Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN.
All things to all men. ? I. Cor. ix., 22. A Very good practice that seemed to be, as Paul used the words and applied them; a very poor practice, one of the poorest of all, as many people use and apply them to-day. To become
all things to all men
is very noble and Christ-like, when it means that you detect whatever is good in even the worst human beings about you, and linking your heart to theirs at that point lead them on to something better still. To become all things to all men is very ignoble and un-Christ-like, when it means that you let your own evil desires respond in sympathy to theirs, and drag you down to deeper degradation still. The one is the Master’s spirit, which could so eat with publicans and sinners as never to encourage their misdeeds, but only to quicken their aspiration for something good; so that, when he left them, they longed to eat with him again and forever in his Father’s kingdom: the other is the spirit of the prodigal son, who could eat with the same people, and become so like them in their worst condition, so low, unmanly, and shameful that he ended by despising himself, and could only cry out on his return home,
Father, I am no more worthy to be called thy son. The one, therefore, is Christian tact, which, joining the wisdom of the serpent with the purity of the dove, draws many souls to a better life without giving them just cause of offence; the other is unchristian weakness, which is laughed out of its principles, and follows a multitude to do evil, or at least stands silently by, consenting to a wicked deed. Now, the first thing to be noticed, with reference to this subject, is that, strictly speaking, no one ever did, or can, become all things to all men. Human nature is too different, as it is…