Verse 23
False Balances
Texts of this kind show the quality of the Bible. No man can in one sentence adequately represent the contents of the Book of God. When we say "Bible," what part of the Bible do we mean? There are many Bibles in one. It is possible to admire the Bible. Admiration is an offence to God. God does not seek admiration, he seeks worship. When we admire and praise the Bible we may be thinking of its comforts and promises, its minor music, its tender speeches to the heart. That is not the Bible; that is part of the great Book an essential, beautiful, indispensable part, because it is fitted to the valley and the darkness, the pain and the restlessness of life: but it would be a poor Bible if it were a Bible of promise only. We must go into other books it we would know what the Bible is in its totality. The bad man must hate the Book of Proverbs; the low-lived business man never looks into the book that rebukes him, the book that knows his little tricks, the book that exposes him in every line. He wonders who wrote the Proverbs. He is content to make it a historical question whilst he goes on with his low villainy. We think of the Bible as a Book of spiritual metaphysics, dealing with the unknown and the unknowable, the unthought and the unthinkable. The Bible does deal with these lofty subjects, but it also comes in and tests your yard-wand, saying, You thought this wand was thirty-six inches long, it is only thirty-five and a half. How glad we should be then if the Bible would deal with the unthinkable! Then we could be Agnostics in relation to it; but when it impertinently, with divine rudeness, takes up the yard-wand, what becomes of our little theory that "business is business, and religion is religion."? Not in the estimation of the Bible. We do not want men who talk so to know the Bible in any sense of patronising it; we do not want such men, we want them to be infidels. To have the Bible and disobey it is agnosticism; to cry, The Bible for ever! and never to practise its morality, is the direst, shame-fullest atheism. We do not want such people to come to church unless they come in the spirit of penitence, the spirit of men who are ashamed of themselves and want to be better and to do better. This Book of Proverbs should be the business man's book: then he would sweat nobody, injure nobody; would help everybody; would say, The loaf of bread is mine to share with a man who has no loaf. The Book of Proverbs would soon make a new society. When the Bible is discussed, in what parts do men take refuge when they would oppose it? Why do they not go into those parts which they can understand and apply, and wait until the other door is open? There is a good deal in the Bible that men might do, and whilst they are doing that they might be waiting in holy expectation for brighter visions, for widening horizons; meanwhile, what doth thy God require of thee, O man, but to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God? Begin there, and you will end there; you will sweep through an infinite firmament of thought, but you will come back to that in heaven. What more shall the bright souls do? It is a long way from the first note to the last in this great life-anthem, and yet the first note and the last are identical.
Texts like this throw responsibility upon the right parties Upon whom is the responsibility thrown in this text? Upon the seller, upon the inside of the counter. The man is not to stand up and say, I cannot be both buyer and seller; if the man does not know what a yard is, it is no business of mine to tell him; if he does not know how many ounces there are in the pound, I am not a schoolmaster to go over the table of weights and measures: he ought to have known all these things before he came to me. No, thou whited sepulchre! You should go upon the principle that you must do right whoever else does wrong; you should be a gentleman, whoever else is a clown. Your place of business should be the asylum, the refuge, of honesty and confidence, so that men shall say about you, We shall get justice here; we should like a few ounces more to the pound, but we shall get table measure and table weight here, for here is a man who would rather die than be dishonest here is a man who says, It is not necessary for me to live, but it is necessary for me to maintain my character and to please God. If you have anything to sell you take the responsibility belonging to your superior knowledge; it is your business to point out the disadvantages of the situation. And yet we think the Bible is unknowable and unthinkable! Certainly it is in many instances, judging by the weakness and cupidity of men, impracticable. It is for the seller to say, On the whole I would advise you not to buy this; it is not so good as it looks, there is not so much of it as it appears in bulk; all the best are at the top, as you get down and down you get worse and worse: turn the matter over in your mind and come back to-morrow if you want it. Would that end business? Never! It would improve business, it would improve incomes, it would improve society, it would sweeten the heart and soul of things, perhaps not to-day or to-morrow, but in the long run. The Bible is not so unthinkable as we supposed it was. We thought it was a supernatural book, dealing in spirits, and spectres, and ghosts, and cloudy outlines and impossibilities. It may do so in other parts, but just here a wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein.
"A false balance is not good." Then there must somewhere be a true balance; somewhere there must be an authoritative standard. What is the meaning of this word "false"? Where you find false you expect to find true; when you find wrong how do you know it is wrong but by the right? Somewhere there is an equipoise. It is all there. Where is that authority? where is that plumb-line that will not tell lies to please any crookedness in the world? What a world of philosophy is in that one reflection that somewhere there must be a true balance, otherwise we could never know that there is a false balance. Somewhere there must be an essential standard of morality; somewhere there must be a moral authority that is infallible and unchangeable. Why palter with details and incidents and accidents and controversies in words? why not gird ourselves up and go in quest of the eternal and unchangeable standard? We could find it; it is not far from any one of us. Weigh your goods out to yourself before you weigh them to your customer; be your own customer first and see that you get the right weight, then pass it on. Beware of all casuistry: avoid men who are too fluent to be honest, too subtle to be true; who make so many distinctions and divisions and subdivisions and classifications that you despair of their ever reaching good, sound, honest conclusions. The casuist first votes on one side, then on the other; he gives you ten reasons for doing, and ten reasons decimal nine for not doing; and whilst you are balancing the one against the other he tells you that even then it is impossible to get at anything that is really and abidingly substantial in the matter. He will refer you to conscience, and when you are going to that court he will tell you that the judge is not sitting to-day; in fact, if he has to come to real matters of simple acknowledgment there is no judge to sit. All casuists are liars, and all liars are thieves. We have, even as laymen in the school of philosophy, come to the false conclusion that wrongs exist separately; so we draw one line, and say, Lying; another, and say, Stealing; another, and say, Hypocrisy; and so on: in reality they are all one. No man can be a liar without being; a thief, and no man can be a thief without being a liar, and no man can be either without being a hypocrite under some circumstances. We thought the Bible was a Book of spirits; it is a Book of morals.
All this we are more or less agreed upon with regard to weights and scales and measures; there is no discussion amongst us as to the pence-table, or avoirdupois or troy or apothecaries' tables, we know all their ounces and pounds and drams and pennyweights. But does not a text like this suggest the larger balancing of things? Even the balance on the counter is a preacher. The clock ticks for eternity; the dewdrop may be a lesson in astronomy. We thought it was a little wet jewel, and snipped it off the rose-leaf with our thumb and finger; in another sense it is the sun in miniature, one of the great planets come down into measurableness and visibility. So this plumb-line is the eternal measurement. The angels have nothing but that same cord with the little weight at the end of it, and that little weight will make the cord right presently. That little weight is seeking the centre of the earth, and the centre of the earth is seeking the centre of the sun, and the centre of the sun is seeking the centre of God. Is it so that a little dangling cord will shake and quiver until it says in stillness, This is right? Is it possible to be right in all these comparatively little matters, and to be wrong in matters that are vital, essential, everlasting? Is there not a great principle of equipoise here? Has not everything to be in harmony with everything else? Is there not a standard by which all things are to be meted and measured and adjusted? Let us beware sometimes of the merely individual conscience. It is possible to have a pedantic conscience, it is possible for a man to say that such and such arrangements do not suit his conscience. But, in the name of the soul of things, what is his conscience? How has he trained it? How has he treated it? Has he put out both its eyes? Has he choked its voice of reproach? Has he bribed it? Has he put it into a dead sleep with some chemical opiate? We treat men's consciences with a healthy rudeness when they want to make too much of them in the pence-table, and when they want to buy by apothecaries' and sell by troy weight, and then say, "My conscience..." We soon get rid of these little pedants in the marketplace, but in the Church of God we encourage that species of pedantry, and a man with a pedantic conscience wants a whole pew to himself. Beware of unhealthiness; be on your guard against moral morbidity; know that everything is weighed by the sun, and all life ought to be weighed and estimated and settled by the sun's Sun.
There is a false balance in the weighing of character. We are unjust to one another. We pinch one of the scales, we touch the balance subtly with our finger, and give advantage to one side; we add a little to the weight, it may be but a grain of sand, but yet a grain of sand is not without its value and influence. Even an atom has a shadow. We may have damped the weight; that water tells in the weighing: we may take up the weight and say, This is the right weight; so it is if it were dry. We do not give credit to one another in a spirit of justice, we see little points, we conceive small prejudices, we do not like the incident that may be changed in a moment, we do not deal with essentials, substantiate, continuing and abiding quantities, and thus we have measured even our friends with a false balance.
We may apply a false balance to the providences which make up our life. What skill some people have in dealing only in dark things, black aspects, wintry phases, deprivations, bereavements, losses! They are eloquent when they tell you what they have parted with. Who can be equally eloquent in numbering mercies? Who ever mentions the great mercies? Who ever gets beyond the outside of things, the mere rim, the palpable environment? Who gets into the soul, and who says, I have reason, how can I be poor? I have health, how can I fail? I have home, how can I be desolate? In balancing life take in all these reasons and thoughts and considerations, and so doing you will see that all the while God has been making you rich, or giving you the possibility and opportunity of acquiring and enjoying the true wealth. Who is there that keeps a right balance when he has to weigh the present and the future? The unsteady hand can never get an equipoise; the palsied fingers cannot hold the scales. You must have health in weighing. No drunken man can weigh out to you justly what you have asked him to give you; no man of biassed mind, prejudiced soul in any way, can give you right judgment in anything on earth. The present is here, the future is yonder, and when did "here" fail to carry the war against "yonder"? We have even formed little foolish proverbs about this, we have gone so far as to tell the lie that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." Whoever says that is guilty of a palpable sophism. He seems to be speaking truth, he forgets that everything depends on the bird that is in the bush, and all the possibilities and contingencies and promises which relate to the possibility and certainty of its capture if the right way be pursued. We are the victims of the present. It would seem impossible for some men to do justice to spirituality. Spiritual teaching goes for nothing. There are people in certain rural districts who never have paid the schoolmaster, and they say they never will the schoolmaster indeed! They pay the farrier, they pay the toll-keeper, but the schoolmaster a man who deals in ideas, thoughts, culture, a man who addresses himself to the soul, how could they ever think of recognising his work? If you deal in clothing for the head you will get your money; there is a county court to support you but if you give a man ideas, if you pray him into heaven, if you lift up his soul into a new selfhood, the county court would smile at you if you made application for assistance in any direction that you might think honest and equitable. And the very best of men play at that game. They cannot help it Pay a poet!
All this leads up to the fact that there are men who are prizing the present in the highest relations in preference to the future. They set time against eternity, earth against heaven, the body against the soul. Have we not aforetime pictured the possibility of a man overfeeding his body and starving his spirit? "Beloved, I wish above all things thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth." What an irony is this a body fed four times a day, a soul never fed at all! no book ever opened, no high authority ever consulted, no poetry ever learned, no study set apart for the culture and training and nurture of the mind. There are men who boast they never open a volume. So let it be. He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption. He shall have his inheritance, he shall lie down with the worms and be forgotten. How are we weighing things? There are two forces that now seek to rule our lives the force that tends downwards, the force that tends upwards. How long halt you between two opinions? The devil wants us, and Christ calls for us; the enemy of souls would ruin us by telling us comforting lies; the Saviour of souls would save us by bringing us to his sacred cross.
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