I. It is an obvious question, Why is it wrong to love the praise of men? For it may be objected, that we are accustomed to educate the young by means of praise and blame; that we encourage them by kind words from us, that is, from man; and punish them for disobedience. If, then, it may be argued, it is right to regard the opinions of others concerning us in our youth, it cannot be in itself wrong to pay attention to it at any other period of life. This is true; but I do not say that the mere love of praise and fear of shame are evil; regard to the corrupt world's praise or blame, this is what is sinful and dangerous. St. John, in the text, implies that the praise of men was, at the time spoken of, in opposition to the praise of God. It must be wrong to prefer anything to the will of God. If the world at large took a correct and religious view of things, then its praise and blame would in its place be valuable too. The reason why we say it is wrong to pursue the world's praise is, because we cannot have it and God's praise too. And yet as the pursuit of it is wrong, so is it common for this reason: because God is unseen, and the world is seen; because God's praise and blame are future, the world's are present; because God's praise and blame are inward, and come quietly and without keenness, whereas the world's are very plain and intelligible, and make themselves felt.
II. I could say to those who fear the world's censure, this: (1) Recollect you cannot please all parties; you must disagree with some or other; you have only to choose (if you are determined to look to man) with which you will disagree. And further, you may be sure that those who attempt to please all parties, please fewest, and that the best way to gain the world's good opinion is to show that you prefer the praise of God. (2) Think of the multitude of beings, who, unseen themselves, may yet be surveying our conduct. Accustom yourself, then, to feel that you are on a public stage, whatever your station of life may be; that there are other witnesses to your conduct besides the world around you, and if you feel shame of men, you should feel much more shame in the presence of God, and those servants of His that do His pleasure. (3) Still further: You fear the judgment of men upon you. What will you think of it on your deathbed? You fear shame; well, and will you not shrink from shame at the judgment-seat of Christ? "Fear ye not the reproach of men, neither be ye afraid of their revilings. For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool; but My righteousness shall be for ever, and My salvation from generation to generation."
J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons,vol. vii., p. 41.
Two Ambitions
I. The praise of men. What our Lord calls "honour one from another." The praise of men will bid us to be moral, to be diligent, to be exemplary, to be religious. Thus far, it runs side by side with the praise of God. But there are points in every life, or there is one point, where the two roads diverge. Now and then the alternative is proposed, suddenly, seriously, decisively, "Who is on the Lord's side?" A word must be spoken, or not spoken. Any social table, any home fireside, may furnish the occasion, an act must be done or not done, a gain made or refused, a hopeful prospect hailed or thought scorn of. What manner of persons ought we to be, on whose innermost motive those momentous issues hang.
II. There are those, St. John tells us, who have in them, really and effectually, the other ambition; who sincerely and practically love the praise of God more than the praise of men. The praise of God would have uttered itself to them in no audible sound; in no voice from the sky, convincing and comforting, "Well done, good and true;" simply and solely in this a conscience calmed at once and strengthened by a sense of peril met and duty done; a soul finding its rest in the truth and in the life, in a Person the desire of all nations, and a spiritual communion, satisfying and everlasting. This is the praise of God in the present. To have this is to be at peace; to love this is to be happy; to live for this is to live above earth, Paradise regained and heaven opened. The man who lives for the praise of God is an independent man; his chains are broken off, and he lives and moves and thinks in freedom not unmoved by earth's interests, for the hand of God and the mind of God are in all things; not untouched by earth's affections, for he who loves God loves his brother also; not idly dreaming of glories to come, but using the world and the fulness thereof as not abusing. Thus he passes through life, watchful not to lose the grace given, fleeing from evil because God hates it, freely imparting, in an influence unwearied and never upbraiding, the love freely received. At length, the departure, to be where it is better; the staff of God comforting the journey, and at its close the at last spoken "Well done!" Then shall he who has here sought the praise of God find it and rejoice in it for ever.
C. J. Vaughan, Temple Sermons,p. 56.
The belief in a Divine Father, to whom our conduct has relation, differentiates at once and for ever religious from secular morality.
I. The thought of a present God, One who knows us, loves us, desires us, co-operates with our efforts, is essential to our practice of the Christian virtues. But we are living at the present time in an intellectual atmosphere, from which that thought has been, to a large extent, eliminated. The consequence is that a great number, if not a majority of professing Christians, have adopted a morality which is no longer distinctively Christian. Their speculative belief, it is true, may have remained unchanged, but the disintegrating influence of this subtle, impalpable, pervasive, corrosive atmosphere has loosened, without their knowledge, the bond of their conduct to their creed; and they live and move and act, in practical affairs, without feeling from day to day the need of the Divine cooperation, the force of the Divine attraction, the constraint of the Divine love. But dangers which elude us by their subtlety do not cease to be real dangers. If what is called agnosticism were the exclusive characteristic of obvious antagonists in well-defined array, it would be no very new enemy to the Church of Christ. But modern agnosticism is nothing of this kind; it is a shifting shapeless mist, that now covers our enemies and now our friends, and now hides the true nature of the battle-ground between us. It means a hundred things in the mouths of a hundred different men. It is now a synonym for atheism, and now the chosen weapon of the Christian apologist, and we must, therefore, if we would clear our conduct from the spell of this mesmeric influence, force the word to give an account of itself, and tell us what it means.
II. Strictly speaking, the word agnosticism should be confined to the position of those who maintain that there is no evidence in the empirical and experimental sciences, when taken by themselves, to prove or to disprove the existence of a God. But such a doctrine, to say the least of it, is in no way incompatible with the Christian belief in a God whom no man hath seen at any time, who is not in the fire, or the whirlwind, or the earthquake, whose ways are not as our ways, and who cannot be found out by searching among the things of the natural world. If agnosticism were confined to the opinion that physical science in the abstract can have no theological bearings, it would be as true as a similar statement in regard of his own department when made by a political economist or pure mathematician. But in actual fact it means more than this, it is the courteous disclaimer of a practised controversialist, who, while he declines the attempt to prove a negative, insinuates his conviction that, after all, with sufficient diligence a negative might be proved. And beyond this scientific agnosticism, we live among forms of what may be called a religious agnosticism, that is, forms of thought which, while retaining a minimum of what is supposed to be requisite to constitute a religion, surrender in false deference to the spirit of the age as large a portion as they think possible of the metaphysics of their creed all in unconsciousness that by so doing they empty it of moral significance as well. Such attempts are retrogressive, counter to the spirit of development; and a Christian may reasonably maintain that such systems are self-condemned by their mutual exclusiveness, while Christianity includes them, as a late complex result of evolution includes the succession of simpler elements which it has incorporated in itself. Generations, like individuals, have each their besetting temptation, and ours is to think from the high level of our average morality, that we can live in less close and conscious dependence upon the Divine assistance than the men of old, who through that assistance raised our morality to what it is. We have special need, therefore, to remind ourselves from time to time, that the specifically Christian virtues owe their essential character to our consciousness of the love of our Father in heaven, of the revelation of that love on Calvary, and of our capacity for living on the power of it, in virtue of its own free self-communication to our souls.
J. R. Illingworth, Oxford and Cambridge Journal,Feb. 14th, 1881.
References: John 12:43. Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times,"vol. v., p. 27. John 12:44-50. F. D. Maurice, The Gospel of St. John,p. 341.