Editorial September 21, 1907 Issue

THE LESSER AND THE GREATER

John B. Willis

He who would fill out the larger measure of an effective life must acquire and maintain a right sense of proportion, the breadth and balance of view which interdicts that lop-sided estimate of things described by an Oxford professor as an "overemphasis of a half truth." Given the acute angle of vision which characterizes both intellectual and spiritual immaturity, together with the average impulse to extravagance and dogmatism of statement, and one is practically sure to find a concept of things which is distorted and can but grieve the thoughtful; and in so far it always handicaps and hinders the teaching with which it is identified.

It has always been characteristic of the narrow-visioned, furthermore, that they make loyalty their half truth the test of the genuineness and good faith of others, and unhesitatingly scourge the non-conforming. It has thus come about in all history that the asserted friends and would-be exponents of great ideas and movements have in many cases presented far greater hindrances to progress than have asserted enemies. Nothing seems to have tried the patience of the Master more severly than the discovery of this disposition and habit upon the part of those who stood most prominently for the religious life and order of his day. "Alas for you Pharisees," said he, "for you pay tithes on your mint and rue and every kind of garden vegetable, and are indifferent to justice and the love of God; these are the things you ought to have attended to while not neglecting the others" (Weymouth's translation). At another time he referred with keenest ridicule to their distorted emphasis of trivial duties, by saying that in their superstitious devotion thereto, while neglection the "weightier matters of the law," they were straining at gnats and swallowing camels. He thus pressed home a lesson which is of abiding significance, namely, that we should be considerate for the rank and order of the divine requirements, and guard against the superstition or personal pride which would lead us to give a single aspect of privilege or duty an entirely unwarranted prominence. We are not to lose sight of the fundamental through absorption in the incidental; not to center an attention on effects which should be given to cause; not to make a physical benefit rather than a spiritual gain our goal.

Jesus' estimate of values was a continuous surprise not only to his enemies, but to his friends, and this is pertinently illustrated in what he said to his disciples respecting physical healing. He was continually doing these wondrous works himself, and in sending forth his disciples he definitely commanded them that also should heal the sick and cast out demons, and yet when they came to him rejoicing in their accomplishment of that where unto he had sent them, he said to them that they were to rejoice not in these things, but rather in this, that their names were "written in heaven," that they were attaining to the consciousness of Life and Truth. At the moment when what seemed to be an entirely fitting exultation over a righteous achievement threatened to obscure their sense of true values, he spoke the steadying word, and that which had seemed primary to them was seen to be but secondary, incidental to a higher realization of Truth.

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