“THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD.”
By G. E. Fifield
[Sermon by Pastor G. E. Fifield, preached at the camp-meeting at Ellsworth, Me., 1900, and written out for publication in the SIGNS, by request of the editor, who was present.] TEXT.—“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” I Cor. 13:13. PERHAPS this is the most wonderful comparison in literature. Here is faith, without which man’s life would be like the lives of the beasts that perish, absolutely bounded by the narrow span between the waking and the sleeping; faith that sweeps back the horizon, broadening grandly man’s life till he lives even here the life eternal, the hopes and joys of eternity becoming daily motive powers to righteousness. Faith that grasps the great fact that God is, better still, that He is my Father; faith that grasps the great fact that Christ is the Saviour of the world, more precious still, that He is my present and personal Saviour; faith that grasps the fact that this book (the Bible) is a letter from my Father to me, all its warnings for me, all its precious promises, too, for my soul, ah! how great, how grand is faith! And yet it is not the greatest or the grandest; for “now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” Here is hope, without which the heart would break; hope that in the darkest night ever whispers of a dawning morrow, on the brow of the blackest storm-cloud ever painting the bow of promise; hope, that, when earth hath done its worst, and all the joys of this life have failed, is still as an anchor to the soul both sure and steadfast, reaching within the vail. How well I remember a dear old sister who was slowly dying. They thought she would never speak again, but, holding an ear very close to her lips, she was heard to say, as with enraptured gaze her eyes looked heavenward, “The anchor holds.” Hope is that anchor. How great! how grand is hope! And yet it is not the greatest nor the grandest; for “now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” Surely it is worth our while for a little time to study this greatest thing in the world. We may, perhaps, better learn what charity is by first learning what it is not. There are those who think that charity is the gold, or the silver, or more probably the copper which we fling to the beggar we meet by the way-side. Ah no! The motive for the gift may, or may not, be charity; for there are many modern Pharisees who give to be seen of men. True, the modern Pharisee does not hire a trumpeter to stand on the street corner to proclaim his good deeds. We do things more scientifically in these days. Frequently he owns secretly and operates a big city daily, and publishes to the whole world his benevolence. The motive may, or may not, be6charity, but it is only metonymically speaking that we can truly call the gift itself charity. Then there are those who seem to think that charity is that failure to appreciate the real value and sacredness of truth which will enable a man to think that a falsehood is as good as the truth, so a man believes it sincerely. A Methodist may believe in free salvation for all, and that “whosoever will may come;” but he must not believe that so strongly as to think it is any better for him than the old predestination idea is for the Presbyterian; for that, they think, would be narrow and bigoted, and we must have charity. The Baptist may believe in baptism by immersion, that is his right; but he must not be so enthusiastic in his belief as to think that immersion is any better for him than sprinkling is for some other man. Even the Seventh-day Adventist, they think, may, if he wishes to, believe in, and practise the observance of the seventh day; but he must not think that Sabbath-keeping is any better for him than Sunday-keeping is for some one else. In short, the lie is as good as the truth if you only believe it sincerely; and it is narrow and bigoted and uncharitable to think otherwise. If this is charity, then Satan is the most charitable being we know of; for he has always been trying to make men believe a lie for the truth, and has thus led men into endless difficulty. Jesus, too, if this is charity, was most uncharitable. He came into a world where many honest teachers had preceded Him, in their blindness and ignorance doing their best. Honestly mistaken they had been, but Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father but by Me.” The disciples picked up the same strain, saying, “Neither is there salvation in any other; for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” How narrow and uncharitable this is, is it?—No, it is never uncharitable to speak the truth instead of a falsehood. A man may be honestly mistaken, but he is still mistaken. A man may honestly believe a lie; but his honesty does not make the lie a truth, nor rob it of its danger. In company with a friend I was once driving to the town of S. As we passed a road turning to the right, my friend said, “We ought to go that way to reach S.” I said, “No, I am sure you are wrong; we should go straight ahead.” We were both honest and earnest, but one of us was mistaken. As I had the lines, we went my way. My friend kept insisting that we were wrong, and that we never should reach S. going that way. To silence him, and utterly crush him so he could say no more, I asked a farmer toiling by the roadside the way to S. He said, “You ought to have turned at that road a mile back.” I was honest, and so perhaps not so guilty as if I had wilfully driven wrong, but still I should never have reached S. by that road. My honest tho mistaken belief only led me the more surely and persistently astray. It perhaps would be nice at such times if the world would slip a cog, and bring the desired place around in front of such an honest man; but it is not built that way. The relation of truth to action is, I think, not often well understood, and so I will speak of it briefly here. There are two things in the realm of thought, and only two; the true and the false. There are also two things, and only two, in the realm of action; the right and the wrong. Every act is preceded by a thought. I do not even move my hand till I think to move it. If the thought is a true one, the act it gives rise to will be a good one. If the thought is a false one, the act it gives rise to will be a wrong and bad act. All truth comes out into action somewhere,—action of righteousness. Every lie, also, however sincerely believed in, comes out into action somewhere,—action of unrighteousness. Truth is divine, for God is the truth. There is nothing therefore in charity which minifies the value of truth. God Himself can not sanctify us through a lie. He may in His infinite love do the best He can in spite of the lie, because of our honesty; but even then the lie is a limitation, preventing His perfect work. Jesus prayed, “Sanctify them through Thy truth.” But while charity can not look upon the lie itself with the least degree of allowance, charity looks beyond a man’s opinions; beyond their truth or their falsehood, their orthodoxy or their heterodoxy; beyond the man’s social state too, beyond his education or his ignorance, his poverty or his wealth, beyond even his morality or his immorality; and beyond it all, and back of it all, and way down underneath it all, charity sees a human soul; a poor, deformed, and shrunken thing it may be, missing, infinitely missing, the high possibilities for which God created it, and yet a human soul still so precious that Christ gave His life for it. Charity sees it not as it is, but as it is capable of becoming under the divine, transforming touch. Charity loves it not for its deformity, but in spite of the deformity because of the possible within it, loves it so as even to give its life with Christ for that soul, to bring out the possible, the ideal, and make it an eternal fact in that life. That this is the Bible meaning of charity we shall endeavor to show in our future study. That many have not understood this, and that far less have we all practised this in our lives, is no wonder. Charity is the greatest thing, the highest Christian grace, the topmost round of the heavenly ladder of Christian experience, from which the perfected Christian steps off into heaven’s eternal joys. To see that this is true we need only to read what is sometimes called Peter’s ladder: “Add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; and to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity.” These virtues are here named in the order of their development in the Christian’s life. By this it is not intended to say that any one of these virtues must be brought to perfection before the one above it can exist at all; but only that the successful development of any one of these, depends upon a prior development, at least to the same degree, of those below. “Add to your faith.” Faith is the foundation. Since faith is the telescopic eye that sees the invisible and the eternal, it follows that without faith a man is not living the eternal life at all, but only the life of temporal expediencies. His hopes and aims and motives are here in this world. If he is honest, it is because he considers honesty the best business policy, and not because he considers dishonesty a sin against God. The motive of such a life fails always just at the time it needs most to hold firmly. Almost all the large fortunes are built up on principles other than those of the divine standard of honesty. Amid the hot competitions of the day it is perhaps impossible for a man eminently to succeed, as the world counts success, without departing from the divine standard. This world furnishes no sufficient and enduring motive for a life of righteousness. This is why “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” Faith sweeps back the horizon of our existence till God, and heaven, and eternity, are brought near, and all the infinite hopes and joys and possibilities of eternity become present motive powers in the life. From faith in God comes that divine love which does right, not for any hope of personal gain here or hereafter, but for love’s sweet sake. This is the only true motive, and whatsoever is not of this motive, in God’s sight, is sin.