By C. H. SPURGEON.
“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you.”—John xiv. 27.
IN whatever the world gives, Christ does not give after the same fashion. In the first place, the world gives scantily. Even the world’s best friends have had cause to complain of its scurvy treatment. In reading the biographies of mighty men whom the world honours, you will soon be convinced that the world is a most ungrateful friend. If you should devote your whole life to serve the world, and make it happy, think not the world would ever return you so much as a doit. Robert Burns is an instance of the world’s fine gratitude. There was the world’s poet; he sang the loves of women, and the joys of lust; the world admires him, but what did the world do for him? He might drag along his whole life in almost poverty. When the time comes for Robert Burns to be honoured (which was all too late for a buried man), how did they honour him? He had poor relatives; look to the subscription list, and see how magnificent the donations they
received! They honoured him with libations of whisky which they drank themselves; that was all they would give him. The devotion of the Scotch drunkards to their poet is a devotion to their drunkenness, not to him. Doubtless there are many true-hearted men who bewail the sinner as much as they admire the genius, but the mass like him none the worse for his faults. However, if it had been ordained and decreed that every drunkard who honoured Burns should go without his whisky for a week, there was not a dozen of them that would have done it—not half a dozen. Their honour to him was an honour to themselves; it was an opportunity for drunkenness, at least in thousands of instances. As I stood by his monument some little time ago, I saw around it a most dismal, dingy set of withered flowers, and I thought, “Ah, this is his honour! O, Burns! how hast thou spent thy life to have a withered wreath for the world’s payment of a life of mighty genius, and a flood of marvellous song!” Yes, when the world pays best, she pays nothing, and when she pays least, she pays her flatterers with scorn; she rewards their services with neglect and poverty. Many a statesman might I quote who has spent his life in the world’s service, and at first the world said “Go on, go on,” and he was clapped everywhere; he was doing something to serve his time; but he made a little mistake—a mistake perhaps, which will prove not to have been a mistake at all when the book of history shall be read with a clearer eye. “Down with him,” says the world, “we will have nothing more to do with him.” All he may have done before went for nothing; one mistake, one flaw in his political career—”Down with him, cast him to the dogs, we will have nought to do with him again.” Ah! the world pays scantily indeed! What will it do for those it loves best? When it has done all it can, the last resource of the world is to give a man a title (and what is that?). And then to give him a tall pillar and set him up there to bear all weathers, to be pitilessly exposed to every storm; and there he stands for fools to gaze at—one of the world’s great ones, paid in stone; it is true the world has paid that out of its own heart, for that is what the world’s heart is made of. The world pays scantily; but did you ever hear a Christian who complained thus of his Master? “No,” will he say, when I serve Christ, I feel that my work is my wages; that labour for Christ is its own reward. He gives me joy on earth, with a fulness of bliss hereafter.” Oh! Christ is a good paymaster—”The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.” He that serves Christ may
get but little gold and silver such as this world calls precious, but he gets a ‘gold and silver that shall ne’er be melted in the last refining fire, and that shall glitter among the precious things of immortality throughout eternity. The world pays niggardly and scantily, but not so Christ.—“Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.”—Extract from Sermon on—“The Best of Masters” (John 14, 27).