1 Corinthians 14:20

BABES, YET MEN

‘Brethren, be not children in mind: howbeit in malice be ye babes, but in mind be men.’

1 Corinthians 14:20 (R. V.)

Two kinds of childishness are indicated by the Apostle, the one to be deprecated, the other to be desired.

I. The child is offered as the example of what Christians ought to be.—No doubt the words of our Lord were much in the mind of the Apostolic Church. ‘Verily, I say unto you, except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ The humble station and low social rank of the primitive converts gave an obvious propriety to their description of themselves as possessing the characteristic qualities of children—simplicity, weakness, innocence. In the Epistle to the Romans St. Paul exults in the ‘obedience’ of his converts, and declares that he would ‘have them wise unto that which is good, and simple unto that which is evil,’ an aspiration which lies open to the objection that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are not always clearly marked, and that it is not very easy to secure that the ‘wisdom’ which shall be available for one class of experiences shall co-exist with the ‘simplicity’ which is proper for another.

II. There are in the text two distinctions which we must mark and appreciate.—There is a sphere within which experience and knowledge are injurious—the sphere of moral wrong-doing. There is a sphere within which experience and knowledge are indispensable—the sphere of the intellect. ‘In malice be ye babes, but in mind be men.’ That is one distinction—a distinction of spheres or of subject-matter. By his emphatic association of ‘mind’ with manhood, St. Paul indicates the importance which he claims for the intellect in the life of the Christian and of the society of Christians. It is possible, he would say, in your abhorrence of moral corruption to exalt an universal childishness as the proper temper of a disciple. But herein you avoid one error only to fall into another. Innocence ceases to be admirable when it certifies immaturity. Christianity is not a religion for the cradle and the nursery only, or mainly, since Christianity is the religion of God manifest in man, and man is then most competent to fulfil his service when he brings to it the plenitude of his powers. St. Paul contrasts the ‘man’ and the ‘babe,’ and he tells us that the Christian is to keep the balance and obey the law of his manhood. ‘In mind be men.’

III. St. Paul seems to mark off sharply the moral from the intellectual obligation of discipleship.—The one resolves itself into a jealous vigilance against every form of evil; the other exacts an honest and arduous service of every kind of truth. Fidelity to a standard once established is the dominant aspect of the one; progress and growth, the recompense and result of discipline and effort, are the leading features of the other. Abstinence and acquisition, to hold fast and to attain, to become as a little child, and, ‘forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, to press on toward the goal,’ it is by such phrases, divergent in suggestion yet correlated in religious experience, that the duty of the Christian is expressed in the New Testament.

—Rev. Canon Henson.

Illustration

‘It is related of the famous Cambridge don of the seventeenth century, Joseph Meade, that he pursued with his pupils a somewhat unusual method, choosing rather to set every one his daily task than constantly to confine himself and them to precise hours for lectures. In the evening they all came to his chamber to satisfy him that they had performed the task he had set them. The first question which he used then to propound to every one in his order was “Quid dubitas?”—“What doubts have you met in your studies to-day?” For he supposed that to doubt nothing and to understand nothing were verifiable alike.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

CHILDLIKE QUALITIES

What did Christ mean by saying that we are to become like children? It is not the goodness of children which our Lord praises. It is certain natural qualities of children that have a sad way of vanishing as we grow older, but which, if they are lost, we must do our best to recover. What are those qualities? If we recall the circumstances in which our Lord spoke about children, we shall at once see that the prayer, ‘I thank Thee that Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes,’ was uttered after His rejection by the chief priests and elders, and of His acceptance by the band of Apostles, and it must refer to that.

I. Candour and simplicity.—Is not one of the most characteristic and delightful qualities of children their habit of looking straight at what is before them and judging it to the best of their power, without prejudice or fear of consequence, on its merits? A child’s candour and simplicity sometimes, by clashing with our polite conventions, causes momentary annoyance, but it is, in essence, a most valuable quality, as we cannot deny even while we suffer from it. And it is this childlike quality in the Apostles which distinguishes them from the Pharisees and enables them to receive the new revelation of Christ. While some were saying, ‘Jesus cannot be a prophet because He was born in Nazareth,’ the Apostles, looking neither before nor behind, having neither prejudice nor fear of consequence, looking straight at their Master, discovered that He had for them the words of eternal life. And so they made the confession on which the Church is founded: ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.’ Now this sincerity, this true thinking and plain speaking, which is natural to children, often tends to be worn away as we leave childhood behind us, by the proper and natural desire to stand well with the little world of society, politics, or religion in which we happen to move, and, if so, it must be recovered, and we have to set it before us as a virtue to be attained; we have to turn and become in this respect once more like little children.

II. The absence of self-importance.—And the second childlike quality which also we must labour to get back again is absence of self-importance. You will remember that our Lord’s putting the little child in the midst followed upon the wrangling of the Apostles as to their order of precedence. Children are not, as a rule, concerned with themselves in such a way as that; they look away from themselves. And this self-importance brings in its train vices which are objectionable to others and excruciating to ourselves, one of which the Apostle notices in the text—Malice. Do not be malicious: children are not. Malice springs out of jealousy, and jealousy is the other side of self-importance. To be wrapped up in one’s own consequence is to be intolerant of the consequence of others; and of all vices surely jealousy is the most mean and, alas for human nature, among the most widely diffused. If it creeps in, how can we banish it? How can we get rid of it? Of course we cannot recover the unconscious un-pretentiousness of childhood: we come to know our own measure too exactly for that; but we can do this—we can endeavour to take a real and unaffected interest in other people for their own sakes, to look on their good qualities without envying them. Surely it lies well within the power of us all to let no malicious word pass our lips; and in that endeavour do let us press into service all the powers of our nature to help us to preserve a frank interest in other people for their own sake, and not as they compare with or affect us. If we have humour, let our humour show us the absurdity of the self-wrapt jealous heart. If we have imagination, let it remind us how disagreeable we find the self-centred person. And if we have common sense, let us apply it here as throughout the realm of our spiritual concerns.

III. Man’s judgment the outgrowth of a child’s sincerity.—And that word brings us back to the second part of our text—‘In understanding be men.’ Common sense, wisdom, comes as near as we can get to what St. Paul is here urging upon the Corinthians. He is not exhorting them to any great effort of intellect, nor to accept the foundations of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. St. Paul is always telling them that the Gospel appeals to the child more than to the grown man. In the apprehension of the message it is the child in us that comes into play—the frank outlook, the instinct for goodness, humility—all childlike qualities. It is to them the Gospel appeals. And so St. Paul is not contradicting his Master; he is urging that, when the Christian faith has been received, there is room in our religious life, as much as in any other life, for the exercise of a man’s faculty of judgment, common sense. And, if you think about it, the child’s virtue of sincerity and the man’s faculty of judgment are very closely allied, and one is really the outgrowth of the other. I dare say you have often remarked the judgments of Christ. Those judgments of His which enraged the Pharisees, and almost His own disciples, were simple judgments of common sense, guided by sincerity. It is not enough that we the clergy, or you the laity, should be as ‘harmless as doves,’ if we are not also as ‘wise as serpents.’ It is not enough to be children in malice; let us also ‘in understanding be men.’

—Rev. Canon Beeching.

Illustration

‘Sir Thomas Browne wrote as a physician, but his exaltation of reason and learning are not less befitting other Christians, and his quaint yet penetrating words do not wholly lose their relevance when the subject of our inquiry is not Nature but Revelation: “The World was made to be inhabited by Beasts, but studied and contemplated by Man; ’tis the Debt of our Reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being Beasts. Without this, the World is still as though it had not been, or as it was before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a Creature that could conceive or say that there was a World. The Wisdom of God receives small honour from those vulgar Heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire His works; those highly magnify Him, whose judicious inquiry into His acts, and deliberate research into His creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration. Therefore,

Search while thou wilt, and let thy Reason go,

To ransome Truth, even to th’ Abyss below;

Rally the scattered Causes; and that line,

Which Nature twists, be able to untwine.

It is thy Maker’s will, for unto none

But unto Reason can He e’er be known.

Teach my endeavours so Thy works to read,

That learning them in Thee, I may proceed.

Give Thou my reason that instructive flight,

Whose weary wings may on Thy hands still light.

Teach me to soar aloft, yet ever so

When near the Sun, to stoop again below.

Thus shall my humble Feathers safely hover,

And though near Earth, more than the Heavens discover.

And then at last, when homeward I shall drive,

Rich with the spoils of Nature, to my Hive,

There will I sit with that industrious Flie,

Buzzing Thy praises which shall never die,

Till Death abrupts them, and succeeding Glory

Bid me go on in a more lasting story.” ’