06-Rights And Duties

VI. RIGHTS AND DUTIES.

Rom 13:7. “Render to all their dues.”

I BELIEVE that a certain distinction has established itself in the general mind between Righteousness and Justice. The two words were both originally used in the same sense, the former being English or Teutonic, the latter its Latin equivalent. Thus when we want to say “make righteous” in one word, we say “justify.” But, partly perhaps because Righteousness is a great Bible word and Justice the word of jurisprudence, we have come to think of Righteousness as a relation between men and God, and of Justice as a relation between man and man.

It is of Justice, accordingly, that I am to speak tonight.

Justice is at once the support and the fruit of civic life. Men cannot live together without some degree of justice; and as they go on living together and their social life becomes richer and more complex, the action and experience of life breed the higher and more perfect forms of justice. But, secular as Justice truly is, we shall not find ourselves compelled to separate it from the Righteousness of faith. On the contrary, my hope is that by considering secular justice as it connects itself with the Christian calling, we may improve our conceptions of what is just. It ought always to be the ambition of theology, not merely to defend itself within an exclusive circle of its own, but to prove itself able to throw light upon all duties and interests.

Human righteousness towards God is of faitJi; that is to say, God has called men to be his children, and they will be right, and do the works which he has prepared for them, when they accept the condition of sonship with its proper feelings of trust and dependence and self-surrender. But God does not isolate his children from one another. It is a part of his calling that he places them together, and binds them with many ties, and calls upon them to feel and act towards one another as those who are children of the same Father. In making men his children, God makes them also a Family.

Here then we find the Christian account of Justice. The true order of mankind is that of spiritual persons living and advancing together as members of the one family of the Heavenly Father. To be completely just is to behave towards each person according to his place in the family. To fill one’s own place and to act towards all others in accordance with the tie by which God has bound us respectively to each, this is what the Christian acknowledges to be his duty. The same law is described in Christian theology under the expressive figure of a Body. Each member or organ has its own function, and to discharge this is its proper business. The eye has to see, and the ear to hear. But the many members make one body; and each organ, if we imagine them conscious, has to respect the functions of the others, and to work with them for the purposes of the whole body. It is the natural action of growth to develop the number and the perfection of organs by a process which philosophers call differentiation. That is to say, at a low point in the scale of creation, there are fewer distinctions in a body; at a higher stage we find more organs, performing more offices, and we call the body more perfect. But the perfection of the body depends on the subordination of the parts and the harmony of the whole. A similar process of differentiation goes on in the growth of human society. Occupations, trades, offices, become more numerous and are more distinctly separated from each other. The relations of human beings to one another become indefinitely manifold and subtle and complex. And thus Justice grows with the growth of society. But it is at all times “a kind of harmony.” It is most thoroughly realized when men fill their own places, serve the whole society, and are affected each towards each according to their mutual relations. This is the eternal and Divine ordinance. God, who has called men to be his children and to have his Son for their Head, binds them together in one body, and bids them live a harmonious life of mutual obligation and regard. The more entirely we live to God as his children, the more successfully shall we live together as brethren. Each relation that life develops we shall reverence as God’s appointment, and it will be a part of the righteousness of faith to fulfil it. No other maxim could better sum up the requirements of Justice than that of our text, “Render to all their dues.” Of course we do not mean by dues only those which men are compelled by penalties to render. It is impossible for any one who takes a spiritual view of Justice to see in it what the law of the land enforces and nothing more. It is the weakness and misfortune of thinkers who do not expressly acknowledge a spiritual basis of human life, that they either seem to build a moral structure on the air, or that they outrage moral feeling by making force the origin and explanation of everything. There are those who admit no conception of justice except the will of -the stronger, expressed in threats. A man’s duty, according to this doctrine, is what he is ordered by a stronger than he to do, on pain of its being the worse for him if he refuses to do it. You see at once how different the Christian conception of Justice is from this. When we Christians adopt the maxim, which is not itself an exclusively Christian one, “ Render to all their dues,” we understand by “ dues,” all that, according to the idea of mankind as the Family of a Heavenly Father, is due from each to each. To some extent, the interpretation of “dues,” thus understood, is variable and progressive, because, as I have taken pains to shew, society is developed as it advances, and we learn through experience what corresponding action or affection any new or modified relation demands.

Christian morality, therefore, ought not to be stationary. We are pledged by our Christian calling to study with reverence the circumstances in which we find ourselves and to watch with a pious hopefulness for improvements. A faithful willingness to be led onward by the Heavenly Hand ought to characterize the Christian mind in dealing with mutual obligations. At the same time no one doubts that the main requirements of Justice are thoroughly ascertained. Our need is not to find them out, but to be persuaded to comply with them. Our natural selfishness is always putting us in the way of thinking what is due from others to us, and not what we owe to others. And Justice will never flourish as beneficently as it might do, so long as each of us thinks earnestly and with spirit of his rights, languidly and as if under compulsion of his duties. The sentiment of Justice is, thank God, a powerful one in the English mind. The more flagrant forms of injustice excite in us a healthy indignation which refuses to tolerate them. The appeal to Justice, when it is a well-grounded one, never finds dull ears in an English audience. Often, it is scarcely necessary to say, we are embarrassed by conflicting obligations. Those who see a case from one point of view only may think there is an injustice where those who look at it from another will reply that there is none. Conflicting obligations are means of spiritual discipline evidently intended to train us in discernment and faithfulness; and the experience of the difficulties and perplexities which they create ought to make us considerate in judging each other. But on the whole, it could not, I think, be fairly charged against us that we are indifferent to justice. But the maxim, “ Render to all their dues,” if we enter thoroughly into the feeling of it, will make us aware of a certain divergence of our habitual standard of justice from the Christian rule, to which I desire to call your particular attention this evening. We are too much biassed by the fact of possession. It is not to be denied that possession is entitled to great consideration. The course of our history in this favoured land, which has been so happy in its freedom from violent changes, has tended to give to possession an unexampled tenacity. The maxim “ Let each keep what he has “might be alleged with some reason to be more characteristic of the English conception of justice than that of St Paul, “Render to all their dues.”

“ Let each keep what he has.” I readily admit that in a country where a matured system of law is administered with punctilious integrity in the penetrating light of public knowledge, this principle will go a long way in maintaining justice. And it is very natural that here, more than anywhere, the legal form of justice should encroach too much upon its moral or spiritual form. But, not the less, the ideal of justice will be very poorly satisfied in a Christian community by the defence of existing possession.

I may illustrate what I mean by our extraordinary reverence for property, for vested interests, and for bequests. Now, it would be a very bad thing for us if no one could call what he had his own, if life had no stability, and industry no secure reward. All that is patent. It would be a downfall, indeed, if we were to lose the protection of a settled law of rights and ownership. But what I am noting, from the Christian point of view, is this, that we have given ourselves up to a kind of worship of property and vested interests and bequests. Our regard for these things, instead of being cool and moderate and conditional, has been touched with the imaginative emotion which turns it into a religion. The very phrase, “the sacredness of property,” discloses the feeling with which we regard it.

We are inclined to exalt possessions, as objects of worship, above the irreverent discussions of reason. When we hear of speculations which question how deeply the right of an individual to what he has inherited or received goes down into the nature of things, and by what conditions it should be limited, we are not content with putting ourselves temperately upon our guard, which would be reasonable enough, but we look upon the speculators as profane and cry out upon them with a kind of horror. Who is not familiar with these symptoms of a worship which the Christian can hardly call anything but an idolatry? The Christian who takes his principles from the New Testament learns there no reverence for the rights of the individual possessor as against the claims of the community. To put it thus, seems almost ironically moderate, when we think of the history of the Christian Church and of the teaching of our Lord and of his Apostles. The Holy Spirit coming down on the day of Pentecost to create the Church of Christ, persuaded every believer to give up his rights of ownership and to throw what he had into the common stock.

Throughout the New Testament, possessions are studiously disenchanted of prestige and sacredness. The believer is to consider them as a trust, for the management of which he will be held responsible.

Everything is done in the earliest Christian teaching that could be done, to prevent men from setting an undue value on property and from regarding it as what the possessor might do what he liked with. The assumption throughout is that there was no need at all to lead men to reverence property, but a great deal of need to guard them against making too much of it. It was the common interest, not the individual, which needed the sanction of religion to sustain its claim. The Scriptural doctrine of private rights agrees exactly with its doctrine of justice. We are to render to all their dues; and in estimating dues, we are to remember that society is a whole, one body, and that it is a Divine family. Now it stands to reason that a single member, a single organ, cannot set up its rights against those of the body. The habitual feeling of every member must be that the interest of the body is incomparably more important and more to be considered than that of any part of it. I can understand the theory that would subordinate society to the individual, and maintain that all social arrangements have for their chief purpose to secure each single person in the enjoyment of his exclusive rights; but this is demonstrably not the Christian theory, and the mind into which the Christian idea of the body and its members has been thoroughly wrought must find such a view wholly uncongenial to it. A sensitively Christian instinct ought to shrink with more repugnance from the assumption that private ownership is sacred and above discussion, than from protestations on behalf of the interest of the community. But the Christian hears God telling him that society is not only a living whole, but also a Divine family. And I think no one will contend that exclusive ownership is congenial to the family feeling. You who are parents know that your children are ready enough by nature to appropriate what they can, and to exclaim defiantly, “ This is mine!” But it is not your delight to cherish and exalt this feeling, nor would you be distressed if your children learnt to say with pleasure of many things, “ This belongs to the family.” I do not say that you can abolish private rights, either under the domestic roof, or in society; what I urge is that to consecrate private rights and give them predominance, is uncongenial to the properly Christian sentiment of justice. The secular justice that is rooted in the soil of Christian theology is of a nobler and a finer kind, believe me, than that which watches over private ownership and vested interest and the grasp of the dead hand on property. It teaches us to throw our sympathies on the side of the poor when their interests seem to come into competition with those of the rich, on the side of the weak more willingly than on that of the strong. To do this is not mere condescending benevolence; it is justice, the justice that renders to all their dues. “ Giving honour unto the wife, as tmto the weaker vessel” there speaks the Divine instinct, dropping as it were by the way a thought quite natural to one who had the mind of Christ, but one which could not have proceeded, at least with the same significant unconsciousness, from any other morality than that of the New Testament. What is due to the weak and defenceless?

Protection. What is due to the ignorant? Enlightenment. What is due to the misunderstood?

Endeavours to enter into their thoughts and feelings. What is due to those that are down? Efforts to lift them up. Your Christian hearts, I hope, brethren, have given these answers freely. Once more, What is due to the rich and great? An answer does not, I imagine, rise so readily to the lips. Shall we say, Honour, flattery, gaping admiration, sedulous anxiety to take out of their way any hindrance that would restrain them from doing what they like with their own, not only while they live, but down to the twentieth generation after them? Are these due from their brethren in the Divine Family to the rich and great? It is hardly the Christian in any one that will give this answer, in the life any more than with the lips. Pause, if you please, before you pronounce definitely what is due to the rich and great. But you could hardly help including amongst their dues such as these, that the arrogance to which their position tempts them should not be fostered, that occasions of falling should not be put officiously in their way, that it should be urged upon them by importunate reminders that the true glory of a man is not in having or enjoying but in serving, and that they should be rigorously made to understand that the community does not exist for their sake, but they for the sake of the community. Such dues we have no clear right to withhold from those that have wealth and rank and privilege amongst us. The spirit of Christian justice has, you will see, to fight against the immense power of selfishness in human nature and those influences and habits which make up “the world.” The strong are always tempted to abuse their strength, the rich to fancy that the earth is made for their enjoyment, the multitudes to domineer over the few. Christian justice appeals to the ordinances of a just and gracious God; it declares that he has made men and classes for one another; it demands a more considerate care for all who are not able to take care of themselves; it stands up for the rights of slaves, of the poor, of women, of unpopular sects and schools.

Above all and over all rights it proclaims incessantly the dignity of the whole community, of the human race itself. The order, the harmony, the well-being, the growth, of the body, are ends for the sake of which individuals are sent into the world and unto which it is their happiness to serve. It is an ordained limitation of the deference to be rendered to the weak, that it must not endanger the general welfare. Authority must not be sacrificed to sympathy. Those who have money must not give it away mischievously. Demands for equality ought not to be allowed to outweigh the general good.

It may be a comfort to us to remember, when we think of the work which justice has to do and of the adversaries against which it has to contend, that, for the Christian, justice is the same thing as the righteousness which is of faith. We want to be guided by light from above, to be helped with strength from above. If we all bore in mind habitually that we are righteous by faitJi, and therefore sought more and more earnestly with prayer and effort to be men of faith, simple, humble, fearless, setting the will of our Father above every earthly interest and power, what a reinforcement we should bring to the cause of harmony and happiness, what services might we not hope to render to our country and our kind! Let me plead with you, my Christian brethren, not to be indifferent to the perfect fulfilment of justice, that is, of righteousness, that is, of the righteousness and Kingdom of God. Our Saviour exhorts us to be indifferent to everything else, in comparison of the Kingdom of God and his righteousness. And there is no conceivable way in which these can triumph, except through the prevalence of the living spirit which renders to all the dues which God assigns. If you see, as you may, an honourable devotion to the cause of justice in men who do not profess to be Christians, render honour to the men, for it is their due, and beware of undervaluing their cause as a merely secular one. The way to serve your Christian profession is to shew how considerate, how delicately just, how courageous, how devoted to the common good, Christians can be. This is what Christ asks of us. This is the way to honour him, because it is to walk in his own steps.