Greatest
Thing in the
World
His
Servants Shall
Serve
By:
Henry Drummond
If
any one wishes to know what he
can do to help on the work of God
in the world let him make a City,
or a street, or a house of a
City. Men complain of the
indefiniteness of religion. There
are thousands ready in their
humble measure to offer some
personal service for the good of
men, but they do not know where
to begin. Let me tell you where
to begin—where Christ told
His disciples to begin, at the
nearest City. I promise you that
before one week’s work is
over you will never again be
haunted by the problem of the
indefiniteness of Christianity.
You will
see so much to do, so many actual
things to be set right, so many
merely material conditions to
alter, so much striving with
employers of labour, and City
councils, and trade agitators,
and Boards, and Vestries, and
Committees; so much pure
unrelieved uninspiring hard work,
that you will begin to wonder
whether in all this naked realism
you are on holy ground at all.
Do not be
afraid of missing Heaven in
seeking a better earth. The
distinction between secular and
sacred is a confusion and not a
contrast; and it is only because
the secular is so intensely
sacred that so many eyes are
blind before it. The really
secular thing in life is the
spirit which despises under that
name what is but part of the
everywhere present work and will
of God. Be sure that, down to the
last and pettiest detail, all
that concerns a better world
isthe direct concern of
Christ.
I make
this, then, in all seriousness as
a definite practical proposal.
You wish, you say, to be a
religious man. Well, be one.
There is your City; begin. But
what are you to believe? Believe
in your City. What else? In Jesus
Christ. What about Him? That He
wants to make your City better;
that that is what He would be
doing if He lived there. What
else? Believe in
yourself—that you, even you,
can do some of the work which He
would like done, and that unless
you do it, it will remain undone.
How are you to begin? As Christ
did. First He looked at the City;
then He wept over it; then He
died for it.
Where are
you to begin? Begin where you
are. Make that one corner, room,
house, office as like Heaven as
you can. Begin?
Begin with
the paper on the walls, make that
beautiful; with the air, keep it
fresh; with the very drains, make
them sweet; with the furniture,
see that it be honest. Abolish
whatsoever worketh
abomination—in food, in
drink, in luxury, in books, in
art; whatsoever maketh a
lie—in conversation, in
social intercourse, in
correspondence, in domestic life.
This done, you have arranged for
aHeaven, but you have not got it.
Heaven lies within, in kindness,
in humbleness, inunselfishness,
in faith, in love, in service. To
get these in, get Christ in.
Teach all in the house about
Christ—what He did, and what
He said, and how He lived, and
how He died, and how He dwells in
them, and how He makes all one.
Teach it
not as a doctrine, but as a
discovery, as your own discovery.
Live your own
discovery.
Then pass
out into the City. Do all to it
that you have done at home.
Beautify it, ventilate it, drain
it. Let nothing enter it that can
defile the streets, the stage,
the newspaper offices, the
booksellers’ counters;
nothing that maketh a lie in its
warehouses, its manufactures, its
shops, its art galleries, its
advertisements. Educate it, amuse
it, church it. Christianize
capital; dignify labour. Join
Councils and Committees. Provide
for the poor, the sick, and the
widow. So will you serve the
City.
If you ask
me which of all these things is
the most important, I reply that
among them there is only one
thing of superlative importance
and that is yourself. By far the
greatest thing a man can do for
his City is to be a good man.
Simply to live there as a good
man, as a Christian man of action
and practical citizen, is the
first and highest contribution
any one can make to its
salvation. Let a City be a Sodom
or a Gomorrah, and if there be
but ten righteous men in it, it
will be saved.
It is here
that the older, the more
individual, conception of
Christianity, did such mighty
work for the world—it
produced good men. It is goodness
that tells, goodness first and
goodness last. Good men even with
small views are immeasurably more
important to the world than small
men with great views.
But given
good men, such men as were
produced even by the self-centred
theology of an older generation,
and add thatwider outlook and
social ideal which are coming to
be the characteristics of the
religion of this age, and
Christianity has an equipment for
the reconstruction of the world,
before which nothing can stand.
Such good men will not merely
content themselves with being
good men.
They will
be forces—according to their
measure, public forces. They will
take the city in hand, some a
house, some a street, and some
the whole. Of set purpose they
will serve. Not ostentatiously,
but silently, in ways varied as
human nature, and many as
life’s opportunities, they
will minister to its
good.
To help the
people, also, to be good people
good fathers, and mothers, and
sons, and citizens—is worth
all else rolled into one. Arrange
the government of the City as you
may, perfect all its
philanthropic machinery, make
righteous its relations great and
small, equip it with galleries
and parks, and libraries and
music, and carry out the whole
programme of social reform, and
the one thing needful is still
without the gates. The gospel of
material blessedness is part of a
gospel—a great and Christian
part— but when held up as
the whole gospel for the people
it is as hollow as the void of
life whose circumference even it
fails to touch.
There are
countries in the world—new
countries—where the people,
rising to the rights of
government, have already secured
almost all that reformers cry
for. The lot of the working man
there is all but perfect. His
wages are high, his leisure
great, his home worthy. Yet in
tens of thousands of cases the
secret of life is
unknown.
It is idle
to talk of Christ as a social
reformer if by that is meant that
His first concern was to improve
the organization of society, or
provide the world with better
laws. These were among His
objects, but His first was to
provide the world with better
men. The one need of every cause
and every community still is for
better men.
If every
workshop held a Workman like Him
who worked in the
carpenter’s shop at
Nazareth, the labour problem and
all other workman’s problems
would soon be solved. If every
street had a home or two like
Mary’s home in Bethany, the
domestic life of the city would
be transformed in three
generations.
External
reforms— education,
civilization, public schemes, and
public charities—have each
their part to play. Any
experiment that can benefit by
one hairbreadth any single human
life is a thousand times worth
trying. There is no effort in any
single one of these directions
but must, as Christianity
advances, be pressed by Christian
men to ever further and fuller
issues. But those whose hands
have tried the ways, and the slow
work of leavening men one by one
with the spirit of Jesus
Christ.
The thought
that the future, that any day,
may see some new and mighty
enterprise of redemption, some
new departure in religion, which
shall change everything with a
breath and make all that is
crooked straight, is not at all
likely to be realized. There is
nothing wrong with the lines on
which redemption runs at present
except the want of faith to
believe in them, and the want of
men to use them. The Kingdom of
God is like leaven, and the
leaven is with us now. The
quantity at work in the world may
increase but that is all. For
nothing can ever be higher than
the Spirit of Christ or more
potent as a regenerating power on
the lives of men.
Do not
charge me with throwing away my
brief because I return to this
old, old plea for the individual
soul. I do not forget that my
plea is for the City. But I plead
for good men, because good men
are good leaven. If their
goodness stop short of that, if
the leaven does not mix with that
which is unleavened, if it does
not do the work of
leaven—that is, to raise
something— it is not the
leaven of Christ. The question or
good men to ask themselves is: Is
my goodness helping others? Is it
a private luxury, or is it
telling upon the City? Is it
bringing any single human soul
nearer happiness or
righteousness?
If you ask
what particular scheme you shall
take up, I cannot answer.
Christianity has no set schemes.
It makes no choice between
conflicting philanthropies,
decides nothing between competing
churches, favours no particular
public policy, organizes no one
line of private charity. It is
not essential even for all of us
to take any public or formal
line.
Christianity
is not all carried on by
Committees, and the Kingdom of
God has other ways of coming than
through municipal reforms. Most
of the stones for the building of
the City of God, and all the best
of them, are made by mothers. But
whether or no you shall work
through public channels, or only
serve Christ along the quieter
paths of home, no man can
determine but
yourself.
There is an
almost awful freedom about
Christ’s religion. “I
do not call you servants.”
He said, “for the servant
knoweth not what his lord doeth.
I have called you friends.”
As Christ’s friends, His
followers are supposed to know
what He wants done, and for the
same reason they will try to do
it—this is the whole working
basis of Christianity.
Surely next
to its love for the chief of
sinners the most touching thing
about the religion of Christ is
its amazing trust in the least of
saints. Here is the mightiest
enterprise ever launched upon
this earth, mightier even than
its creation, for it is its
re-creation, and the carrying of
it out is left, so to speak, to
haphazard—to individual
loyalty, to free enthusiasms, to
uncoerced activities, to an
uncompelled response to the
pressures of God’s Spirit.
Christ sets
His followers no tasks. He
appoints no hours. He allots no
sphere. He Himself simply went
about and did good. He did not
stop life to do some special
thing which should be called
religious. His life was His
religion. Each day as it came
brought round in the ordinary
course its natural ministry. Each
village along the highway had
someone waiting to be helped. His
pulpit was the hillside, His
congregation a woman at a well.
The poor, wherever He met them,
were His clients; the sick, as
often as He found them, His
opportunity. His work was
everywhere; His workshop was the
world.
One’s
associations of Christ are all of
the wayside. We never think of
Him in connection with a Church
We cannot picture Him in the garb
of a priest or belonging to any
of the classes who specialize
religion. His service was of a
universal human order. He was the
Son of Man, the
Citizen.
This,
remember, was the highest life
ever lived, this informal
citizen-life. So simple a thing
it was, so natural, so human,
that those who saw it first did
not know it was religion, and
Christ did not pass among them as
a very religious man. Nay, it is
certain, and it is an infinitely
significant thought, that the
religious people of His time not
only refused to accept this type
of religion as any kind of
religion at all, but repudiated
and denounced Him as its bitter
enemy.
Inability
to discern what true religion is,
is not confined to the Pharisees.
Multitudes still who profess to
belong to the religion of Christ,
scarcely know it when they see
it. The truth is, men will hold
to almost anything in the name of
Christianity, believe anything,
do anything—except its
common and obvious tasks. Great
is the mystery of what has passed
in this world for
religion.
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