The tender mercies of the wicked are when base and guilty men are spared that should be smitten with the sword of justice. Pity of this sort is more cruel than cruelty itself. For cruelty is exercised upon individuals, but the pity, by granting impunity, arms and sends forth against innocent men the whole army of evil doers.—Lord Bacon.
We have been used to hear much of the benevolence of infidels and the philanthropy of deists. It is all a pretence. Self is the idol and self-indulgence the object, in the accomplishment of which they are little scrupulous about the means. Where self is the idol, the heart is cruel. While they talk of universal charity, they regard not the cruelty of robbing thousands of the consolations of religion. . . . While they speak of harmless gaiety and pleasure they would treacherously corrupt piety and pollute unsuspecting innocence.—Holden.
The word “regard” is of twofold application, and may either apply to the moral or the intellectual part of our nature. In the one it is the regard of attention; in the other it is the regard of sympathy or kindness. But we do not marvel at the term having been applied to two different things, for they are most intimately associated. They act and re-act upon each other. If the heart be very alive to any particular set of emotions the mind will be alert in singling out the peculiar objects which excite them; so, on the other hand, that the emotions be specifically felt the objects must be specifically noticed. . . . So much is this the case that Nature seems to have limited and circumscribed our power of noticing just for the purpose of shielding us from too incessant a sympathy. . . . If man, for instance, looked upon Nature with a microscopic eye his sensibilities would be exposed to the torture of a perpetual offence from all possible quarters of contemplation, or, if through habit these sensibilities were blunted, what would become of character in the extinction of delicacy of feeling? . . . There is, furthermore, a physical inertness of our reflective faculties, an opiate infused, as it were, into the recesses of our mental economy, by which objects, when out of sight, are out of mind, and it is to some such provision, we think that much of the heart’s purity, as well as its tenderness, is owing; and it is well that the thoughts of the spirit should be kept, though even by the weight of its own lethargy, from too busy a converse with objects which are alike offensive and hazardous to both. . . . But there is a still more wondrous limitation than this. . . . The sufferings of the lower animals may be in sight, and yet out of mind. This is strikingly exemplified in the sports of the field, in the midst of whose varied and animating bustle that cruelty, which is all along present to the senses, may not, for one moment, be present to the thoughts. . . . It touches not the sensibilities of the heart, but just because it is never present to the notice of the mind. The followers of this occupation are reckless of pain, but this is not rejoicing in pain. Theirs is not the delight of savage, but the apathy of unreflecting creatures. . . . We are inclined to carry this principle must further. We are not sure if, within the whole compass of humanity, fallen as it is, there be such a thing as delight in suffering for its own sake. But, without hazarding a controversy on this, we hold it enough for every practical object that much, and perhaps the whole of the world’s cruelty, arises not from the enjoyment that is felt in consequence of others’ pain, but from the enjoyment that is felt in spite of it. . . . But a charge of the foulest delinquency may be made up altogether of wants or of negatives; and just as the human face, by the mere want of some of its features, although there should not be any inversion of them, might be an object of utter loathsomeness to beholders, so the human character, by the mere absence of certain habits or sensibilities which belong ordinarily and constitutionally to our species, may be an object of utter abomination in society. The want of natural affection forms one article of the Apostle’s indictment against our world; and certain it is enough for the designation of a monster. The mere want of religion is enough to make a man an outcast from his God. Even to the most barbarous of our kind you apply, not the term of anti-humanity, but of inhumanity—not the term of anti-sensibility; and you hold it enough for the purpose of branding him for general execration that you convicted him of complete and total insensibility. . . . We count it a deep atrocity that, unlike to the righteous man of our text, he simply does not regard the life of a beast. . . . The true principle of his condemnation is that he ought to have regarded. . . . Our text rests the whole cause of the inferior animals on one moral element, which is in respect of principle, and on one practical method, which is, in respect of efficacy, unquestionable: “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.” Let a man be but righteous in the general and obvious sense of the word, and let the regard of his attention be but directed to the case of the inferior animals, and then the regard of his sympathy will be awakened to the full extent at which it is either duteous or desirable. . . . The lesson is not the circulation of benevolence within the limits of one species. It is the transmission of it from one species to another. The first is but the charity of a world; the second is the charity of a universe. Had there been no such charity, no descending current of love and liberality from species to species, what would have become of ourselves? Whence have we learned this attitude of lofty unconcern about the creatures who are beneath us? Not from those ministering spirits who wait upon the heirs of salvation. . . . Not from that mighty and mysterious visitant who unrobed Him of all His glories, and bowed down His head unto the sacrifice, and still, from the seat of His now exalted mediatorship, pours forth His intercessions and His calls in behalf of the race He died for. Finally, not from the eternal Father of all, in the pavilion of whose residence there is the golden treasury of all those bounties and beatitudes that roll over the face of nature, and from the footstool of whose empyreal throne there reaches a golden chain of providence to the very humblest of His family.—Chalmers.
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God that loveth us,
He made and loveth all.—Coleridge.
main homiletics of verse 11.
Satisfaction from Tillage.
I. Satisfaction as the result of tillage depends—1. Upon the performance of a Divine promise. It is long ago since God gave Noah the promise that “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” (Gen. ix. 22), and it has been so invariably fulfilled that men have come to forget upon whom they are depending—in whom they are exercising faith—when they plough the ground and sow the seed. God’s regularity in His performance has bred in men a contempt for the promise and the promise maker. Men speak of the laws of nature and ignore the fact that it is by the Word of the Lord that the “rain cometh down and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater” (Isa. lv. 10). But so it is. The promise is the power that set the laws in motion at first and that have kept them in motion ever since. There can be no tillage without dependence upon God either acknowledged or unacknowledged. The promise is an absolute one, and implies power in God to fulfil it to the end of time. It can never fail unless God’s power fail, or unless He break His Word; these are blessed impossibilities with Him. Therefore, so far as God is concerned the shall of the text is absolute. But it depends likewise—2. Upon man’s fulfilment of their duties. First, it is not all tillage that will satisfy a man with bread, the tillage must be painstaking and intelligent. The promise of God does not set aside the necessity for the man to be very laborious and to study carefully the nature and needs of the soil which he tills. Agriculture is a science which must be acquired—a man must learn how to till the ground. God claims to be man’s instructor in this matter (Isa. xxviii. 26). Then, again, it must be his land that he tills, not land taken by fraud or violence from another. Neither if a man tills the land of another as his servant is he always paid sufficient wages to be satisfied with bread. But this is the greed of man interfering with God’s ordination.
II. The promise suggests symbolic teaching. We may look at it in relation to the human spirit. As land must be ploughed and sown with painstaking intelligence if a man is to have the satisfaction of reaping a harvest, so the human soul must be the object of spiritual tillage if it is ever to yield any satisfaction to God or man. There is very much to be got out of the land, but no man can obtain the full blessing unless he cultivate it. So it is with the man himself. A human soul left to lie barren can never become as a “field which the Lord hath blessed.” 1. It must be prepared to receive the words of God. The “fallow ground” must be broken up, lest the sowing be “among thorns” (Jer. iv. 3), or the seed fall where it can find no entrance (Hosea x. 12; Matt. xiii. 4). 2. Good seed must be sown. The word of God (Mark iv. 14), that “incorruptible seed” by which men are “born again” (1 Pet. i. 23). 3. And the spiritual sower must be persevering and prayerful. It is true of natural tillage that “He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap” (Eccles. xi. 4); it is equally so of soul-husbandry. The world, the flesh, and the devil will be always putting difficulties in the way of a man’s caring for his “own soul.” But these obstacles must be surmounted, and if the seed is watered by prayer God will assuredly send down the rain of the Holy Ghost. 4. And in spiritual tillage there is also a certainty of satisfaction. This also depends upon not one Divine promise but upon many—upon the revelation of God as a whole. (Upon the opposite character—him “that followeth vain persons,” or vanity, instead of tilling his land or his spiritual nature—see Homiletics on chapters [vi. 11] and [x. 5], pages 79 and 147.)
outlines and suggestive comments.
We might have expected that the antithesis of the second clause would have ended with “shall lack bread,” but the real contrast goes deeper. Idleness leads to a worse evil than that of hunger.—Plumptre.