Proverbs 11:21

Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished.

(Taken with Luke 23:51)

The laws of responsibility in combinations and partnerships

We are surrounded by numberless combinations devised by men for all manner of purposes--religious, political, judicial, social, commercial, scientific, industrial, artistic, educational, etc. Men widely abandon endeavours after striking individuality in thought or conduct, and throw themselves blindfold into the stream of fashion which carries the multitude away. Men seek to recover their lost sense of power by combination with others in doctrine, in capital, indeed in all departments. The will of each individual becomes, as it were, a single minute cog in a mighty wheel-work of engineering, which carries everything before it. All this is not favourable to the sense of responsibility for conduct here or hereafter. There is a special delusion which attends the combinations in which men seek to recover the sense of power, and to unite their forces in order to accomplish their ends. This delusion consists in mistaking joint responsibility for divided responsibility. The persuasion is extended widely that union is not only strength in administration and enterprise, but that it distributes the oppressive burden of responsibility in equal or nearly equal and insignificant shares between all the persons who are joined together in any undertaking; so that although the practical result of their united action may be morally indefensible, or even utterly wicked and injurious, no single person can be justly blamed, or rendered accountable for the whole criminality of the result--since the wickedness has been effected by an organisation or administration consisting of numbers of agents who have assisted or consented in the work. A characteristic proverb has descended to us from the last century to this effect: “A cathedral chapter would divide even a murder between them”--a proverb unfairly singling out one particular kind of Christian combination for censure, yet embodying two truths applicable to every association, civil and religious.

1. That even well-disposed men will sometimes agree to do in company what they would not dare to do as individuals.

2. That no man’s personal accountableness to God can ever be swallowed up and lost in an impersonal organisation. The relation of the individual to the moral government of God is primary, dominant, and inalienable; it cannot be diminished by the concurrence of others. Before God the combination of men in counsel and action results always not in divided responsibility but in joint responsibility. Each member is responsible for the whole result of what he consents to, or carries into action. There can be no divided liability for a conjoint iniquity. If this were not so, it would require men only to join hand in hand to go unpunished. But how should God judge the world unless in all such cases the responsibility is joint, not distributive? This is also the principle of human legislation and administration. It is not, therefore, good to undertake, as if merely nominal, any real responsibilities.

This truth, that a man is responsible for whatever he consents to, ought--

1. To be proclaimed in relation to ecclesiastical organisations and missionary societies.

2. The principle may be seen in the working of political party. Educated men are guilty, in a free country, of all the national iniquity against which they do not protest with determination.

3. The principle of personal liability needs application to commercial affairs and civil life. The Almighty God stands behind every creditor and every customer, in readiness to assert and enforce every just claim to the uttermost. The Infinite Defender of Right is behind every person who is wronged. The highest Law Court is omnipresent and sleepless. We cannot put an end to the great battle between selfish interests, but we can do much by public spirit and sound legislation to alleviate its woes. On the whole I must express my conviction, however, that the commercial world will bear an honourable comparison with the political and ecclesiastical, when tried by this principle of the responsibility of each member in every combination. (Edward White.)

Combination

Men, like sheep, are gregarious. The combination is--

I. Natural. The wicked, in the text, are supposed to be in danger, and nothing is more natural than for men to crowd together in common danger. Fear as well as love brings men together; the one drives, the other draws.

II. Useless. No combination of men, however great in number, vast in wisdom, mighty in strength, affluent in resources, can prevent punishment from befalling the wicked. It must come.

1. The moral constitution of the soul.

2. The justice of the universe.

3. The almightiness of God, render all human efforts to avoid it futile. (Homilist.)

Opposing God useless

The uselessness of opposing God must be manifest from every point of view. God is omniscient, and knows all things; is almighty, and can do all things; is omnipresent, and is everywhere: so that no device or counsel or plot can succeed against Him. The image of the text is that of conspiracy, wicked men combining, saying to one another in effect, “It each of us cannot succeed singly, we may by combination succeed as a unity.” The possibility of such a conspiracy was foreseen, and the issue of it is foretold in these plain terms. Let men add money to money, genius to genius, influence to influence, counsel to counsel, still it is but like the addition of so many ciphers--the number being very great but the value being absolutely nothing. What one man cannot do in this direction a thousand men are unable to do. Fool, then, is he who supposes that because he has followed a multitude to do evil, therefore no harm will come to him. Every man in the multitude will be judged as if he were alone responsible for the whole mischief. Hands that are joined together in wickedness may be dissevered on any occasion and for the flimsiest reasons. It is folly for any wicked man to trust in a man as wicked as himself, for the very fact that wickedness renders security impossible, and turns all manner of association into a mere matter of temporary convenience, which may be varied or destroyed according to a thousand contingencies. All evil partnerships in business are doomed to failure. All irregular alliances in the household must come to confusion and disappointment, and may end fatally. The same law holds good in the State, and indeed in every department of life. There can be no security but in righteousness, in high wisdom, in unselfish enthusiasm; where these abound the security is as complete as it is possible for man to make it. Men cannot be joined wisely and permanently together unless they are first joined to the living God. Men can only be joined to the living God through the living Christ; He is the vine, men are the branches, and unless the branch abides in the vine it cannot bear fruit, but is doomed to be burned. True union, therefore, must be religious or spiritual before it can be human and social. Neglect of this great law has ended in inexpressible disappointment and mortification on the part of statesmen, reformers, and propagandists of every kind. (J. Parker, D.D.)

But the seed of the righteous shall be delivered.--

The sanctions of obedience

The text is a twofold proposition--that combinations against God and godliness only incur failure and penalty; and that the triumph of righteousness is equally sure. There are among men’s habits three general kinds of “wickedness,” or disobedience to God’s laws, entailing upon them three several orders and degrees of retribution or punishment: violations of the laws which govern the spiritual or moral man, the animal man, and the social man.

1. If the mind-laws, which include the intellectual and moral aspects of man, be disobeyed, that is if the process of education be not contemporaneous with the progress of years, the mental faculty languishes in the stagnation of its undeveloped powers, the mental man grows and abides an ignoramus, a stereotyped boor; and if the means of grace be in like manner neglected, the spiritual man rises not into the dignity which the love of God designed for him.

2. If the body-laws, or the principles which regulate the health, be disregarded by habits of excess or even ordinary indulgence or neglect of exercise, the penalty is a diseased body, and personal infirmity.

3. If the estate laws be disregarded, which make industry essential to getting, and frugality essential to saving what is got, and forethought essential in the way of insurance upon life or property, the punishment meets the man in his estate, in his condition of life, that is, in the form in which he has sinned. When we pray for a sound and enlightened mind, do we turn to the Word “whose entrance giveth light”? Do we seek to inform our minds, correct our judgments, and enrich our memories? When we pray for health and strength to labour and enjoy, do we avoid those varieties, artifices, and excesses in food and drink, and those sluggish habits of inactivity and sloth, which make health physically impossible? When we pray for prosperity in our worldly affairs, do we still, on conscientious principles, “labour, working with our hands the thing that is meet”? Do we glorify God in our attention to our business? Where can there be a more cogent, impressive, animating motive than the sterling fact, “Ye are not your own; ye are bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your bodies and spirits, which are His”? Man can no more do without God, or act independently of God and His laws, than the rays of light can dispense with the sun. All the errors of individual character, all the failures in educational theories, all the mistakes of experimental legislation, originate in the fundamental fatal effect of reckoning without God, setting aside the great elemental fact that He is at the root, progress, and issue of all things, and that to put Him out of our calculations, to supersede His constitution, is to start upon false premises, to provoke and compel a failure, to reason and range in a vicious circle, for ever retracing its impracticable, unprogressive steps. “The wicked shall not go unpunished.” “The seed of the righteous shall be delivered.” (Joseph B. Owen, M.A.)