The Honour and Degradation of an Official

“For if I do this thing willingly, I have a reward: but if against my will, a dispensation of the gospel is committed unto me.”—1 Corinthians ix. 17.

The passage: Paul says that if he does this work willingly he has a reward, but that if he does it against his will, a stewardship of the gospel has still been entrusted to him.

“That man is a mere official,” people say. “He does his work today as he has done it for thirty or forty years: punctual and accurate, without interest or enthusiasm, successful as a machine is, with nothing of a man’s feeling or life.” We have all heard such remarks, and most of us have found them just in some cases, and terrible when just. Some add that this is a peculiarly English failing. Nowhere, they say, do men so readily become officials, or does the dry sense of duty so swallow up the passion for glory, personal affection, delight in what is good for its own sake, and even the hope of any tangible reward. Pleasure in the past and hope for the future shrink into a bare admission that certain services must be performed, which the performer would gladly do in his sleep if he could.

But patriotism has its revenge on those who speak so of their countrymen. We cannot separate ourselves from the people we were born among. Their tendencies are ours, and whatever tempts them tempts us. The man who has most denounced slavery to routine in his neighbour soon finds it threatening himself. His very efforts to stay free have robbed him of freedom. He refused to follow a prescribed track or be tied, like others, to set times and places. But he must follow some order, and the one he invents soon shackles him as much as the one he abandoned. He can break it with less compunction, but it binds him while it lasts. Perpetual change, the habit of breaking habits, becomes the cruellest necessity of all, and brings loss of power, weariness and poor results. Finally the proud libertine will accept any ruler, so long as he is formal and minute enough, who will spare him the dreadful privilege of deciding anything for himself.

We know what usually follows from these opposite experiences and violent reactions. But what ought to follow? Were those wrong who thought dry, dead officiality an evil? If it is an evil, must we give in to it because it is our national or natural tendency? Is there no good at the bottom of it that we could separate from the corruption? If we kept that good, might the individual freedom Englishmen hold so tightly sustain the sense of duty that is also strong in them, instead of destroying it? Might our lives then stop being a battle of errors cancelling one another, and become a reconciliation of forces aimed at one end?

I. I have put this difficulty in its most general form because it besets us all in our different spheres of work. All are tempted to be mere officials, and all are taught that not being officials, choosing their own course instead of accepting one marked out for them, cutting many roads instead of walking forward on one, makes life abortive. If a clergyman said this was his special trial, which other men could not understand, and that maxims applied to him that did not apply to them, he would destroy the meaning of his name and function. He would be admitting he had no message for his fellows. But he may declare, and I think he is bound to, that what is true of them is true of him in a higher and more appalling sense. If they are in danger of becoming creatures of routine, with no lively sense of their tasks, that danger lies at least as close to him and may bring him a more hopeless moral death. If, in avoiding it, they fall into another, becoming irregular and self-willed, running like men in a dream and fighting the air, that also constantly besets him and has caused him a thousand falls. He can escape it only when he stops blaming his misdoings on his circumstances and confesses them as sins of his own. If he learns this very hard art, he may begin to confess the sins of those he pretends to teach, and so be able to help them in some of their perplexities.

II. He will do this most effectively if he studies under the greatest of Christ’s preachers. In our passage St. Paul unfolds the principle we set aside both when we fall into official dryness and call it devotion to duty, and when we claim to follow the impulses of love and affection rather than of duty. He applies his words first to himself, as he always does. He never lays down a rule for others that he has not tested in his own case. So rules is the wrong name for the great moral maxims in his letters. They announce human and universal laws, which he was led to see through individual experience. He is always telling us who led him, and how little he could have learnt from trials alone without One to interpret them and give him their fruit. Where he does not say it, it is assumed in his discourse, his title and his work. His authority is not to announce dogmas ex cathedrâ, but to show the processes by which they became part of his being and may become part of ours.

III. The impression of the Apostle we naturally take from his writings, and which divines of nearly all schools try to fix on us, is of a man overpowered by a vehement conviction that he must proclaim at any cost of reputation or life. Nothing in our passage alters that impression, and much deepens it. But “overpowered by a conviction” can carry almost opposite meanings. We often give it a sense that is not the most natural one. We suppose a man takes up an opinion or course of action and throws his whole will into it, so that it becomes so intensely his that you could sooner make water run uphill than separate him from it. I will not stop to ask whether anyone has ever been identified in this way with a thought or purpose of his own. In general, the men who have moved most unflinchingly toward some purpose, good or evil, have felt that a Power, which many of them called Destiny, fixed their purposes and their outcome. Multitudes crouch before such men, none more than those who scorn their belief as superstition or hypocrisy. Paul must be reckoned among them rather than among those who talk of their own determination. In the verse before my text he says that a necessity is laid upon him, and woe is to him if he does not preach the gospel. No one could more completely renounce the idea that he chose his work or became a preacher because he liked preaching. The hardest fatalist never rejected that way of speaking more than he does. You may say he was overpowered by a conviction, and perhaps he would not repudiate the words, perhaps you mean what he means. But it is not his habitual language. He speaks of being called, and likes to describe himself as an apostle or messenger. He utterly disclaims being able to drop his function at pleasure, any more than he could take it up at pleasure. He is a steward of Another’s treasures, commanded to distribute them, and woe is to him if he does not.

IV. St. Paul, then, is an official. He has a prescribed duty to perform, and he cannot fix what it is. It is continuous and recurring. And he is well aware he may become reluctant to do it. “If I do this thing willingly, I have a reward” assumes he might do it unwillingly, and the next clause says outright that he might. He was liable, like other men, to alternations of feeling, exhaustion, despondency and disgust, and the nature of his news did not guard him against such moods. It was good news, but most who heard it did not count it good. Those who did, constantly misunderstood and perverted it. Often its fruits looked quite unlike what was expected, to others and even to him. Then every doubt about its origin or power recoiled on himself. A chill came over the heart that should have poured it out, the message seemed to fall dead from his lips, and there was no reward.

V. For the reward, he affirms, was attached to his willingness, and he found it so, as all other men do. Work done as a task brings no joy to the doer: none now, none in looking back, none in looking forward. In some kinds of work one may hope for compensation later for the sheer amount done, whatever the spirit behind it. That hope can never be clear or lively, since sullenness and discontent are big ingredients in it and sadly disturb whatever they enter. But Paul could cherish no such hope. If he was not in sympathy with the gospel he preached, he was not in sympathy with the mind and character of God revealed in it. And the reward he held out to men was to know this mind and character thoroughly and have fellowship with God. It was a contradiction and an impossibility to connect that reward with a temper and habit alien to it. The highest blessing he could ask was that this temper and habit be entirely reversed.

VI. The question of all questions, then, was how he could obtain the willingness that was the only pledge and foretaste of any such reward. Here the Apostle parted from believers in mere Fate. They agreed so far: he held that a necessity was laid upon him, that he could not devise a scheme of life for himself, and that one had been devised for him which he was bound to pursue. “Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel.” Woe, he says, if I preach anything else, or fail to preach that. But the gospel announces God’s goodwill to men and the peace He has made with them. “I did not become a preacher because my will urged me to. I was the servant of His Will. He who loved men sent me to tell them of His love. He who had reconciled men to Himself sent me to tell them of it, that they might be reconciled to Him. I am the minister of a Will that is all good and gracious, and that can conquer rebellious wills and bring reluctant ones into consent. Do I believe this message? Then I can ask that this loving, conquering Will bear on mine and bring me into harmony with it. I can ask that I, the preacher, not be out of tune with the perfect Nature that, I declare, can and purposes to bring all natures into accord with it. I am shown again and again that, left to myself, I shall not be a willing proclaimer, but will grow cold and repeat the message because it is my business, or because it once gripped me. I know that while this is so I can have no reward now and expect none in ages to come. Yet I am equally sure that He who committed this message to me can make me willing in the day of His power, turn His poor, hard official into a living, rejoicing witness, and make that witness effective for His ends.”

VII. So an infinite consolation springs from the side of the alternative that looks so disheartening: “But if against my will, a dispensation of the Gospel is committed to me.” It strikes us as unspeakably mournful that a man should preach this gospel against his will and discharge his stewardship miserably. Yet the man whose preaching made Christ’s light shine through the world faces the possibility and does not shrink from it as possible for him. Why should he? The more he feels the impotence of his own will and confesses it may be alienated from the true Will, the more he sees that Will’s intention and its power to subdue all things to itself. There is honey in the carcase of the dead lion: when all strength seems gone, the real and only strength begins to show. “Nevertheless,” whatever the state of my will, “a dispensation is committed to me. My calling and election stand out broad and clear, written in sunbeams, while I, the officer, am lost in shadow. The thing is true, and the decree as certain as the laws of the Medes and Persians, for my will had nothing to do with creating it and cannot revoke it. If I or an angel from heaven say God’s will is not what the gospel says, that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, let me or that angel be accursed. For that Will, not mine or an angel’s, shall be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”

VIII. Brethren, this is the doctrine to learn at St. Paul’s feet and to lay to heart in times of wealth and tribulation, self-exaltation and despondency. It is an infinite comfort that no divine word from our lips depends for its truth, or even its success, on the purity of our lips or the right will of the speaker. It is a comfort beyond all comfort to believe that the Will, the Heart, from which the good news first came, has no variableness or shadow of turning. And it is a comfort, in this sense, to feel that we are officials, open to the same just charges of coldness and deadness as all others who bear the name. But may we not ask, as the greatest sign of forgiveness in those who have heard and not been helped, and of thankfulness for any good that has borne fruit in them, that they will desire for their teachers that they may be good stewards of God’s manifold gifts? I mean stewards who not only have a dispensation committed to them, but respond to the mind and will of Him who committed it, and whose spirits are quickened by His Spirit. Then, I think, we shall cease to be mere officials, and yet feel more than ever that nothing is more blessed and glorious than duty. For He who exacts duty is the source of all loving sympathy, and we keep His commandment when we love one another. We shall then be better able to help all classes of men in pursuing the great principle of an Englishman’s life, and in avoiding the death to which that principle, cut off from its root, inevitably leads. The sense of duty draws all its strength from acknowledging a God who never acts from caprice or self-will, who governs heaven and earth by the order He has imposed, and who seeks to bring all voluntary beings to understand that order and consent to it cheerfully. Obedience and Freedom meet when we believe He asks us to yield our wills as sacrifices to His, who first made the great sacrifice for us and united us to Himself in it. Then no office is less than a calling, and in the highest and the lowest Christ’s own voice says, “Follow Me.” Then this nation, like the one Paul was among the latest and noblest representatives of, will become a chosen nation bound to do God’s work among the nations and bear witness of Him, even unwillingly; but if willingly, oh, with what reward to each citizen and to generations unborn.