Quinquagesima Sunday
February 14, 1858
“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. Abstain from all appearance of evil.”—1 Thessalonians v. 21, 22.
The passage: Test everything; hold on to what is good; keep away from every form of evil.
This verse’s last clause is commonly taken to mean, “Abstain from everything that looks like evil, that a bystander might suspect to be evil.” You will hear clergy as well as laymen alter the sentence to “Abstain from the very appearance of evil” or “even from the appearance of evil,” and many readers vaguely suppose such wording exists somewhere in the Bible. I do not think our translators meant to give St. Paul’s words that sense. “Every evil appearance,” or “appearance of evil,” may simply mean every shape or form evil takes — a fair rendering of the Greek word εἶδος, perhaps preferable to “form” or “kind,” the more natural translation. But since, like “species” in the Vulgate, the word “appearance” is ambiguous, one might wish it had never been used.
A moment’s thought shows St. Paul cannot have meant what we have forced on his words. Christ said, “Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment” — though that verse, using ὄψις rather than εἶδος, doesn’t bear directly on how we construe our text, it does bear on whether we should judge evil by mere look. Remember the occasion: Christ had healed a sick man on the Sabbath. The act had the appearance of evil — not only to bystanders but to the religious leaders of the Jews, who at once decided he had broken the Law, and had plausible grounds for it. This is one of a series: his receiving sinners and eating with them; the acts that led to the charge “a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber”; his tolerating the sinful woman who washed his feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. The Evangelists record these things carefully — evidently believing that without them Christ would not have fully revealed his Father or been a complete pattern for his disciples, and the conscience of mankind has agreed: devout men feel that if these features were removed from the Divine Image, the whole would be changed. Do you think St. Paul believed otherwise — that he would have taught the Thessalonians these conspicuous features of Christ’s character were not to be copied but treated as dangerous?
How far does Paul’s own example support that suspicion? You may remind me he told the Corinthians he would eat no meat while the world stood rather than cause a brother to stumble, and warned that acting on the knowledge that all meats are equally innocent might destroy the weak brother for whom Christ died. Was this not avoiding an appearance of evil where there was no real evil? Certainly not: the highest principle of Christian morality, the law of love and fellowship, would have been violated for the sake of a mere appetite or a petty display of intellectual superiority. He set aside a rule that looked sound on the surface in order to reach a solid, real principle.
But did not Paul himself strictly follow his Master’s steps, departing entirely from the maxim ascribed to him, when he appeared to Jews — converted and unconverted, even to Apostles — to be violating sacred customs and trampling on the Covenant of his fathers? What doctrine was he following when he openly ate with Gentiles in front of Peter and Barnabas, who were trying to preserve what every Jew considered a necessary mark of the difference between the Chosen People and all others? How did he avoid the mere look of evil when he left his countrymen with the impression that he was overthrowing the righteousness of the Law by preaching the righteousness of faith? His life was one long fight against appearances — continual proof that to assert any great truth, one must deliberately risk appearing evil to both bad men and good.
We need not look far for evidence — the passage itself is decisive. The three clauses, “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good; abstain from all appearance of evil,” are not merely strung together by accident. Anyone attentive to Paul’s style will notice the antithesis marked by the Greek words κατέχετε and ἀπέχεσθε: “hold on to the good, hold off from every form of evil.” And the word governing both clauses, uppermost in his mind, is δοκιμάζετε, “prove” — a word always denoting a process of testing, whether applied to things or persons, the soundness of money or fitness for citizenship. Paul had already used it in this sense earlier in the letter: “So we speak, not as pleasing men, but God that trieth the hearts.” That shows that to “prove” something means to look beneath its outside appearance to its real worth and essential nature. Yet on the popular reading, the first clause would say: “Do not be content with mere semblance; look into things, find their good, hold to that” — while the second would say: “Be afraid of semblances; the moment anything looks like evil, flee it; throw away your tests, and simply hold off from what seems evil to you or to others.” That is not an antithesis but a contradiction — one it is not reverent to impute to an inspired man, nor honest to impute to an honest one; in Paul’s case it would make his life an even greater contradiction than his words. Let us examine the text’s language to see if it offers safer, more helpful guidance.
I. First, “prove” or “test” all things. This text has often been claimed as the special motto of Protestant divinity, while “Charity believeth all things” or “Blessed are they which have not seen and yet have believed” are claimed by its opponents. I know no more honourable watchword than “prove all things,” rightly understood as Paul meant it. He did not mean, “Bring everything to the standard of your private judgment, and keep only what agrees with it” — no scientist who speaks of testing and experiment would accept such an interpretation. He would object that reducing everything to a rule or anticipation already in our own mind is exactly what Bacon sought to free us from; as long as we do it we never reach truth. If there is no truth absolutely true for all men, inquiry is fruitless and should be abandoned. If my own judgment is the measure of all I see, with no higher measure to enlarge it, it will grow narrower and feebler daily. But if I acknowledge a Light greater than any organ of mine can hold, yet meant for me to commune with, I will want it to enter and purify my sight and widen its power. I will want to see all things by this Light, which distinguishes the fantastic from the real, the show of things from their substance, so that I cannot mistake one for the other, whether led by my own taste or by any earthly authority. This testing of the moral and spiritual world is exercised less in schools by learned men — though they need it too — than on sick-beds, by those fighting sore temptation and seeking God’s help; they gain a power to distinguish what will endure the fire from what must be burned, which those untried in the fire never gain. So the charity that believes all things is not opposed to the judgment that proves all things — they are closely akin, and neither flourishes without the other. Love, seeking God who is Perfect Love, cannot rest in counterfeits or phantoms of him. Judgment, impatient of falsehood, takes no pleasure in mere rejection; it only wants to find what it can embrace and hold. The Protestant who felt bound to prove all things claimed the Bible as his great helper, and it never failed him — until he forgot the purpose of the work, and used it merely to build up his own notions and refute adversaries, instead of asking it to help him discern right from wrong in his own heart and dealings. The Romanist, needing something given and revealed, rejoiced in his Catholic Creeds, and they did not fail him — until he ceased treating them as catholic, and built over them a vast edifice of individual notions and centuries of speculation, hiding the truth that belongs to all men, leading multitudes who dared not test them to disbelieve them and the truth together — even while making the blessing on those who believed amid that darkness a truly great blessing.
II. Next, Paul says to prove all things — not merely certain doctrines submitted to us, though those are included. He assumes that everything we meet — the ordinary notions and maxims of society, the habits and traditions of whatever literary, philosophical, professional, or religious circle we move in, the words we speak, our everyday experiences — needs sifting and testing to find the good in it. He assumes there is good in it all; otherwise there would be nothing to prove. Finding that good is our task. We are not to sit in a fault-finding spirit cataloguing how our fathers or neighbours have misled us, or how much worse our profession or country is than others. Instead, where much around us is evil, we are still to pursue the good, believing it is there and that discovering it will free us and our brethren from what enslaves us. Believe the good is in all things — even things we have dismissed, been taught to hate, or learned to hate ourselves. Do not shrink from confessing that goodness and beauty lie at the bottom of them all, or they could not have continued to exist. Do not fear seeking it for fear of falling in love with the evil also present in them; you will never fully know and detest evil until you have perceived and honored what stands opposed to it. Many in our day have plunged into false systems because they and their teachers ignored this rule: hearing only denunciations of evil, they discovered there was undisclosed good, and — partly to avenge their earlier deception, partly from lost confidence in teachers who had practiced a pious fraud on them, partly from having lost all power to distinguish — they accepted the whole compound, good and evil together.
III. Paul continues, “Hold fast the good.” Having perceived and detected it anywhere, cleave to it, hold it, refuse to let it go. Be sure what you want is the substantial good, the beauty with no flaw in it. Having that, you have what God in his infinite love desires you to have, what the Son of God took your nature and died to give you, what the Spirit of God stirs all creatures to sigh and groan for. Not that it is yours in the sense that you could tell a neighbour, “It is not thine”; not yours in the sense that lets you say, “It belongs to me, I cannot lose it, I may take my ease and be merry.” It is yours by faith, because it is God’s, and he invites you to trust him and so inherit his own righteousness, truth, and blessedness — yours because it is not in your own keeping, because you are lifted out of yourself to enjoy it.
IV. So we come to the word I began with: “Abstain,” or keep yourselves from every form or appearance that is evil. Having seen and grasped the good, have nothing to do with whatever is not that, whatever counterfeits it. Evil will take every variety of shape and appearance, but if you have learned to look beneath, to test the heart of things, you will not be misled by that variety — you will detect the lie under each new disguise and stand aloof from it. As the truth becomes precious and familiar to you, this likeness, this double, this mockery of it will be loathed and kept at a distance. This precept never becomes obsolete; it grows more necessary each day as the final struggle between light and darkness draws nearer, for the shapes of evil grow more complicated and their mimicry of good more complete. They will deceive us if we trust to our knowledge of the past, our sagacity in detecting others’ errors, or our skill in applying rules received from men. Nothing will serve us but a love of the good, a thorough distrust of ourselves, a continual sense of evil’s presence, and a continual assurance that Christ is present with us too, and has overcome it.
But the danger of being conquered by evil in some of its many forms is, I think, greatly increased by the opinion that has gained strength from Paul’s supposed authority. To believe we must flee whatever people think evil, whatever seems evil to us at first glance, is to become evil’s prey in the worst sense. This doctrine has retarded every reformation in every age and sanctified every corruption, yet it has never restrained a single rash reformer or preserved a single truth from outrage. Conscience cannot be bound by a rule that must be broken before any brave or right act can be done; the only effect of proclaiming it is to make earnest men doubt whether Paul’s authority should be heeded at all, and to rob them of the real guidance his wisdom offers. Tell a man given to foolish eccentricities that there is nothing really wrong in what he does, but that he should avoid the appearance of evil, and — since he knows that in countless cases he should not avoid it — his silly innovations become canonized in his mind as manly resistance to the world’s opinion. Better to tell him that God has given him work to do, that his influence over others is a trust fitting him for it, and that his affectations, since they impair that influence, violate the trust and show a low estimate of his work — so they should be cast off not as apparent but as real evil. Tell a man clinging to a course adopted not from self-will but honest conviction, whose action grieves others, that he should avoid the appearance of evil, and you rouse his conscience — the trifle becomes serious, and he will fight and die for it. Better to bid him prove and test what he is doing, hold fast the real good in it, and discard the rest not as apparently but as really evil — a self-indulgence not offered up to Christian Unity, from which Christian Truth cannot long be separated. These examples — and your own experience will supply a hundred more — show the maxim utterly ineffectual for its own ends. Every worldly argument dressed in religious clothes and claiming an authority not its own must prove feeble and worthless; its only effect is to benumb the moral sense and degrade the hearts under its influence. People will plead it to desert a friend or refuse an unpopular cause, yet forget it the moment it crosses their own passions. Let us ask God’s help to be less moved by mere appearances, whether of good or evil; let us seek the substantial and reject the semblance in all the common work of life. So we shall enter fellowship with him who is the Truth, and be delivered from the Spirit of Lies, his adversary; so, when he whose face was marred more than any man’s, who appeared to men an evil-doer, who was crucified in weakness, is revealed in the glory of his Father and the holy angels, we shall not be ashamed before him at his coming.