The Right Hand and the Left

The passage: Do not do your righteousness before people to be seen by them, or you lose your Father’s reward. When you give alms, let not your left hand know what your right hand does; give in secret, and your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you. (Matthew vi. 1, 3.)

Let your light out freely, so that men may see it but not so that they may see you. If I do something not because God would have it so, or from love of the thing, but that I may be seen as the doer and praised or famed, then however good the thing, my reward is from men; there is none for me with the Father. If I do it with the light as my pleasure, that it may shine and men may know the Light, the Father of lights, I do well. But if I do it that I may be seen shining, with the light noted as mine and not another’s, I seek glory of men and worship Satan; the light that may illuminate others through me is, in me and for me, darkness.

But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.

How am I to let my light shine, if I take pains to hide what I do?

The injunction is not to hide what you do from others but from yourself. The Master would have you not plume yourself on it or confer with yourself in satisfaction over it. A man must not desire to be satisfied with himself; his right hand must not seek the praise of his left, but let the thing go as done with. We must imagine no merit in ourselves, either in doing a fine thing or in having done it: that would be to love a lie, for we have none. What is there to be proud of in refusing to worship the devil, or in denying ourselves a selfish indulgence, any more than in washing our hands? When we have done all, we are unprofitable servants; our best is only decent, and what more could it be? The worst villains would be those proud of not committing a villainy, and their pride would make them readier for it when temptation next came. Even perfect duty, once we pride ourselves on it, drops us into a hell of worthlessness. What are we for but to do our duty? We must do it and think nothing of ourselves for it, and not care what men think; their blame may be good, their praise cannot be. But the worst praise of men is the praise we give ourselves. We must do nothing to be seen of ourselves, and seek no approval but God’s, or we shut the door of the kingdom from outside; and his approval will only deepen our sense of unworthiness. What! seek praise of men for being fair to our brothers and sisters, or of God for laying our hearts at the feet of him to whom we utterly belong? There is no pride so mean (and all pride is essentially mean) as the pride of being holier than our fellow, except the pride of being holy. Such imagined holiness is foulness; religion in the hearts of the unreal is a dead thing, and what seems life in it is the crawling life of a corpse.

One word in the Authorized Version used to trouble me, because it seemed to make publicity part of the reward for doing right in secret: the word openly, at the ends of the fourth, sixth and eighteenth verses. The Lord seemed to say, “Avoid the praise of men, and you will at length have the praise of men”; your reward seen of men, and you seen receiving it! How else could the word be understood? It must be the interpolation of some Jewish scribe who, even after learning a little of the Christ, could not conceive a reward that did not draw some sweetness from the gazing eyes of the crowd. I was glad to find the word is not in the best manuscripts, and is left out of the revised version. Of like sort is the daring of much exposition of the Master’s words: what men lack faith to receive, they dilute to the level of their own power of reception. If anyone asks why the Lord let the word stay so long if he never said it, perhaps it was that his disciples might be troubled, rise against it, and do him right by casting it out, and so Wisdom be justified of her children.

Some who are not naturally troubled by the notion of reward have come to be, because of objectors who think they take a higher stand than the Christian and call reward for doing right a low idea. It would be low for a child to do his father’s will in hope of being rewarded. But it is quite another thing for a father, seeing his child try to please him, to let him know he recognizes his childness and will be fatherly good to him. What kind of father, because there can be no merit in doing well, would give his child no smile or pleased word for trying his best? That smile is the child’s perfect reward. Suppose he loves his child so much that he wants to give him everything but dares not until his character is developed: must he not be glad, and show it, at each step toward the day he can throne his son over all he has? “I am an unprofitable servant,” says the man who has done his duty; yet his lord, finding him at his post, girds himself, sits him down to meat, and serves him. How could the divine order, founded for growth, proceed without return for a thing done? How can we work with God and he never say “Thank you, my child,” like a husbandman taking all the profit and muzzling the ox? When a man works for another he has his wages, and society exists by this dependence of man on man. The devil did not invent this society; he invented the notion of degradation in work and a greater in wages, and has built a Society after his own likeness, which despises work, leaves it undone, and so can claim its wages without disgrace.

If you say, “No one ought to do right for the sake of reward,” I go further: no man can. A man may do something indifferent, or wrong, for reward; but a thing right in itself, done for reward, ceases in the doing to be right. Yet a man who does right cannot escape being rewarded, and to refuse the reward would be to refuse life and foil the creative love. The whole question is what reward is expected. The first reward of doing well is to grow purer in heart and stronger in hope of seeing God; without it a man must perish. As for happiness and the lower rewards that naturally follow, is God to destroy the sequence of cause and effect and say, “Do well, but gain no good by it; live joylessly for eternity, that lack of delight may show you pure”? Could Love create for that end? Righteousness does not demand creation; it is Love, not Righteousness, that cannot live alone. The creature must already be before Righteousness can put in a claim; but once hearts and souls are there, Love, which created for love and joy, presses Righteousness’s demand first.

A righteousness that created misery to uphold itself would be unrighteous. God will die for righteousness, but never create for a joyless one. To create the necessarily incomplete, to create for the knowledge of himself and then not give himself, would be cruel injustice; and if he gives himself, what reward is left out, seeing he is Life and all her children, the All in all? It will take the utmost joy God can give to let men know him, and what man, knowing him, would mind losing every other joy? What other joy could be kept from entering where the God of joy already dwelt? The law of the universe holds, the name of the Father be praised: a man reaps what he sows, the whirlwind from the wind, corruption from sowing to the flesh and life everlasting from sowing to the spirit; to him who has more is given, and from him who has not even that is taken.

To object to Christianity as selfish is foolishness; it alone gives hope of deliverance from selfishness. Is it selfish to desire to love, or to hope for purity and the sight of God? What better can we do for our neighbour than become altogether righteous toward him, and so bring him nearer to sharing the reward of a return to the divine idea?

Where is the evil toward God, or wrong to my neighbour, if I sometimes think of the joys that follow perfect loving? Is not love itself, the Father’s breath, in which no thinnest pollution of selfishness can float, the only material to build the castles of heaven? The childlike heart might cry: “Creator, give me all the reward your father-heart can give your unmeriting child. My fit wages may be pain, sorrow, humiliation of soul; I welcome them. Your reward will be to lift me out of the mire of self-love and bring me nearer to you and your children, the divinest of good things. Your highest reward is your purest gift, yourself; you made me for it, and have been labouring to fit me for it. I can seek only what you wait to give: let your love flow into me.”

It seems to me that the only merit that could live before God is the merit of Jesus, who of himself, untaught and unimplored, laid himself aside and turned to the Father, refusing his life save in him. Like God, he chose righteousness of himself, and so merited to sit on the throne of God. In the same spirit he afterward gave himself to his Father’s children, and merited the power to pour his life-redeeming spirit into theirs: made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him. Yet to say that Jesus had no thought of merit, that he saw only what he had to be and must do, is a word of little daring. Where is a man’s merit in refusing to go down to an abyss of loss, of the right to be, of his father, of himself? Would Satan, with all the instincts of his origin in him, have merited eternal life by refusing to be a devil? He would still have had it, and the Father’s love; that would have been his reward. I cannot imagine any created thing meriting anything save by divine courtesy.

I suspect the notion of merit belongs to a low stage of development; the higher a man rises, the less he finds it worth a thought. Perhaps it exists only because man thinks it. I suspect it is not a thought of the eternal mind, and is to God merely a thing man thinks.

So the man who does right and seeks no praise from men, though he merits nothing, will be rewarded by his Father, and will prize the reward.

We must let our light shine, make our faith, hope and love manifest, so that men may praise not us for shining but the Father for creating the light. No one with faith, hope and love alive in his soul could make a show of them to win admiration; yet they must appear in our words, looks and carriage, above all in honourable, unselfish, hospitable, helpful deeds: in cheerfulness, joy, and, where a man has the gift, merriment; in freedom from care save for one another, in interest in others’ concerns, in fearlessness, tenderness, courtesy and graciousness. In our anger and indignation, especially, must it shine. But we must give no quarter to the faintest thought of how this or that will look, or of the praise of men. No man can be a disciple of Christ and desire fame. To desire fame is ignoble, a beggarly greed; there is no aspiration in it, only ambition, selfishness that would be proud if it could. Fame is the applause of the many, whose judgment is foolish; the greater the fame, the greater the foolishness that swells it and the worse that which longs for it. Aspiration is the only escape from ambition. He who aspires, who strives to rise above himself, neither lusts to be higher than his neighbour nor seeks to mount in his opinion. His light shines the more because he does nothing to be seen of men. He stands in the mist between the gulf and the glory, and looks upward; he does not love his own soul but longs to be clean.

O Lord, your creature earnestly waits for the sons of God to be revealed.