With most of us manners are a chief ministry of life. If love is the very element, the essence of holiness, then holiness should produce sweetness of both mind and manners. Amiability means, etymologically, loveliness, loveableness. But is it not too often the misfortune of piety, especially in its more earnest forms, to be accompanied by unamiable severity, not to say sourness—by introspective moodiness; unnecessary rigor in petty or indifferent things; uncharitable crimination of those whose opinions of spiritual experience do not conform to our own, habitual obtrusion of our own opinions—not only repelling individual brethren, but sometimes annoying and agitating whole churches?
“Be courteous:” The sentence, though brief, is full of significance, and is divinely authoritative. It is a commandment.
Stanley, in his “Lectures on the Scotch Church,” tells a fine story about Archbishop Usher, the chronologist of sacred history. Hearing of the great genius and saintliness of Rutherford, the celebrated Scotch divine, he went incognito to the rural parsonage of the good pastor, and was received to its hospitality as a belated traveler. The household was “catechised” that evening, and the stranger took his seat among them to share the exercise. “How many commandments are there?” asked Rutherford. “Eleven,” replied Usher. Rutherford rebuked him severely for his ignorance. What had been his education, that he could make such a blunder? The next morning was Sunday, and, as the pastor went on his way through the woods toward his church, he heard fervent prayer in a thicket, and was deeply affected. Usher soon appeared coming out of it, and Rutherford had an explanation. His heart was still more deeply touched, and the archbishop was constrained to preach for him that morning. He did so on the text, “A new commandment,” etc. Rutherford was now still more deeply affected; there was, indeed, an eleventh commandment—“that ye love one another”—and he had unintentionally broken it, for he had not been courteous to his eminent visitor, in his Saturday evening catechetical rebuke, and the command to be courteous was certainly implied in the new commandment—if not, it must be a twelfth one.
It is, indeed, a “commandment” whether the eleventh modified, or a twelfth. Hannah Moore, in her essay on St. Paul, delineates him as a veritable gentleman. He knew how to rebuke audacious sin; but his writings teem with maxims inculcating gentle behavior. There was a fine touch of courtesy in his retraction of that sudden rebuke to the Jewish priest—of courteous respect for the office, if not the officer.
Manners are admitted to be, at least, “minor morals.” Minor morals! How often are they indeed major morals! As making up a great proportion of the habitual conduct of life, their influence on ourselves, as well as on others, is habitual, and, therefore, must be proportionately strong and important. Shall we, then, deem them mere minor morals? Do they not fashion us, to a great extent, for both worlds? “As a man thinketh, so is he,” is an old proverb; as a man acteth, so is he, may be more surely affirmed, especially as he acteth habitually, in the common intercourse of life, so thoroughly modified by our demeanor.
You “know a man by the company he keeps,” says another maxim; you know him still more by the habitudes which accompany him.
You know him by his manners, not merely because manners are the most habitual effect, or expression, of his character, but because they have really, to a great extent, formed his character. They are cause as well as effect.
There is, then, a profound ethical importance in manners, for their educational, their moral, effect on the man himself. A truly courteous man, a true gentleman, and especially a Christian gentleman, is the better for every act of good manners in his daily life. There is sentiment, and, in a sense, moral sentiment, at the bottom of all manners. Respect for others has some very subtle and vital affinity with self-respect; and self-respect is not self-conceit, it is respect for the moral claims of our own nature on our own conduct.
Courtesy is, then, we repeat, ethical—and much more deeply and broadly so than is usually supposed. We can not habitually violate its requisitions without injuring ourselves, as well as others. Discourtesy reacts and degenerates.
But manners are not only important as self-educational; they are powerful in their influence on others, and have, in this respect, an ethical importance: to them attaches an unavoidable responsibility.