The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character

by Robert E. Speer

And, lastly, we believe in no compromise because the truth is bound to prevail, and it will triumph the soonest when it is least hampered and tied up with error or with qualification. One might stop here to make a defense on this ground of the fanatics and devotees, but it is enough to say that the truth is going to prevail because it is God’s truth, and hell and all hell’s power in the world cannot stand against it. What is the use in delaying the day of that triumph by compromising with error? The right will prevail all the faster if we make no compromise with error, if we go out and preach unflinchingly and courageously with no compromise, with no surrender or economy or adaptations, the hard, plain truth of God as we see it. If what we think is truth is really error, it will be the sooner beaten down for being made to stand up for itself. But if it is indeed the truth we know it will prevail the more in the world as we keep it free from all connection with anything that will weaken or becloud it.

I know how much danger there is in such an attitude as this if we take it up towards the truth that we hold. It lies in our human nature to go to violence or extremes with everything. Martin Luther used to say that human nature is like a drunken man trying to ride a horse, you prop him up on one side and he topples over on the other. It is that way with us. We try to be firm and we become hard-hearted. We pride ourselves on uncompromising loyalty to the truth and we lack the tenderness and sympathy. Moreover, as Bushnell said in his essay on “Christian Comprehensiveness”:

“It is the common infirmity of mere human reformers that, when they rise up to cast out an error, it is generally not till they have kindled their passions against it. If they begin with reason, they are commonly moved, in the last degree, by their animosities instead of reason. And as animosities are blind, they, of course, see nothing to respect, nothing to spare. The question whether possibly there may not be some truth or good in the error assailed, which is needed to qualify and save the equilibrium of their own opposing truth, is not once entertained. Hence it is that men, in expelling one error, are perpetually thrusting themselves into another, as if unwilling or unable to hold more than half the truth at once.”

And yet these dangers are lesser dangers than the danger of surrendering the truth. And we can be guarded from them by the great and unselfish love that guarded Paul. The man who loves others more than he loves himself, who holds human lives sacred and free from invasion, who is seeking not his own glory, but the glory of God and the good of men, is in little danger from an absolutely uncompromising loyalty to the truth.

And if ever men have any doubts or misgivings regarding this, or if the time of discouragements and fears comes to them, and they look with longing to the multitudes who act together, while they think of themselves as just a few, bearing testimony for the truth against error and sin, they may encourage themselves with Mr. Matthew Arnold’s doctrine of the remnant, or better yet, by remembering the great Solitary, Jesus Christ. How lonesomely He walked His way; seeing what no other soul was seeing; standing alone for the great truth which He uttered, and at last meeting death upon the cross alone; one of His disciples having betrayed Him, another having three times denied that he ever knew Him, and all the others having left Him and gone away! And yet as we look back, we see that lonely cross ruling the whole world, and that forsaken figure men are clothing now with the crown of everlasting light, and His name is above every name. All that we are asked to do is simply to follow in His train, to take up the truth which He opened, and for that truth to be willing to live, and, which is far easier, if need be, to die. Our lives are ours for this one thing, that through them, without compromise with error or with sin, God may bear testimony to Himself, and whether He does that through many years or through few, through peaceful personal service or through storm and tragedy, is of no consequence. The one thing that is of consequence is that we should know and be true to God.

But there is a better way to set forth and commend this principle as a law of life than by arguing it in these general terms. Let the principle put on flesh and live before us in a man:

“And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the sojourners of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the Lord, the God of Israel, liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.”

The old man who spoke these words was one of the four great characters of the Old Testament. He and Moses and Samuel and David stood apart in the thought of the Hebrew people. Indeed, there was a sense in which he and Moses were in a class by themselves. The appearance of those two with our Lord on the Mountain of Transfiguration was only an illustration of the place which they held in the imagination of Israel.

These were the first words he spoke as he bursts on our view. What lay behind them we can only surmise. He was a Tishbite, one “of the sojourners of Gilead,” dwelling beyond the Jordan, a man brought up in the desert. There on the level sands, with the eye of God looking down upon him, he had come to a deep feeling of the soul’s lonely stand before God, and convinced of God and the righteousness of God he came over the Jordan to speak his message and do his work in the organized national life of his people. He was a clean-limbed, frugal-lived man, who gathered up his skirts about him, we are told, and ran straight away sixteen miles before the chariot of Ahab, from Carmel to the entering in of Jezreel; a calm, quiet, courageous, firm-principled man; bred so in the desert with God.

We do not have any very elaborate story of his life. He appears on the stage and then he vanishes. There are long periods of time covering years when he disappears entirely from the record. We can condense what we know about his life into six brief chapters, between each two of which there is an interval, in some cases, a long interval of time.