Matthew 25:21

FOUND FAITHFUL

‘His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.’

Matthew 25:21

What we must learn from the saints is to persevere to the end in our struggle. The moral splendour of sanctity is wrapped up in faithfulness; that is the achievement of the saints. That may be yours. Faithfulness is so practical.

I. Faithful to conscience.—The still small voice within us says, ‘Do this; leave that.’ It is worth while, and the earlier the better, being faithful to conscience, for if you do, you are made ruler, not in eternity but now, ruler over an important power. He that wills to do the will of God shall know; being faithful to conscience you are led in the path of truth.

II. Faithful to the higher instincts of life.—They come, they go, like the brightness of a dream, like the voice of music, like the flash of the light. There are moments in the drawing-room, in the study, when there comes a voice, a light, an instinct, an inspiration. Oh! to follow it, cost what it may, to follow it with resolution and with power and beautiful desire, is to enter on that grand morality of the saints.

III. Faithful to principles.—Principles are truths that do not change, and the beauty of which you see in exalted movements. We have to use them when moments are not exalted, but when common life is upon you and you have to act upon, not what you feel, but what you know.

IV. Faithful to the faith.—The faith is the statement of eternal truth, mysterious, awful, saving, half understood, but always blessed; and if we cling to the Creed, and if we hold to the Lord’s Prayer, and if the Ten Commandments are our guide in moral difficulty, and if we kneel in early mornings before the Presence of the Sacramental gift of Christ; many of us because we have been faithful to the faith have been brought through the darkness into the light.

If you are not faithful to these things, what then? You are faithful to your intellect, faithful to your wishes, or faithful to your passions, but there comes a moment, yes, it is coming quickly, when the intellect and the passions and the wish, like robes of royalty that are no use on the skeleton of the king, when these are torn away and laid into nothingness and where are you yourself? It is worth while to be faithful to yourselves; to be true to one’s self it brings one right, for being true to one’s self is being true to God.

—Canon W. J. Knox Little.

Illustration

(1) ‘A story that riveted my attention when I was yet a boy, a story of that poor young prince of France who never was, although he was called, a king. And when his father died on the scaffold, and his mother in the street of execution was executed by a blind and blasphemous mob, and when that frail form, with the tenderness of a girl, died, her boy was left in the prison of the temple, in the hands of corruptors of his moral life; and they said, “We do not kill the Dauphin, but corrupt him, make him as bad and base and detestable as it is possible for us to make him.” They did; they poured into the poor boy’s ears the foulest language, they taught him to speak blasphemous phrases, they tried to fill his will with powers of corruption and weakness; but, so said the old historian that I read with enthusiasm when a boy, he turned upon them sometimes, sometimes when they tried to corrupt him, sprang to his feet, shook his fist in their faces and said, “But I was born to be a king.” And, my brother, when you are so tempted to fail in faithfulness in a few things, to conscience, to instinct, to the higher thoughts of the faith, to the Divine Friend, may you not in common truth and deep reality turn upon the tempter and say, “But I was born to be a king.” ’

(2) ‘I remember the death-bed of a little boy, a sailor in the Navy. I remember hearing how when that sweet child of fifteen, having struggled up against the difficulties of disease for a week, at last lay down to die; how he called for a pencil and paper, and how with the cold sweat of death on that fair young brow, and with a trembling hand of dying in one who had been both strong and beautiful, he said, “I must write a letter to him who has been a father to me for these years”; it was a short letter, but it exists; it only said just this, and I can vouch for the truth of the story: “I have been faithful to what you told me; I have tried to do right; I have said my prayers.” O could you wish, my brother, my sister, that your boy could speak clearer than that on the edge of eternity? Interpret it, what does it mean? Faithful in a few things, he had been made ruler over many things, as you may be made. He had been made ruler not only over the issues of the heart in repentance, or the will and the intellect in faith, he had been made ruler of that which we dread, of that which is awful to us all; he had been made as you may be made if you are faithful, ruler of Death, of Death the Destroyer.’