The Greatest Thing in the World

THE ANALYSIS PART TWO. THE next ingredient is a very remarkable one. GOOD TEMPER. Love is not easily provoked. Nothing could be more striking than to find this here. We are inclined to look upon bad temper as a very harmless weakness. We speak of it as a mere infirmity of nature, a family failing, a matter of temperament, not a thing to take very seriously into account in estimating a man's character. And yet, here, right in the heart of this analysis of love, it finds a place. And the Bible again and again returns to condemn it as one of the most destructive elements in human nature. The peculiarity of ill-temper is that it is the vice of the virtuous. It is often the one blot on an otherwise noble character. You know men who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but for an easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or touchy disposition. This compatibility of ill-temper with high moral character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics. The truth is that there are two great classes of sins, sins of the body and sins of the disposition. The prodigal son may be taken as a type of the first, the elder brother of the second. Now society has no doubt as to which of these is the worst. Its brand falls without a challenge upon the prodigal. But are we right? We have no balance to weigh one another's sins, and coarser and finer are but human words. But faults in the higher nature may be less venial than those in the lower, and to the eye of him who is love, a sin against love may seem a hundred times more base. No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to unchristianize society than evil temper. For embittering life, for breaking up communities, for destroying the most sacred relationships, for devastating homes, for withering up men and women, for taking the bloom off childhood, in short, for sheer gratuitous misery-producing power, this influence stands alone. Look at the elder brother, moral, hard-working, patient, dutiful. Let him get all credit for his virtues. Look at this man, this baby, sulking outside his father's door. He was angry, we read, and would not go in. Look at the effect upon the father, upon the servants, upon the happiness of the guests. Judge the effect upon the prodigal. And how many prodigals are kept out of the kingdom of God by the unlovely characters of those who profess to be inside. Analyze, as a study in temper, the thundercloud itself as it gathers upon the elder brother's brow. What is it made of? Jealousy, anger, pride, uncharity, cruelty, self-righteousness, touchiness, doggedness, sullenness. These are all the ingredients of this dark and loveless soul. In varying proportions, also, these are the ingredients of all ill-temper. Judge if such sins of the disposition are not worse to live in, and for others to live with, than sins of the body. Did Christ, indeed, not answer the question himself when he said, I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of heaven before you. There is really no place in heaven for a disposition like this. A man with such a mood could only make heaven miserable for all the people in it. Except, therefore, such a man be born again, he cannot, he simply cannot enter the kingdom of heaven, for it is perfectly certain, and you will not misunderstand me, that to enter heaven a man must take it with him. You will see, then, why temper is significant. It is not in what it is alone, but in what it reveals. This is why I take the liberty now of speaking of it with such unusual plainness. It is a test of love, a symptom, a revelation of an unloving nature at bottom. It is the intermittent fever which bespeaks unintermittent disease within, the occasional bubble escaping to the surface which betrays some rottenness underneath, a sample of the most hidden products of the soul dropped involuntarily when off one's guard. In a word, the lightning form of a hundred hideous and unchristian sins, for a want of patience, a want of kindness, a want of generosity, a want of courtesy, a want of unselfishness, are all instantaneously symbolized in one flash of temper. Hence, it is not enough to deal with the temper. We must go to the source and change the inmost nature, and the angry humors will die away of themselves. Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids out, but by putting something in, a great love, a new spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Christ, the Spirit of Christ interpenetrating ours, sweetens, purifies, transforms all. This only can eradicate what is wrong, work a chemical change, renovate and regenerate and rehabilitate the inner man. Willpower does not change men. Time does not change men. Christ does. Therefore, let that mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. Some of us have not much time to lose. Remember, once more, that this is a matter of life and death. I cannot help speaking urgently, for myself, for yourselves. Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. That is to say, it is the deliberate verdict of the Lord Jesus that it is better not to live than not to love. It is better not to live than not to love. Guilelessness and sincerity may be dismissed almost with a word. Guilelessness is the grace for suspicious people, and the possession of it is the great secret of personal influence. You will find, if you think for a moment, that the people who influence you are people who believe in you. In an atmosphere of suspicion men shrivel up, but in that atmosphere they expand and find encouragement and educative fellowship. It is a wonderful thing that here and there in this hard, uncharitable world there should still be left a few rare souls who think no evil. This is the great unworldliness. Love thinketh no evil, imputes no motive, sees the bright side, puts the best construction on every action. What a delightful state of mind to live in! What a stimulus and benediction even to meet with it for a day! To be trusted is to be saved. And if we try to influence or elevate others, we shall soon see that success is in proportion to their belief of our belief in them. For the respect of another is the first restoration of the self-respect a man has lost. Our ideal of what he is becomes to him the hope and pattern of what he may become. Love rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth. I have called this sincerity, from the words rendered in the authorized version by And certainly, were this the real translation, nothing could be more just. For he who loves will love truth not less than men. He will rejoice in the truth. Rejoice not in what he has been taught to believe, not in this church's doctrine or in that, not in this ism or in that ism, but in the truth. He will accept only what is real. He will strive to get at facts. He will search for truth with a humble and unbiased mind, and cherish whatever he finds at any sacrifice. But the more literal translation of the revised version calls for just such a sacrifice for truth's sake here. For what Paul really meant is, as we read there, Rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but rejoiceth with the truth. A quality which probably no one English word, and certainly not sincerity, adequately defines. It includes, perhaps more strictly, the self-restraint which refuses to make capital out of others' faults. The charity which delights not in exposing the weakness of others, but covereth all things. The sincerity of purpose which endeavours to see things as they are, and rejoices to find them better than suspicion feared or calumny denounced.