1 Peter 2:18-25 Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the fraudulent.… It may be asked whether the advice of St. Peter to submit quietly to wrong does not destroy manliness and force of character if it is acted on? Does it not tend to create a race of effeminate, spiritless men? This question involves another. In what does moral strength consist? It is sometimes taken for granted that moral strength must catch the eye, must inflict itself on the imagination; that it must be something bustling, demonstrative, aggressive; that it must at least have colour, body, muscle, to recommend it. This is not the ease. Moral strength, in its very finest forms, may be the reverse of all this; when it makes no show, and is passive, it is often at its best. Many a man who can act with great courage in moments of great personal danger, in a struggle with a brigand, or in a burning house, cannot go through an illness as bravely and patiently as a little girl. The hardest thing often is to do nothing, to await the approach of danger or of death, and yet not to lose nerve and self-possession. No moral strength in the whole history of mankind ever equalled that which was displayed on Calvary, where all that awaited Him was present from the first to the mind of the Divine victim, "who, when He was reviled, reviled not again; when He suffered He threatened not, but committed Himself to Him that judgeth righteously" (1 Peter 2:23). Nothing that has been said will be so greatly misconstrued as to be taken to imply that cruelty, tyranny, oppression, can be agreeable to the mind of God. He permits these things among men from time to time, just as He permits much else that is evil for His own wise ends. He brings good out of them, yet He condemns them. By and by He will punish them. Nowhere is it implied in the Bible that the systems involving the oppression of man by man have vested rights in the moral universe, or that the circumstances which permit it are even tolerable, unless they are perpetuated for very different purposes indeed. The days will come when Englishmen will look back to the abolition of the slave trade by the English Parliament as a greater title to glory than was Trafalgar or Waterloo; as among the very greatest in the course of our history. Wilberforce and Clarkson will rank even before those celebrated commanders, to whose courage and genius, under God, we owe the independence of our country. Among yourselves there are probably some who, for conscience toward God, endure grief, suffering wrongfully. There are no slaves, thank God, on English soil, but there are multitudes of persons in positions of dependence whose lives can easily be made miserable by the cruel ingenuity of their betters, and too often for no worse crime than that of obeying a higher sense of right. Every rank in society has its petty tyrants and its secret confessorships; to suffer wrongfully for conscience toward God is the monopoly of no one class. Here is a cadet of a noble family who will not consent to a transaction which he knows to be unjust, and he is cut off with a shilling. There is an apprentice or clerk in a large city house who will not abandon the duties or restraints of a Christian life in deference to pressure or abuse or ridicule from his companions, and he has a hard time of it. Yonder is a governess who has learnt a higher estimate of life and duty than her wealthy and ostentatious employer; or a clergyman who feels too keenly the real character of Divine revelation and the tremendous issues of life and death to acquiesce in some popular but shallow misrepresentation of the gospel which makes his people comfortable without bringing them nearer to God. These, and such as these, must, "for conscience toward God, endure grief, suffering wrongfully." Law can do but little for them; the province of law lies outside the spheres of the heart and the conscience; the whole world of motive is beyond it. But religion can do much, or rather everything, by pointing to the crucified and risen Prince of that vast company in all ages who have cared less to avoid discomfort than to be true to known truth and duty; by pointing to the unapproached bitterness of His sorrow, and to the completeness and splendour of His triumph. (Canon Liddon.) Parallel Verses KJV: Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward. |
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