46. XLIV. Did Paul Teach a Selfish End?
XLIV. Did Paul Teach a Selfish End? The individual shall seek salvation and the Kingdom of God. Against this teaching the charge has been made that it is selfish. We hear this accusation repeated in various forms, and we read denunciations of the narrow and unsympathetic and egoistic teaching that one should seek to save one’s own soul. “Am I simply to mind my own wretched little soul?” So I have heard some ardent spirit declare with strong emphasis; “Am I to give only the dregs and the poor remainder of my work and my thought to others, to the world, to the progress of the world, to the improvement of society, to the poor and neglected? I would rather let my own soul perish, while I do something to help others, than save my own soul, while I let others perish.” In this complaint and accusation there is much that savours of the true Christ-nature along with utter ignorance. Morally and emotionally the feeling it expresses is noble and devoted, and such as Paul would approve and Jesus would accept. Intellectually, however, it shows a singular misunderstanding of the nature of salvation, and of the Gospel of Christ. As has been said in Section III, Christianity makes a high demand on the intellect; and the persons who bring this charge against the teaching of Paul are not showing themselves equal to the demand made on them, and are allowing emotion to speak where some exertion of the intellect is required. The work whereby man saves his own soul lies in perfect unselfishness and in giving all, even life itself, for others. It is the most perfect expression in conduct of pure love for God and mankind.
It will aid our judgment on this subject, if we can trace in modern literature any expression of a principle that presents some analogy to the Pauline doctrine. No mere exposition of Paulinism, no conscious and intentional interpretation of the Christian principle to the modern world, will serve our purpose at this moment. We look for the message of some great modern writer, who has no thought about Paulinism, who is unconscious that the teaching which he enunciates has any resemblance, or owes anything, to the teaching of Paul. We look for some teacher and thinker, who has his own message springing fresh from his own nature, who spoke to his own time in the words which the time and the situation demand. For this purpose we take Thomas Carlyle and quote his message in his own words. Whether or not he could ever have found his message except through the moulding influence of generations that had studied the Gospels and Paul, is not the question. It is enough that Carlyle spoke his own message in his own way to his own contemporaries, and that he had no intention of expressing the teaching either of Jesus or of Paul. Perhaps he thought it was a non-Christian message that he had to deliver; and certainly from one point of view it is non-Christian.
He says in his Signs of the Times: “to reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself”. This is a message rather of despair, than of hope. It is narrower, emptier, and more barren than the message of Paul. It is all that the intellect of a great writer could gather from the experience of his own life and the inherited experience of ancestry and nationality. It is exposed, not wholly unjustly, perhaps, to the charge of selfishness. It is exposed, far more justly, to the charge of barrenness. The charge applies to the form of the message: only the fool will try any wider scheme of reformation that reaches beyond himself: every such wider reformation is unsolid, empty, and resultless in the long run; for the apparent results may be quickly and easily reached, but do no good, and only cheat the reformer and his dupes. He can modify a law, or place on the statute-book, amid the applause of a nation, a new law that promises much; but the result is naught. The individual is not reformed, and the nation is not remade. The “reform” turns out to be dust and ashes, mere Dead Sea fruit, unless the individuals composing the nation are recreated and set on a higher platform of thought and character and emotion and morality. The individual, therefore, must seek to reform himself; and this is a far slower and more difficult process than to “reform” a nation. It were well to reform a world or a nation, and he who succeeds in this will deserve salvation, as Carlyle would have admitted. But can he succeed? It is so utterly impossible to succeed, and so futile to attempt it, that only the fool will try. The method is false, topsy-turvy, absurd, foredoomed to failure. You must reform the individual, and you must begin with yourself. There is no other way. The ambitious reformer, who is going to start the nation or the world on a new course and a happier era, can only fail. Such is the message of Carlyle. Paul is in full agreement with it:
Paul knew in his own case how all the great resolutions of his youth — to live the divine life and to work for the coming of the Messiah, who should realise the Promise and make the God of Israel supreme in the respect and belief of the nations — had resulted only in ruin; and how he had found himself fighting with all his might against the Messiah. In his own intentions, through his own great schemes, man cannot be saved. Another power is necessary, and another way must be followed.
Carlyle, from another side, has come to the same conclusion; mere desire to work for the good of the world is resultless and empty; but he could go no farther. He had nothing positive to offer. The wise man, he says, will seek to reform himself: that is the only real reformation. But how? What wise man will furnish the effective power to move the “wise man” in the path of self-reformation? He must not seek to work for others, and, if he works on himself, he works in a vacuum. A gospel of negation and narrowest limitation! It is useless to aim at anything outside of self! The theory of Carlyle is put into action in the life that Dickens portrays. Dickens probably was not conscious of the theory and the philosophy that underlay his picture of human life; but he painted all that he could see. The philanthropist, the man that seeks to achieve anything for the world’s good, the man who seeks to benefit others, is in Dickens’s novels always an impostor and a fraud. For the phrase of Carlyle, “no wise man,” he substitutes “no honest man”. The knavish man who cheats others, and the thoughtless empty woman who cheats herself with cheap philanthropy and thinks that she is deluding others into a belief in her goodness, — these are the people that seek in the pages of Dickens to reform the world. They begin with imposture and end in exposure, as a rule; but yet they have their dupes and achieve some sham success.
Both Carlyle and Dickens express the same lesson that Paul taught, so far as it was a negation. That way is hopeless: it leads only to delusion, to cheating and to ruin. Paul saw that negative lesson written in every page of history and on every human effort. He was not content with a negative. He had his fundamental axiom to guide him. “God is good, and His Promise must be fulfilled.” Paul saw the purpose of God in the plan of the world. There is a cure. There is a way for man to follow. That way is the way of Faith. In Faith we have the force that lifts man above himself and enables him in saving himself to work for others, and in reforming others to save himself.