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.

“That man,” it is often said, “is a mere official. He goes through his work to-day as he went through it yesterday, as he has gone through it any day for the last thirty or forty years; with the same punctual accuracy; with the same absence of interest and enthusiasm; with all the success of a machine; with nothing of the feeling or life of a man.” All of us have heard these comments upon one and another of our fellow-creatures; most of us have recognized the description as in certain cases just, and when just, as not a little terrible; some have nevertheless said, “It applies characteristically to England. Surely nowhere do men so readily pass into officials as here. Nowhere does the dry sense of duty so absorb into itself the passion for glory, personal affection, the delight in what is good for its own sake, even the hope of any rewards, however palpable and material, for toil. All pleasure in what has been, or is, all anticipation of what may be, sinks into the mere confession of a necessity that certain services should be performed, though the performer would rather, if that were possible, transact them in his sleep.”

But when we have spoken thus disparagingly of our people, patriotism has its revenge. The discovery is forced upon us that we cannot separate ourselves from those among whom it is our lot to be born; their tendencies are our tendencies; whatever temptation they are exposed to must assail us. Very soon the man who has denounced slavery to routine most, who has condemned it most in this or that neighbour, perceives that it is threatening himself. The very efforts he has made to maintain his freedom have contributed to rob him of it. He was determined not to walk in a track which had been marked out for him; he would not be tied, like other people, by times and places, by a formal, prescribed order. But he must follow some order, and that which he invents is found after a while to shackle him as much as that which he has abandoned for it. He can break it certainly with less compunction, but while it lasts it is not less a bondage because it is without the authority of prescription; rather the perpetual change, the custom of breaking through customs, becomes the cruellest of all necessities; it involves the loss of power, weariness, poor results or none, till the proud libertine is ready to accept any ruler, provided he is formal enough, minute enough in his exactions; provided he will save his servant from the fearful privilege of deciding, in any matter whatsoever, for himself.

We know, what is continually the consequence of these opposing experiences,—of these violent reactions. But what ought to be the result of them? Were those wrong who looked upon dry, dead officiality as an evil? If it is an evil, is it one to which we must succumb because it is our national or our natural propensity? Is there no good at the bottom of it which we may separate from the corruption? If we could retain that, might we not also hope to find how the individual freedom, of which Englishmen are tenacious, may sustain and not destroy the sense of duty which is also so strong in them? Might we not hope that our lives, instead of being a mere battle of opposing errors trying to neutralize each other, might become a reconciliation of forces all directed towards the same end?

I. I have stated this difficulty in the most general form, because it is one which besets us all in our different spheres of work. All are tempted to be mere officials; all are taught in some way or other that not to be officials—to be choosing their own course of action instead of accepting a certain course of action as marked out for them, to cut many roads instead of to be walking forward in one—is to make existence abortive. If a clergyman were to say that this was his especial trial, that other men could not understand it or enter into it, that certain maxims applied to him which did not apply to them, he would be destroying the very significance of his name and function—he would be owning that he had not any message to his fellows. But he may declare—I think he is bound to declare—that what is true of them is true, in a higher and more appalling sense, of him; that if they are in danger of becoming mere creatures of routine, and of losing all lively consciousness of the tasks they are engaged in, that danger lies at least as close to him, and may overwhelm him in a more utter and hopeless moral death; that if in their efforts to avoid so great a peril they encounter another,—if they become irregular, self-willed, running like men who run in a dream, fighting as those that fight the air—this also is one which is always besetting him, which has caused him a thousand falls, which he can only escape from when he ceases to charge his misdoings upon his circumstances, when he confesses them as sins in himself. If he learns this art—a very hard one to learn and to practise—he may begin also to confess the sins of those whom he pretends to teach; he may not be quite unable to help them in some of their perplexities.

II. He will be able to do that work most effectually, if he studies under the greatest of all Christ’s preachers and Evangelists. In the passage before us, St. Paul unfolds the principle which we set at nought when we fall into official dryness, calling it a devotion to duty, as well as that which we set at nought when we try, as we say, to obey the impulses of love and affection rather than of duty. The Apostle refers his words first of all to himself. He always does so. He never lays down a rule for other men which he has not tested in his own case. Rules therefore is not the right name for any of the great moral maxims of which his letters are full. They are the announcement of laws, human and universal laws, into the perception of which he has been led by some individual experience. Who has led him, how little he could have learnt anything by merely passing through trials, if there had not been One to interpret them and give him the fruit of them,—he is telling us continually; when he does not tell, it is assumed in his discourse, in the title which he bears, in the work which he does. But the authority which he claims is not to announce dogmas ex cathedrâ, but to exhibit the processes through which they have become parts of his being, and may become parts of our being.

III. The impression of the Apostle which we naturally adopt from his writings—the one which divines of nearly all schools try to fix on us—is that of a man overpowered by a vehement conviction, which he must proclaim to the world at any cost of reputation or of life. There is nothing in the passage before us to alter that impression, much to deepen it. But different, almost opposite meanings, may be given to the phrase—“overpowered by a conviction.” Oftentimes, I think, we attach to it a sense which is not the most natural and obvious one. We suppose that a man having taken up an opinion, or entered upon a course of action, throws the whole energy of his will into it; that from thenceforth it is so intensely and essentially his opinion, his course of action, that you might as soon make water run up a hill, or fire cease to burn, as sever him from it. Whether any person ever has been or ever can be in this way identified with some thought or purpose of his own, I will not stop to inquire. In general, those men who have advanced most fixedly and unflinchingly towards a purpose of good or of evil, have been those who have felt that a Power—many of them called it Destiny—fixed their purposes, fixed what should be the issue of those purposes. To such men multitudes crouch, none more than those who treat their belief with scorn, as superstitious or hypocritical. Among them, rather than among those who speak of their own determination, St. Paul must be reckoned. He declares in the verse before my text (the 16th), that a necessity is laid upon him; yea, woe is to him if he preaches not the Gospel. A more entire renunciation of the doctrine that he had chosen his work, that he became a preacher because he liked to preach, cannot be imagined. The sternest believer in Destiny, the hardest fatalist, never rejected that mode of speech more than the Apostle does. You may say he was overpowered by a conviction, if you please; perhaps he might not repudiate the language; perhaps you may mean what he means. But it is not his habitual phraseology. He speaks of being called. He delights to describe himself as an Apostle or a messenger. He utterly disclaims the thought that he could at his pleasure divest himself of his function, any more than he could at his pleasure enter upon it. He is a steward, the steward of Another’s treasures. He is commanded to distribute them. Woe is to him if he does not distribute them!

IV. St. Paul, then, is an official. He has a duty which is to be performed. It is a prescribed duty. There is something to be done, and he cannot fix what that something shall be. It is to be a continuous duty, a recurring duty. And what is more, the Apostle is perfectly aware that he may become reluctant to perform this duty. “If I do this thing willingly,” he says, “I have a reward.” He assumes of course that he might do it unwillingly. In the next clause he says expressly that he might. St. Paul did not differ from other men in that respect. He was liable to the same alternations of feelings, to the same exhaustion, to the same despondency and disgust. And the character of the news which he bore did not secure him against the intrusion of such moods of mind. It was good news; but the majority of those who heard it did not count it good. Those who did, continually misunderstood it and perverted it. Often the fruits of it seemed to others, seemed even to him, the most unlike what were to have been expected. And then every doubt respecting its origin or its efficacy recoiled upon himself; a chill came over the heart which should have poured it forth; it seemed to fall dead from his lips; there was no reward.

V. For the reward was, he affirms, attached to his willingness. He found it so; his experience in this respect answering to that of all other men. What was done as taskwork could not bring any joy to him who did it; no present joy, none in retrospection, none in looking forward. In some works, there may be a hope of a compensation hereafter for the mere amount of what is done here, irrespective of the spirit in which it is done. The hope can never be a very clear or lively one; sullenness and discontent will be great elements in it, and these must sadly disturb any compound into which they enter. But St. Paul could cherish no such hope. If he was not in sympathy with the Gospel which he preached, he was not in sympathy with the mind and character of God which were revealed in that Gospel. But the reward he held forth to men was that they should know this mind and character thoroughly, that they should have fellowship with God. It was a contradiction and an impossibility to connect this reward with a temper and habit of being which were alien from it. The highest blessing he could ask was that this temper and habit should be entirely reversed.

VI. The question then of all questions was, How could he obtain that willingness which was the only pledge and foretaste of any such reward as God had prepared for men? And here came in the great difference between the Apostle and the believers in a mere Fate or Destiny. They were agreed to this extent. The Apostle held that a necessity was laid upon him. He was not at liberty to devise a scheme of life for himself. One had been devised for him. He was under fearful obligations and sacraments to pursue that scheme and no other. “Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel.” “Woe is me if I preach anything except that, or if I do not preach that! But the Gospel is an announcement of God’s goodwill to men, of the peace which God has made with men. I did not undertake the office of a preacher because my will urged me to undertake it. I was the servant of His Will. He Who loved men sent me to tell them of His Love to them. He Who had reconciled men to Himself sent me to tell them of His reconciliation, that they might be reconciled to Him. I am the minister, then, of a Will which is all good and gracious. I am the minister of a Will which can conquer rebellious, which can bring reluctant, wills into consent with itself. Do I believe this message? Then I can ask that that Will—that loving, conquering Will—may bear upon mine, may bring me into fellowship and harmony with it. I can ask that I, the preacher, may not be out of tune with the perfect Nature which I declare can bring, and purposes to bring, all natures into accordance with it. Although, then, I am shown—shown again and again—that left to myself I shall not be the willing proclaimer of these tidings, that I shall grow indifferent and cold to them; that I shall repeat them because it is my business to repeat them, or because they once took a strong hold upon my spirit; though I have the clearest evidence of this painful truth, and though I know that while it is so, I can have no reward at present, I can expect no reward in the ages to come,—yet am I equally sure that He Who has committed this message to me concerning His Will and the will of His creatures, can make me willing in the day of His power, can turn His poor, hard official into a living and rejoicing witness of His goodness and truth, can make that witness effectual for the ends to which He designs it.”

VII. And so an infinite consolation springs out of that side of the alternative which looks at first so disheartening. “But if against my will, a dispensation of the Gospel is committed to me.” For a man to be preaching this Gospel against his will; for him to have a stewardship which under such conditions he must miserably discharge, this strikes us as unspeakably mournful. Nevertheless he whose preaching caused the light of Christ to shine throughout the world, confronts the possibility, does not shrink from treating it as a possibility for him. Why need he? The more he is conscious of the impotency of his own will, and confesses how it may become alienated from the true Will, the more does the intention of that Will and its transcendent capacity to subdue even all things to itself dawn upon him. There is honey in the carcase of the dead lion; when it seems as if all strength were gone, then is the real strength, the only strength, beginning to manifest itself. “Nevertheless”—be the conditions of my will what they may—“a dispensation is committed to me.” “I know that there is. My calling and election to this office stand out broad and clear, written in sunbeams, as I, the officer, am lost in shadow. The thing is true, and the decree is certain as the laws of the Medes and the Persians which alter not, for this will of mine has had nothing to do with the creating of it, cannot procure the revoking of it. Though I or an angel from heaven say that God’s will is not what the Gospel says it is, that all men should be saved and should come to the knowledge of the truth, let me or that angel be accursed. For that Will, and not my will or an angel’s, shall be done on earth even as it is in Heaven.”

VIII. Brethren, this is the doctrine which we have to learn at the feet of St. Paul, and which I trust we shall learn and lay to heart for all times of wealth and of tribulation, of self-exaltation and of despondency. It is a comfort, an infinite comfort, to think that no divine word which goes out of our lips is dependent for its truth, or even for its success, upon the purity of the lips, upon the right will or the heart of the speaker. It is a comfort beyond all comfort to believe that the Will, the Heart, from which the good news has first proceeded, are without variableness or the least shadow of turning. It is a comfort, in this sense, to feel that we are officials, open to the same charges, and just charges, of coldness and deadness as all others who bear that name. But may we not ask, as the one greatest sign of the forgiveness of those who hear for that which has not done them good, of thankfulness to God for anything which has entered into them and borne fruit, that they will desire this blessing for their teachers that they may be good stewards of the manifold gifts of God; stewards, I mean, who have not merely a dispensation committed to them, but who respond to the mind and will of Him Who has committed it, whose spirits are quickened and actuated continually by His Spirit? Then, I think, we—ceasing to be mere officials and yet more than ever feeling that there can be nothing more blessed and glorious than duty, because He Who exacts duty is Himself the source of all loving sympathy and affection, because we keep His commandment when we love one another—shall be better able to help all classes and conditions of men in pursuing the great principle of an Englishman’s life, and in avoiding the death to which that principle, when it is separated from its root, inevitably leads. The sense of duty draws all its strength and nourishment from the acknowledgment of a God Who never acts from caprice or self-will, Who governs all things in heaven and earth according to the order which He has imposed upon them, Who seeks to bring all voluntary beings into an understanding of His order and into cheerful consent with it. Obedience and Freedom meet and embrace each other when we believe that He asks us to yield up our wills as sacrifices to His Who has first made the great sacrifice for us, Who in that sacrifice has united us to Himself. Then no office can be looked upon as anything less than a calling; in the highest and in the lowest Christ’s own voice is saying, “Follow Me.” Then this whole nation, like that of which St. Paul was one of the latest and noblest representatives, will become indeed a chosen nation bound to do God’s work among the nations; to bear witness of Him, even unwillingly,—but if willingly, oh! with what reward to each citizen and to generations unborn.