The passage: Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, or they will trample them and turn and tear you.
Churchmen in old times and our own have liked this text. From it come maxims and practices: “holy things for the holy” — hide the Altar from public view, keep a careful reserve about sacred mysteries.
Englishmen generally have little sympathy with these applications and denounce them. But they have their own version. They learn early that their most sacred things must be kept from the vulgar, scarcely mentioned even among friends. The schoolboy, however eager to share, senses he had better not throw down certain things among his companions lest they be trampled. This reserve deepens with age. The very words of this text — “dogs,” “the swinish multitude” — are familiar to us and affect us even when we don’t use them; election candidates, in their depths of servility, show they know these terms by heart. This is one precept of the Sermon on the Mount that doesn’t repel us by its severity — we practise it, in our own way, before we preach it.
But treated as a precept of our Lord, it raises difficulties, especially for us clergy. The maxim about giving holy things only to the holy has tradition behind it, is built into church forms. But what were we sent into the world for, if not to proclaim what is holy to the unholy? Did not our Lord say the physician is for the sick, not the healthy? Was not His work among publicans and sinners? Did He withhold His divine wisdom from them, or from the dogs who surrounded Him among the Scribes and Pharisees? How can we follow His example if we only speak His message to those we’ve first certified are not dogs or swine?
And there’s another question, for you as much as for us: by what skill do we tell who are dogs and who are swine? Let’s read what comes just before this text: “Judge not, that ye be not judged… why beholdest thou the mote in thy brother’s eye, and considerest not the beam in thine own?… first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then thou shalt see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Our text follows immediately. The two seem to clash violently: I may not judge my brother’s faults until I’ve dealt with my own greater ones — yet I’m to treat certain people as dogs and swine.
But perhaps these precepts illuminate each other more than we think. Perhaps obeying the first is the way to discover the reason for the second. Suppose it were true that the moment I judge my brother, I am casting the holy thing to the dogs; that the moment I look for the mote in his eye, I am casting pearls before swine. At first this seems monstrous. But if the context favors it, it’s worth asking whether our own experience favors it too.
Take the very instances before us. I meet a man with a snarling, savage, currish nature — he barks and growls at everyone, especially when they mention anything noble or holy, as if he can’t bear to acknowledge goodness exists. Seeing this, I judge him: he is of the Dog species, nothing else. Or I see a man who is gross, sensual, delighting in uncleanness. I judge him too: he belongs to the Epicurean sty, the species Swine.
Now in this very act — however justified it seems — I am giving the holy thing to the dogs and casting pearls before swine. For there IS a holy thing in that snapping, biting man, a man beneath all that is disagreeable and offensive; and I have handed that holy thing over to its tormentors — not only in my classification, but in fact. By denying there is a better, truer being in him, I confirm his own worst unbelief, strengthen the habits he’s yielded to, and persuade him he can do nothing else.
Is it different with the other man? There are precious pearls in the heart of that victim of his lusts. But I refuse to see them; I see only the swine trampling them, and I leave him to their mercy — even provoke them to fresh violence. I’ll have my reward: next time I see him, fewer pearls, and the swinish propensities turned on me, fiercer than before.
How has this happened? Because in my eagerness to judge these people, to fix them once and for all in their classes, I never asked whether these same canine and swinish traits might be found in me — whether I too carry the bestial nature that, in different forms, seeks to blot out God’s image in them. How terrible when that nature reveals itself in us too — when the judge is judged, the measure we used is measured back to us! Then we begin to suspect there is nothing in us but this evil nature, no spirit fighting against the flesh, no holy thing that hasn’t been thrown to the dogs, no pearls the swine haven’t trampled to nothing! It is not true — may God convince us it is not! May His Spirit, who convicts us of sin, convict us also of righteousness! May He show that the dogs would not howl so if there were no holy thing irritating them, that the swine would not tear the ground if there were no pearls they sought to trample! But discovering this grows harder the less justice we’ve done to others — justice we owe them as much as ourselves.
It may seem I have overturned the ordinary reading of this passage. I’d suspect myself if I had, for ordinary interpretations have great value even when they mislead — they’re usually shallow rather than false, and can be maintained on a sound footing without contradicting confessed truths. I hope that’s the effect of what I’ve said. I fully grant that the command not to give holy things to dogs nor cast pearls before swine bears directly on how we preach the Gospel and speak of the highest truths in ordinary conversation. What that bearing is, we’ll learn best by first getting rid of the painful doubt whether our Lord’s practice contradicted His own words.
The more closely we examine His discourses to the multitude, His disciples, His enemies, the more convinced we’ll be that His practice perfectly illustrated these words. He spoke to men who might, if any could, be called dogs — those described in the twenty-second Psalm, those who yelled at Him on the Cross. Yet He never withheld from them any holy truth, any revelation of God’s character, any announcement of reconciliation. But He never gave the holy thing to dogs, because He spoke not to the dog in the man but to the man in the man. He told how God was like a Shepherd seeking the lost, like a Woman sweeping her house for lost money, like a Father recovering the prodigal eating husks. He said, “Come unto Me, ye that are weary.” He said, “Ask of Me, and I will give you living water.” These messages went not to the carping, cavilling nature but to the spirit crying for deliverance and hungering for righteousness. If the message of peace met only a warring temper, He told His Apostles the peace would return to them — not wasted. The Kingdom of God had come near to those who heard it, had witnessed in their consciences; they were treated as men, not dogs; the dog-nature might rage, but the holy thing was taken from its teeth, not thrown to it.
So too He found men and women who had yielded to swinish lusts. To them also He preached deliverance, not condemnation. He withheld no holy promise from them. He said to the sinful woman, “Go in peace, thy sins be forgiven thee” — because His love had called forth her faith, which saved her from herself, raised her from the bestial nature. The merchant had found the goodly pearls; the swine could trample them no more.
But woes were mixed with His blessings — the most tremendous woes ever pronounced on nations or men. These were addressed to the dark, disputatious, filthy nature in nations and men, in Pharisees and Publicans, in you and me — announcements that the fan was in His hand to purge His floor, gather the wheat, burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. They especially denounced the judging, condemning temper that made the Jew an enemy of God, of mankind, of himself. The more seriously and heartily we believe these words belong to all time, the more the fleshly tendencies akin to dogs and swine tremble and are confounded, and the more the imprisoned Spirit, the trampled pearl, lifts itself and gives thanks to God — hearing in these curses on its tyrants the voice of the Deliverer, the assurance of its redemption.
Such is our Lord’s example. How do we follow it? How do we commit the error He warns against, and how escape it? We commit it whenever we try to present the Gospel of God TO the disputatious, quarrelsome dispositions in man. Most of us know how prone we are to this, and must confess with shame how often we’ve fallen into the very sin we charged on others. We speak what we think — or know — are truths. Others reject them or don’t understand. We say: it is stubbornness, unbelief, God has hardened them. We are somewhat angry for their sakes and God’s sake, but much more for the affront to us. The dog-nature in us meets the dog-nature in them. The holy thing is cast to the dogs; noisy debaters fight over it, gnawing it as if it were coarse earthly stuff, not divine at all. It matters little who wins — the thing they fought over has perished, or been reduced to a dry bone, in the strife.
I think we commit the sin of casting pearls before swine when we appeal to the lower nature’s motives on behalf of truths meant to raise men out of it. When we leaven God’s Word with carnal, idolatrous conceptions, on the pretense that a carnal generation can only receive it so — when we say we must speak of sensual rewards in a sensual paradise, since what higher thing could they understand? — when we say we must speak of outward material punishments hereafter, since what could they know of a worm in the conscience, of exile from a Father’s presence? — when we use to the poorest, most ignorant man a single phrase we do not ourselves believe, that we could not ask God to justify as His truth — then we are casting pearls before swine, cultivating and making mighty what God hates and curses, what He sent His Son to deliver us from, what shall be cast into the lake of fire. And as surely as God’s laws cannot change, as surely as Christ’s words will not pass away when Heaven and Earth pass away, these swine we have fed and fattened will turn and rend us. There is not a pious fraud ever invented for pious ends that has not served impiety, weakened mankind’s faith, become a weapon for its opponents. There is not an unworthy inducement ever urged to make men good that has not helped make them wicked. Woe to the world, woe to the Church, for these offences! May God teach us it were better to have a millstone about our necks and be drowned in the sea than to cause this!
Here, then, is ample justification for the Churchman’s reserve, the Englishman’s reserve. There is danger in bringing holy things to the unholy, danger of profaning what belongs to the heart’s inmost sanctuary. But Churchmen and Englishmen alike are liable to do this, whatever their ecclesiastical theories or constitutional haughtiness, if they do not reverence their fellow-creatures more than they are wont, and respect themselves more than they are wont. Stiffness, dignity, and pretension will not keep us from giving holy things to dogs and casting pearls before swine.
How may we be saved from doing it? Only by remembering that there is no man alive without a holy thing in him to which we CAN speak, and without that dog-and-swine nature to which we MAY speak. Only by holding constantly before us that the holy thing is not his own possession, no part of his private self, but is his because he is Christ’s, and Christ is God’s; because Christ is the head of every man; because so long as he keeps the marks of a man he is related to the One who took our nature and was not ashamed to call us brethren. Only by saying to ourselves, hour by hour: “I live only because He lives; I am righteous only because He is righteous; whatever divides me from Him divides me from my kind — that is earthly, sensual, devilish. Whatever unites me to Him is what He gives us from His own fullness, that we may be true men and so true children of His Father.”
Holding this faith, we shall avoid casting the holy thing before dogs and Christ’s pearls before swine. We shall be able to confess this Lent how often we have committed this sin — lowering the Gospel to our own baseness and that of those we addressed — and how God has punished us by lowering ourselves and disabling us from raising them. The evil nature in ourselves, if not in others, has again turned and rent us, mastering us because we did not confess Him who has mastered it. Alongside this, another confession, equally necessary: how much we have judged our neighbours, how quickly we detected evil propensities in them, how eager to cast them out before knowing what answered to them in ourselves. It may not always be open sinners we’ve judged — those manifestly yielding to swinish inclinations we may have regarded with lofty compassion, feeling safely distant. But contempt for those nearer ourselves, whom we can compare ourselves to — especially contempt for them as inferior to us in gifts and insight — has this not been each of our easily besetting sin? We need not reproach ourselves for spreading God’s Gospel too freely, for drawing the lines too carelessly between those we claim as God’s children entitled to His reconciliation, and the dogs and swine. Our fault has run the other way: we have withheld from them what might have raised them into men, refusing to see that as God’s purpose toward them. And so we have not attained the true standard of manhood ourselves; we have sunk to the level we deemed safe to assign to them. May God give us true repentance for this transgression, and endue us with the Holy Spirit that will overcome the flesh in ourselves, and enable us to claim fellowship with whatever is His in our brethren!