Handley Moule.
Chapter x, continued.
To turn to another point, which is, after all, but one point of special brightness in the bright circle of consistency. I refer to that great qualification for Christian Service on which we have already dwelt in a previous chapter – an honest and unaffected self-forgetfulness, let me call it selflessness, in the worker’s soul, with reference to the work.
Deep in our nature, in the Fall, lies the sin of which this is the blessed contrary; and alas for the manifestations of that sin in the circles of Christian service! It appears all too often in just the most energetic, the most versatile, the most clever, of the servants of Christ those, perhaps, gifted with most capacity to originate and direct. Their capacities are the Master’s golden talents, and are certainly meant to be employed, in His time. But then, as the solemn associations of the misused word talent should of themselves remind us, they are never, no not for an hour, to be used for self, but for Him. The eager thought that the work, the enterprise, the organization, the connexion, is mine, is to be kept in jealous check. The first symptoms of religious envy are to be by the Lord’s servant as promptly and thoroughly dealt with as would be those of a formidable bodily disease; or rather, what is far better, the servant is to remember beforehand the danger of infection, and to live therefore in that germ-killing air, the presence and the peace of God.
It is a sorrowful sight, but not a very rare one, to see some otherwise admirable Christian ill of this disease already, and not taking the least action against it; to see a man manifestly equipped with manifold powers, and skill to use them, but with whom one fellow-worker after another “finds it very hard to work.” For the Christian in question is not content with being qualified to be first, to lead, to be prominent; he cannot be happy in any second place.
And it is scarcely needful to point out that the exciting causes of this malady can arise not only from the individual, but from the individual’s circle, whether it be the circle of personal connexion, or of special line of Christian enterprise, or of ecclesiastical organization. It is one thing to be loyal to well-loved associates and colleagues, to be soberly convinced about certain principles of Church order. It is quite another thing, and, alas, it is far more common and more easy, I fear, to be simply prejudiced, and filled with the spirit of self, in regard, for instance, of some marked blessing sent down on work or workers going upon a different, not to say an alien, line. It has no necessary connexion whatever with fixity of principle, clearness of conviction, and a discernment of things that differ. Analyse it, and it will come out as the spirit of self, the precise antithesis to the spirit of the Gospel. Let us, for our life of service, live habitually in the holy air in which this cannot live.
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