Cutting off a Right Hand.
By E. P. Powell
A MAN makes a very poor Christian who does not cut off a right hand occasionally. Giving up the positively bad or doing congenial duty weaves a thin robe of righteousness. The good must be given for the better, and the better often sacrificed for the best. It often amounts to plucking out a right eye or cutting off a right hand. What we hold dearest, what we see by, and what we hold by, are often in the way of a higher, finer life. I never understood Christ’s emphasis upon self-sacrifice till I had a dear friend shot within an inch of his heart with a double charge of pigeon-shot. The case was desperate. A messenger was sent in great haste to bring a famous surgeon from a neighboring city. But the gruff old man refused to come. “You must bleed him to death to save his life,” was all he would say. And so we did bleed him to the very edge of death, and saved his life. I understood then what Christ meant by, “He that would save his life must lose it.” In our reaction from the perhaps too frigid style of Puritanism, we have come into an era of Christian luxury. The most superficial logic allows all manner of indulgences as harmless. The question, however, should not be, What harm is there in it? but, What good is there in it? A life cannot be Christian without positiveness. A father has just been in to plead with me for help for one of his sons. Yesterday a mother came with agony inexpressible, and both had the same tale to tell. “Christians have done the work.” Our boys constantly reply, “If Mr. A. or Deacon C. can do so and so, why not I?” “And,” said a parent to me not long ago, “I told a prominent man in our church that I would hold him eternally accountable for the ruin of my boy. He led him to the billiard-hall, and coming away unscathed himself, he leaves my boy a prey to gamblers. How awful to have one’s own only son turned into a vile outcast.” “What did the man reply?” I asked. “He was angry, and declared that to him billiards and theaters were no harm.” Here was evidently a need of the sacrifice of a right hand. Every pastor knows how difficult it is to lead his people to measure all their deeds by the possible effect on others. A prominent member of a Detroit church some time since said to me, “I want you to accompany my wife to the opera to-night.” “I cannot,” I replied. “Why not? you are disengaged, are you not?” “But in A., I have lads in my care that have been harmed by going; I do not wish them to go.” “But they will never know it.” “I would not, for the world, know it myself, while among them.” There is very little likelihood of our knowing the effects of a careless action. Scores are willing to attend church, weekly prayer-meetings, make public profession of Christ; but the moment you ask of them to go not with the fashionable multitude, to bear the name of bigot or fanatic, for cutting off a right hand, they turn haughtily away. O soul! in that hour you turn away from the joy of God, from your best inheritance, and enter on a course of loss, compared with which a right arm is nothing. A company of gay young men just called, and, in the course of our talk, one said, “But, Mr. P., are you opposed to theaters and such things? Most Christians now-a-days have given in, as to those affairs.” I said, “Not exactly; but I think, at least, one of my boys has been seriously damaged, and two ruined by them, for all high ends. And don’t you think I ought to save a soul rather than please myself? I cannot get the young to understand higher things, till they give up lower.” “You are right,” they responded. I understand the “right hand” doctrine to be that every man has certain tastes, or habits, or methods of enjoyment, which are to him like a right eye or a right hand. He sets more by them than by all other methods of enjoyment. Every well-made man is adjusted to nature and to society so that he has strong points and strong inclinations. A true man is not a pond, but a river. He has a current; he runs east or west, north or south. We say of one, he runs to machinery; of another, he runs to natural science, or to the fine arts; another runs to mercantile pursuits. So one runs to one kind of emotional display, another to some other. One is fond of one pleasure, another runs to a very different style of enjoyment. And to give up ordinary pleasures or objects may be no sacrifice at all. It is easy for some to refrain from theaters and popular amusements; they cut off nothing in choosing, instead, a social gathering or a literary entertainment. They do not even pare a nail in preaching abstemiousness, temperance, and frugality. Their right hands are very different things. To go out among the low, the vulgar, the mean, and endure and give up valuable time, that cuts. To be one with the young in hours valued for high culture, that puts a sharp blade to the wrist. Is it right for a man to even give himself to scholarly pursuits and absorb himself in even high moral problems, and not feel the errors and sins of his fellow-men? His thinking, certainly, will not be healthy. But is he right? Ought he not occasionally to cut off a right hand of mental luxury, of even intellectual attainment, and bear a hand in the prime work of saving? Will he not gain a broader culture, a wider sympathy, a deeper humanity, by touching the wants and the weaknesses of the prodigals and wanderers? There are men in the pulpit who do not know how to enter into any other human being’s experience. They write limitless essays on the philosophy of faith and prayer, on baptisms and skepticisms; they dispute with phantom Apollyons; they throw small shot at Huxley and Darwin, but all the community about them is essentially a foreign land. They do not feel into and feel with the currents of human daily life. Jesus was Saviour in this, that he took up his cross daily for us, and gave himself for us.—REV. E. P. POWELL, in N. Y. Observer.