The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character

by Robert E. Speer

Now, as a matter of fact, the principle of that impression was true, for although, as Dr. McGiffert says, Paul

“recognized the legitimacy of Jewish Christianity, and the right of Peter and other apostles to preach to the Jews the Gospel of circumcision, and though there is no evidence that he ever undertook to lead the Jews as a people to cease observing their ancestral law, he had certainly been in the habit of insisting that his Jewish converts should associate on equal terms with their Gentile brethren, and that they should not allow their law to act in any way as a barrier to the freest and most intimate association with them. But this, of course, meant, in so far, their violation of the law’s commands. It is certain also that Paul had preached for years the doctrine that not the Gentile Christian alone but the Jewish Christian as well is absolutely free from all obligation to keep the law of Moses, and though such teaching might not always result in a disregard of that law by his Jewish converts, it must have a tendency to produce that effect and doubtless did in many cases. It is clear therefore that both accusations had much truth in them, and it is difficult to suppose that Paul can have deliberately attempted in Jerusalem to prove them wholly false.

“And yet, though as an honourable man and a man of principle he can hardly have undertaken to demonstrate that there was no truth in the reports which were circulated concerning him, it may well be that he tried to show that they were not wholly true. It was evidently assumed by those who accused him of ‘teaching all the Jews which are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children, neither to walk after the customs,’ that he hated the Jewish law and that he was doing all that lay in his power to destroy it; that he believed and that he taught everywhere that its observance was under any and all circumstances a positive sin. But this assumption was not true. Paul was certainly not hostile to the law in any such sense. He believed that it had no binding authority over a Christian, and he opposed with all his might the idea that its observance had any value as a means of salvation, or that it contributed in any way to the believer’s righteousness or growth in grace; but he held no such view of the law as made its observance necessarily sinful, and rendered it impossible for him ever to observe it himself in any respect. And it was not at all unnatural that he should desire to convince the Christians of Jerusalem of the fact; especially when he had come thither with the express purpose of conciliating them and winning their favour for himself and for his Gentile converts. He would have been very foolish under these circumstances to allow such a false impression touching his attitude towards the law to go uncontradicted.”[1]

[1] “The Apostolic Age,” p. 341.

This is a satisfactory defense if one were needed of Paul’s course, but no one would question his motive. That was right enough and he evidently acted in all good conscience, but the procedure, instead of getting him out of his trouble, got him into worse trouble. It always does that. I do not believe any man was ever permanently helped by compromise. Every man who has begun to play with it has been drawn into worse difficulties and troubles, or has gone down, perhaps without conscious difficulty but with real moral loss, to a lower level of life. For one thing, compromise blurs the line of cleavage between truth and error, and that is exactly what no one of us can afford to have done. We do not want the lines of distinction between what is true and what is false slurred over for us. We want them sharpened so that we shall make as little mistake as possible as to where they lie. Furthermore compromise gets us into more difficulty than it removes, because it throws together things that are not congruous or reconcilable. This is its very nature. It brings into one bed things that cannot sleep together, into one union things that cannot be tied. And it postpones real settlements in the interest of spurious arrangements, sacrificing some

“greater good for the less, on no more creditable ground than that the less is nearer. It is better to wait, and to defer the realization of our ideas until we can realize them fully, than to defraud the future by truncating them, if truncate them we must, in order to secure a partial triumph for them in the immediate present.... What is the sense, and what is the morality, of postponing the wider utility to the narrower? Nothing is so sure to impoverish an epoch, to deprive conduct of nobleness, and character of elevation.”

These are Mr. Morley’s closing words. This is the second reason why we believe there can be no room for compromise in our Christian life or service.

In the third place, it encourages evil by making it think that having got so much it can get the rest, and so it prolongs the life of evil. That is exactly what compromise did in the old days of slavery. Every one of those early compromises prolonged the life of evil which at last the nation had to pour out its blood to destroy. That is what compromise always does. It persuades evil that, after all, maybe evil can win the victory, that having gotten so much from us it can get the rest if only it will be patient, and we simply increase the courage of our foe in proportion as we make any compromise with him instead of standing up face to face against him from the very beginning. And so it destroys the power and might of right causes by mixing in the taint of wrong. You do not make a good man better by putting a dash of bad in him. You do not make a good cause stronger by letting the evil come in; you only weaken its strength and power. Compromise plays into the hands of the very evil which we are here to overcome and destroy.

In the fourth place, compromise breaks down the strength of rigid consistency, and by letting in one qualification prepares the way for others. That is the reason why it is so much harder for a man to be a moderate drinker than to be a total abstainer. As was said of Samuel Johnson, “He could practice abstinence but not temperance.” When a man has made up his mind that he will never do a thing, it is a great deal easier for him to refuse to do it in any given instance than if he has made up his mind that he will do it moderately, because he never knows when he ceases to be moderate. There is a sharp line between moderate drinking and total abstinence. That boundary line no one can ever mistake, but the boundary line between intemperance and moderation is not located anywhere. There is no definite border between those two countries. As a matter of fact, every man starts in by being a moderate drinker. He never intended to become anything else but a moderate drinker when he began. But there is a boundary line so clear that a blind man can see it between yes and no, between not doing a thing at all and doing that thing only moderately. We believe in the principle of absolutely no compromise in moral habit and principle, and we believe in the same principle in our clear and evangelical convictions regarding the Christian faith.

In the fifth place, we ought to shun all such compromise because it undermines our confidence in men, and the solid unity of their coöperative action. We know where truth is, but we never know where calculating compromise may be. In the language of the deaf and dumb this is the sign for truth—a straight line right away from your mouth—for the simple reason that between two points there is only one straight line, but there may be many crooked lines. The truth is always a single thing, but the error,—no man knows what it may be. No compromise makes possible unity of accord by giving people one standard on which they can rely, and by supplying confidence in the stability of men and their convictions. But we cannot follow the compromising man, for as soon as he gets out of our sight we do not know where he will be.