley, as he once was, on this subject of compromise, its nature and limits, of which Scott Holland says in “Lux Mundi” that “no one can read that book without being either the better or the worse for it.” In it Morley takes up three different spheres of life. First, the formation of opinion; second, the expression of opinion when it is called out from us; and, third, the propagation of opinion; and then he pursues this line of argument: In the matter of the formation of opinion there cannot be any compromise at all. Every one of us is bound to hunt for the truth, no matter what the truth may be, and when we have found it, to give our lives absolutely to it. In the realm of the expression of opinion, nobody has any right to deceive any one regarding his principles and convictions when they are called forth. But in the third place, he admits room for compromise when it comes to the aggressive propagation of our convictions. He says that every man is not bound to propagate what he believes, and he takes for example his own case,――that of a man who does not believe in the Bible, who has abandoned the old religious views of his people, but who does not regard it as his duty aggressively to propagate his dissentient convictions.

In his own words his thesis is this:

“In the positive endeavour to realize an opinion, to convert
a theory into practice, it may be, and very often is, highly
expedient to defer to the prejudices of the majority, to
move very slowly, to bow to the conditions of the status
quo, to practice the very utmost sobriety, self-restraint,
and conciliatoriness. The mere expression of opinion, in the
next place, the avowal of dissent from received notions, the
refusal to conform to language which implies the acceptance
of such notions――this rests on a different footing. Here
the reasons for respecting the wishes and sentiments of the
majority are far less strong, though, as we shall presently
see, such reasons certainly exist, and will weigh with all
well-considering men. Finally, in the formation of an opinion
as to the abstract preferableness of one course of action
over another, or as to the truth or falsehood or right
significance of a proposition, the fact that the majority of
one’s contemporaries lean in the other direction is naught,
and no more than dust in the balance. In making up our minds
as to what would be the wisest line of policy if it were
practicable, we have nothing to do with the circumstance that
it is not practicable. And in settling with ourselves whether
propositions purporting to state matters of fact are true or
not, we have to consider how far they are conformable to the
evidence. We have nothing to do with the comfort and solace
which they would be likely to bring to others or ourselves, if
they were taken as true.”

Now, we cannot but be rather grateful that men, who if they spoke would have to oppose Christianity, take this view and remain silent, and yet that is not our principle. Believing in Christianity, we believe that it would be wrong and unworthy compromise to conceal it and to refrain from propagating it. Mr. Morley prefixed to his essay Whately’s saying, “It makes all the difference in the world whether we put truth in the first place or in the second place.” We hold to another word of Whately’s also: “If our religion is false, we must change it. If it is true, we must propagate it.” Notice that Morley is speaking not of his doubts, but of his convictions. There is no obligation of a propaganda of insecurity. There is an obligation to propagate positive truth. It must, of course, be the truth that I believe. When I am asked what I believe I must, of course, tell the truth. But we believe something far more than that. The religious truth that one believes he must give his life to propagate throughout the world, and it would not make any difference if he were the only man in the world who held that truth, it would still be his duty, if he believed it was the truth and the great and necessary truth of life, to go out single-handed to defend and propagate it. Athanasius is regarded as an impracticable and troublesome type but the progress of the world is often lifted forward a sheer and discernible stage by such uncompromisingness.

Let us set forth some of the reasons why we may believe that there dare not be, in our Christian life and our Christian service, any compromise whatever, either in our searching for the truth, in our utterance of the truth, or in our aggressive and active propagation of the truth throughout the world. This is to put the matter, of course, very broadly and sweepingly. There is a great deal to be said for some of Morley’s nice discriminations. But actual life is a very rough and imperative and elemental thing. The difficulty of acting on any body of wary and wavery casuistical principles is enormous. The really workable principle of actual living must be very simple and uncomplicated and direct. The only safe ethical law is “No lie,” no lie whatever or under any justification. So also, however crude and blunt the rule may be, “No compromise” is the only practicable right rule. Mr. Morley closed his essay with such a plain word: “It is better to bear the burden of impracticableness, than to stifle conviction and to pare away principle until it becomes mere hollowness and triviality.” And in the beginning he wrote: “Our day of small calculations and petty utilities must first pass away; our vision of the true expediencies must reach further and deeper; our resolution to search for the highest verities, to give up all and follow them, must first become the supreme part of ourselves.” The loss by compromise to ourselves and others is certain, while its gain is uncertain and problematical.

In the first place, one believes this because compromise makes no contribution to the settlement of the real issue over truth. It is true that all the boundaries between truth and error are not clear and sharply drawn lines. Often there is a gray and misty region between. And much truth is only slowly and gradually won. But the ideal of truth is clearer than the sun and as pure as the character of God. And we have a far richer chance of winning it and all that it brings with it, if we both think and live it uncompromisingly. “The political spirit,” says Mr. Morley in noble words, “is the great force in throwing love of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place. The evil does not stop here. This achievement has indirectly countenanced the postponement of intellectual methods, and the diminution of the sense of intellectual responsibility, by a school that is anything rather than political. Theology has borrowed, and coloured for her own use, the principles which were first brought into vogue in politics. If in the one field it is the fashion to consider convenience first and truth second, in the other there is a corresponding fashion of placing truth second and emotional comfort first. If there are some who compromise their real opinions, or the chance of reaching truth, for the sake of gain, there are far more who shrink from giving their intelligence free play, for the sake of keeping undisturbed certain luxurious spiritual sensibilities....

“The intelligence is not free in the presence of a mortal fear lest its conclusions should trouble soft tranquillity of spirit. There is always hope of a man so long as he dwells in the region of the direct categorical proposition and the unambiguous term; so long as he does not deny the rightly drawn conclusions after accepting the major and minor premises. This may seem a scanty virtue and very easy grace. Yet experience shows it to be too hard of attainment for those who tamper with disinterestedness of conviction, for the sake of luxuriating in the softness of spiritual transport without interruption from a syllogism. It is true that there are now and then in life as in history noble and fair natures, that by the silent teaching and unconscious example of their inborn purity, star-like constancy, and great devotion, do carry the world about them to further heights of living than can be attained by ratiocination. But these, the blameless and loved saints of the earth, rise too rarely on our dull horizons to make a rule for the world. The law of things is that they who tamper with veracity, from whatever motive, are tampering with the vital force of human progress. Our comfort and the delight of the religious imagination are no better than forms of self-indulgence, when they are secured at the cost of that love of truth on which, more than on anything else, the increase of light and happiness among men must depend. We have to fight and do lifelong battle against the forces of darkness, and anything that turns the edge of reason blunts the surest and most potent of our weapons.” We do not believe in compromising, because it makes no contribution to the larger discerning of truth or the triumphing of that truth over error.

In the second place, we do not believe in it because it creates a great many more difficulties than it removes. Now, Paul was invited to this compromising course in Jerusalem by his misguided friends because they thought it would avoid trouble. They wanted to set Paul right with the Jewish Christians in the city, and maybe with the Jews who were not Christians; they wanted to remove an impression which they thought prevailed regarding Paul’s attitude towards the Mosaic customs in the Gentile world.

Now, as a matter of fact, the principle of that impression was true, for although, as Dr. McGiffert says, Paul

“recognized the legitimacy of Jewish Christianity, and the
right of Peter and other apostles to preach to the Jews the
Gospel of circumcision, and though there is no evidence that he
ever undertook to lead the Jews as a people to cease observing
their ancestral law, he had certainly been in the habit of
insisting that his Jewish converts should associate on equal
terms with their Gentile brethren, and that they should not
allow their law to act in any way as a barrier to the freest
and most intimate association with them. But this, of course,
meant, in so far, their violation of the law’s commands. It
is certain also that Paul had preached for years the doctrine
that not the Gentile Christian alone but the Jewish Christian
as well is absolutely free from all obligation to keep the law
of Moses, and though such teaching might not always result in
a disregard of that law by his Jewish converts, it must have
a tendency to produce that effect and doubtless did in many
cases. It is clear therefore that both accusations had much
truth in them, and it is difficult to suppose that Paul can
have deliberately attempted in Jerusalem to prove them wholly
false.

“And yet, though as an honourable man and a man of principle
he can hardly have undertaken to demonstrate that there was
no truth in the reports which were circulated concerning
him, it may well be that he tried to show that they were not
wholly true. It was evidently assumed by those who accused
him of ‘teaching all the Jews which are among the Gentiles to
forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children,
neither to walk after the customs,’ that he hated the Jewish
law and that he was doing all that lay in his power to destroy
it; that he believed and that he taught everywhere that its
observance was under any and all circumstances a positive
sin. But this assumption was not true. Paul was certainly not
hostile to the law in any such sense. He believed that it had
no binding authority over a Christian, and he opposed with
all his might the idea that its observance had any value as a
means of salvation, or that it contributed in any way to the
believer’s righteousness or growth in grace; but he held no
such view of the law as made its observance necessarily sinful,
and rendered it impossible for him ever to observe it himself
in any respect. And it was not at all unnatural that he should
desire to convince the Christians of Jerusalem of the fact;
especially when he had come thither with the express purpose
of conciliating them and winning their favour for himself and
for his Gentile converts. He would have been very foolish under
these circumstances to allow such a false impression touching
his attitude towards the law to go uncontradicted.”[1]

[1] “The Apostolic Age,” p. 341.

This is a satisfactory defense if one were needed of Paul’s course, but no one would question his motive. That was right enough and he evidently acted in all good conscience, but the procedure, instead of getting him out of his trouble, got him into worse trouble. It always does that. I do not believe any man was ever permanently helped by compromise. Every man who has begun to play with it has been drawn into worse difficulties and troubles, or has gone down, perhaps without conscious difficulty but with real moral loss, to a lower level of life. For one thing, compromise blurs the line of cleavage between truth and error, and that is exactly what no one of us can afford to have done. We do not want the lines of distinction between what is true and what is false slurred over for us. We want them sharpened so that we shall make as little mistake as possible as to where they lie. Furthermore compromise gets us into more difficulty than it removes, because it throws together things that are not congruous or reconcilable. This is its very nature. It brings into one bed things that cannot sleep together, into one union things that cannot be tied. And it postpones real settlements in the interest of spurious arrangements, sacrificing some

“greater good for the less, on no more creditable ground than
that the less is nearer. It is better to wait, and to defer
the realization of our ideas until we can realize them fully,
than to defraud the future by truncating them, if truncate
them we must, in order to secure a partial triumph for them
in the immediate present.... What is the sense, and what is
the morality, of postponing the wider utility to the narrower?
Nothing is so sure to impoverish an epoch, to deprive conduct
of nobleness, and character of elevation.”

These are Mr. Morley’s closing words. This is the second reason why we believe there can be no room for compromise in our Christian life or service.

In the third place, it encourages evil by making it think that having got so much it can get the rest, and so it prolongs the life of evil. That is exactly what compromise did in the old days of slavery. Every one of those early compromises prolonged the life of evil which at last the nation had to pour out its blood to destroy. That is what compromise always does. It persuades evil that, after all, maybe evil can win the victory, that having gotten so much from us it can get the rest if only it will be patient, and we simply increase the courage of our foe in proportion as we make any compromise with him instead of standing up face to face against him from the very beginning. And so it destroys the power and might of right causes by mixing in the taint of wrong. You do not make a good man better by putting a dash of bad in him. You do not make a good cause stronger by letting the evil come in; you only weaken its strength and power. Compromise plays into the hands of the very evil which we are here to overcome and destroy.

In the fourth place, compromise breaks down the strength of rigid consistency, and by letting in one qualification prepares the way for others. That is the reason why it is so much harder for a man to be a moderate drinker than to be a total abstainer. As was said of Samuel Johnson, “He could practice abstinence but not temperance.” When a man has made up his mind that he will never do a thing, it is a great deal easier for him to refuse to do it in any given instance than if he has made up his mind that he will do it moderately, because he never knows when he ceases to be moderate. There is a sharp line between moderate drinking and total abstinence. That boundary line no one can ever mistake, but the boundary line between intemperance and moderation is not located anywhere. There is no definite border between those two countries. As a matter of fact, every man starts in by being a moderate drinker. He never intended to become anything else but a moderate drinker when he began. But there is a boundary line so clear that a blind man can see it between yes and no, between not doing a thing at all and doing that thing only moderately. We believe in the principle of absolutely no compromise in moral habit and principle, and we believe in the same principle in our clear and evangelical convictions regarding the Christian faith.

In the fifth place, we ought to shun all such compromise because it undermines our confidence in men, and the solid unity of their coöperative action. We know where truth is, but we never know where calculating compromise may be. In the language of the deaf and dumb this is the sign for truth――a straight line right away from your mouth――for the simple reason that between two points there is only one straight line, but there may be many crooked lines. The truth is always a single thing, but the error,――no man knows what it may be. No compromise makes possible unity of accord by giving people one standard on which they can rely, and by supplying confidence in the stability of men and their convictions. But we cannot follow the compromising man, for as soon as he gets out of our sight we do not know where he will be.

It is the man who makes no compromise, who stands fast by truth, that we know we can locate. It was that which gave Stonewall Jackson his huge power as a leader of men in the Civil War. He was a man of the most unflinching Christian convictions. He was one who never moved the breadth of a hair from his loyalty to his Lord or to truth as he saw truth in the presence of his Lord. Colonel Henderson draws for us a rich picture of the great soldier’s character and it is full of genial and kindly touches, but it is faithful also in its account of the man’s rigid and inflexible righteousness.

“Jackson’s religion entered into every action of his life. No
duty, however trivial, was begun without asking a blessing, or
ended without returning thanks. ‘He had long cultivated,’ he
said, ‘the habit of connecting the most trivial and customary
acts of life with a silent prayer.’ He took the Bible as his
guide, and it is possible that his literal interpretation
of its precepts caused many to regard him as a fanatic. His
observance of the Sabbath was hardly in accordance with
ordinary usage. He never read a letter on that day, nor
posted one; he believed that the Government in carrying the
mails was violating a divine law, and he considered the
suppression of such traffic one of the most important duties
of the legislature. Such opinions were uncommon, even among
the Presbyterians, and his rigid respect for truth served to
strengthen the impression that he was morbidly scrupulous.
If he unintentionally made a misstatement――even about some
trifling matter――as soon as he discovered his mistake he would
lose no time and spare no trouble in hastening to correct it.
‘Why, in the name of reason,’ he was asked, ‘do you walk a mile
in the rain for a perfectly unimportant thing?’ ‘Simply because
I have discovered that it was a misstatement, I could not sleep
comfortably unless I put it right.’

“He had occasion to censure a cadet who had given, as Jackson
believed, the wrong solution of a problem. On thinking the
matter over at home, he found that the pupil was right and
the teacher wrong. It was late at night and in the depth of
winter, but he immediately started off to the Institute,
some distance from his quarters, and sent for the cadet. The
delinquent, answering with much trepidation the untimely
summons, found himself to his astonishment the recipient
of a frank apology. Jackson’s scruples carried him even
further. Persons who interlarded their conversation with the
unmeaning phrase ‘you know’ were often astonished by the blunt
interruption that he did _not_ know; and when he was entreated
at parties or receptions to break through his dietary rules,
and for courtesy’s sake to seem to accept some delicacy, he
would always refuse with the reply that he had ‘no genius for
seeming.’ But if he carried his conscientiousness to extremes,
if he laid down stringent rules for his own governance, he
neither set himself up for a model nor did he attempt to
force his convictions upon others. He was always tolerant; he
knew his own faults, and his own temptations, and if he could
say nothing good of a man he would not speak of him at all.
But he was by no means disposed to overlook conduct of which
he disapproved, and undue leniency was a weakness to which
he never yielded. If he once lost confidence or discovered
deception on the part of one he trusted, he withdrew himself as
far as possible from any further dealings with him; and whether
with the cadets or with his brother-officers, if an offense
had been committed of which he was called upon to take notice,
he was absolutely inflexible. Punishment or report inevitably
followed. No excuses, no personal feelings, no appeals to
the suffering which might be brought upon the innocent, were
permitted to interfere with the execution of his duty.”

“As exact as the multiplication table,” some one said of him, “and as full of things military as an arsenal.” Those of us who are looking for the secret of Christian influence over others may be sure that we will find it here. Men are not going to follow the shifting man. They will follow the man who makes no compromise, who has his firm convictions and who stands by those convictions, no matter what the cost of his loyalty may be. Recent American politics are rather eloquent and convincing on this point.

In the sixth place, compromise in principle substitutes reliance upon majorities for reliance upon the truth, and the majorities never have been right and we may doubt whether, until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again, they ever will be right. God never has relied upon the majority. He never has waited to do His work until it was ready to side with Him. In all ages God has done His work by the few. In Old Testament times He did it by the few. The one principle prevailed always――not by might, nor by power. It was ever only “the Sword of the Lord and of Gideon.” When our Lord came He did His work with the few. Through all the ages God has been working so, and we simply depart from His whole method in history when by compromise we try to get the force of the majority on our side. The force of the majority does not amount to anything in comparison with the force of truth. “The history of success,” says Mr. Morley, “as we can never too often repeat to ourselves, is the history of minorities.” And we do not believe in compromise because it substitutes our reliance upon the majority for our reliance upon the truth of God, and upon the strength of God to enable the few with the truth to triumph against the error of the crowd. This passes for foolish idealism and some of our most popular political leaders and reformers have poured scorn upon the idealists and dreamers, who are not to be numbered among the practical men.

“One would like to ask them what purpose is served by an ideal,
if it is not to make a guide for practice and a landmark
in dealing with the real. A man’s loftiest and most ideal
notions must be of a singularly ethereal and, shall we not
say, senseless kind, if he can never see how to take a single
step that may tend in the slightest degree towards making
them more real. If an ideal has no point of contact with what
exists, it is probably not much more than the vapid outcome
of intellectual or spiritual self-indulgence. If it has such
a point of contact, then there is sure to be something which
a man can do towards the fulfillment of his hopes. He cannot
substitute a new national religion for the old, but he can
at least do something to prevent people from supposing that
the adherents of the old are more numerous than they really
are, and something to show them that good ideas are not all
exhausted by the ancient forms. He cannot transform a monarchy
into a republic, but he can make sure that one citizen at least
shall aim at republican virtues, and abstain from the debasing
complaisance of the crowd.”[2]

[2] Morley, “Compromise,” p. 226.

And we might add, “he cannot instantly make truth the life of the nation, but he can be loyal to its commandments. He cannot make political leaders honest and patriotic, but he can refuse to profit by their dishonesty or to regard them as honest men if they will but wear his badge and seek their own ends by promoting his. He can form his own ideals of honour and glory and live by them whatever way others may go.”

In the seventh place, compromise increases in peril as we draw near the highest. If you take a man who is down on the lower levels, compromise does not mean as much to him as it does to men who have been climbing up. The nearer we come to Christ and the highest truth, the more perilous does compromise become. As Edward Thring said: “In proportion to excellence, compromise is impossible. A single leak sinks a great ship, a raft that is all leaks floats.” That is just the deep lesson that men and women need to learn; that the higher and cleaner and more morally lofty or exacting the life, the more perilous compromise becomes to it. One has heard Christian men say sometimes that they thought they were safe in doing what this or that man, not as strong or experienced or mature, could do. It is a great mistake. The clearer and stronger a man’s life, the more careful must the man be, the more solicitous, the more anxious, lest thinking he stands he falls. One of the greatest things about the life of Paul was the humility and self-distrust in which he walked, fearing lest when he had preached to others he himself might be a castaway. We have to learn that here lies power and duty, and that the cleaner Christ makes any human life, the more careful must that life be to keep all its habits pure and unsullied, and its convictions of truth unflinching and firm.

It was this principle that made our friend, S. H. Hadley, and that makes so many men who have escaped from the slavery of drink, go to extremes in cutting off physical indulgences. Mr. Hadley not only dropped once and forever the use of alcohol, but he stopped tobacco too, and he tried to get every drunkard whom he was seeking to save to discontinue the use of nicotine. He held that men should be clean every whit and his strong conviction was that while he would not for a moment class such indulgences together, nevertheless the man who wanted to be free from the one would find his deliverance far easier if he sloughed off the other also. It is safer and easier to be thoroughgoing and indiscriminate, if you will, than to be always calculating how great risks can be safely run.

And, lastly, we believe in no compromise because the truth is bound to prevail, and it will triumph the soonest when it is least hampered and tied up with error or with qualification. One might stop here to make a defense on this ground of the fanatics and devotees, but it is enough to say that the truth is going to prevail because it is God’s truth, and hell and all hell’s power in the world cannot stand against it. What is the use in delaying the day of that triumph by compromising with error? The right will prevail all the faster if we make no compromise with error, if we go out and preach unflinchingly and courageously with no compromise, with no surrender or economy or adaptations, the hard, plain truth of God as we see it. If what we think is truth is really error, it will be the sooner beaten down for being made to stand up for itself. But if it is indeed the truth we know it will prevail the more in the world as we keep it free from all connection with anything that will weaken or becloud it.

I know how much danger there is in such an attitude as this if we take it up towards the truth that we hold. It lies in our human nature to go to violence or extremes with everything. Martin Luther used to say that human nature is like a drunken man trying to ride a horse, you prop him up on one side and he topples over on the other. It is that way with us. We try to be firm and we become hard-hearted. We pride ourselves on uncompromising loyalty to the truth and we lack the tenderness and sympathy. Moreover, as Bushnell said in his essay on “Christian Comprehensiveness”:

“It is the common infirmity of mere human reformers that, when
they rise up to cast out an error, it is generally not till
they have kindled their passions against it. If they begin with
reason, they are commonly moved, in the last degree, by their
animosities instead of reason. And as animosities are blind,
they, of course, see nothing to respect, nothing to spare.
The question whether possibly there may not be some truth or
good in the error assailed, which is needed to qualify and
save the equilibrium of their own opposing truth, is not once
entertained. Hence it is that men, in expelling one error, are
perpetually thrusting themselves into another, as if unwilling
or unable to hold more than half the truth at once.”

And yet these dangers are lesser dangers than the danger of surrendering the truth. And we can be guarded from them by the great and unselfish love that guarded Paul. The man who loves others more than he loves himself, who holds human lives sacred and free from invasion, who is seeking not his own glory, but the glory of God and the good of men, is in little danger from an absolutely uncompromising loyalty to the truth.

And if ever men have any doubts or misgivings regarding this, or if the time of discouragements and fears comes to them, and they look with longing to the multitudes who act together, while they think of themselves as just a few, bearing testimony for the truth against error and sin, they may encourage themselves with Mr. Matthew Arnold’s doctrine of the remnant, or better yet, by remembering the great Solitary, Jesus Christ. How lonesomely He walked His way; seeing what no other soul was seeing; standing alone for the great truth which He uttered, and at last meeting death upon the cross alone; one of His disciples having betrayed Him, another having three times denied that he ever knew Him, and all the others having left Him and gone away! And yet as we look back, we see that lonely cross ruling the whole world, and that forsaken figure men are clothing now with the crown of everlasting light, and His name is above every name. All that we are asked to do is simply to follow in His train, to take up the truth which He opened, and for that truth to be willing to live, and, which is far easier, if need be, to die. Our lives are ours for this one thing, that through them, without compromise with error or with sin, God may bear testimony to Himself, and whether He does that through many years or through few, through peaceful personal service or through storm and tragedy, is of no consequence. The one thing that is of consequence is that we should know and be true to God.

But there is a better way to set forth and commend this principle as a law of life than by arguing it in these general terms. Let the principle put on flesh and live before us in a man:

“And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the sojourners of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the Lord, the God of Israel, liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.”

The old man who spoke these words was one of the four great characters of the Old Testament. He and Moses and Samuel and David stood apart in the thought of the Hebrew people. Indeed, there was a sense in which he and Moses were in a class by themselves. The appearance of those two with our Lord on the Mountain of Transfiguration was only an illustration of the place which they held in the imagination of Israel.

These were the first words he spoke as he bursts on our view. What lay behind them we can only surmise. He was a Tishbite, one “of the sojourners of Gilead,” dwelling beyond the Jordan, a man brought up in the desert. There on the level sands, with the eye of God looking down upon him, he had come to a deep feeling of the soul’s lonely stand before God, and convinced of God and the righteousness of God he came over the Jordan to speak his message and do his work in the organized national life of his people. He was a clean-limbed, frugal-lived man, who gathered up his skirts about him, we are told, and ran straight away sixteen miles before the chariot of Ahab, from Carmel to the entering in of Jezreel; a calm, quiet, courageous, firm-principled man; bred so in the desert with God.

We do not have any very elaborate story of his life. He appears on the stage and then he vanishes. There are long periods of time covering years when he disappears entirely from the record. We can condense what we know about his life into six brief chapters, between each two of which there is an interval, in some cases, a long interval of time.

He appears first of all in connection with the great drought which he prophesied and which lasted for the three years he had foretold. We see him by the little brook Cherith, fed of the ravens, until through the long cessation of the rain the brook itself disappeared. Then we see him in the house of the widow of Sarepta, feeding with her on her little supply of meal, and in her hour of depthless sorrow raising her son from death to life. And then, in the second chapter, he breaks forth once more upon the national stage. Ahab and Obadiah, his chief man, had sought for him up and down the land, having divided the country between them, partly that they might seek water for their fast diminishing herds, partly that they might meet again and punish this troubler of Israel. At last, on one of the highways, the man of God appeared to the prime minister and told him that he had no fear to meet the king and would do so if he would carry word to Ahab. True to his word, he met the king, confronted him with his disloyalty to Jehovah, and challenged him to produce the prophets of Baal for the great test on Mount Carmel; and then, after his triumph, Elijah again disappears.