Daniel 1:8 But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king's meat, nor with the wine which he drank… The distinctive thing about Daniel was his conscience, along with that sense of Divine authority with which, to Daniel, his conscience stood vested. The conscience is a solemn thing; it is the power with which we appreciate the right in its Divine imperialism. All the possibilities of the completest theism are involved in it. For Daniel to feel that to do this was right and that to do that was wrong was for him to feel that the Divine voice was speaking to him in terms of command or of prohibition. In that way behaviour became to him a kind of worship, and was the continuous expression of a religious loyalty. Conscience is an old-fashioned affair, but nothing has yet been discovered that will quite take the place of it. Doing right is itself religion when the right is done with a distinct appreciation of the infinitude of the obligation that we are under to do right. That is a point to be guarded jealously. It is religion's starting-point — conscience is, The right, when felt as such, with all its unspeakable sanctions, all its transparent validity, all its unargued authority, all its long and mystic reach into the realms of things unseen, is a point at which thought takes easy hold upon that which is eternal, and at which it rises up in quick response of reverent worship toward the Holy One in all the divineness of His imperialism. It is a long reach toward God merely to feel the sanctity of the claim which the right makes upon us, so that when alternative courses open themselves before us, however we may feel ourselves enticed toward that which is evil, we experience a counter-drawing that is too mystic to be explained, and that bears down upon us with too authoritative a compulsion to be lightly ignored. It is through the sensitive conscience considered as the soul's open eye that we first come into range with Divine things. Here, then, our first and most painstaking work must be done. The conscience is religion's front door; and yet it is not such a door that having passed through it you can close it behind you. We better say, then, that conscience is religion's bottom masonry upon which the whole superstructure has to be posited, such superstructure towering up in its permanence only so long as the substructure abides in its deep solidity. A man cannot become religiously expanded beyond the point where he continues to be ethically sound. Conscience conditions every step of our Christian expansion. You cannot plant religion on the top of moral mud any more than you can put up a fifteen-story apartment house on the top of the Jersey meadows. The stability of a house depends as much on the solidity of its foundation when it has stood for a thousand years as it does the first year it is erected. You admire the glisten of the diamond, but you cannot coax diamond-glisten out of polished putty, with whatever appliances of attrition it may be treated withal. The first thing to do is to do right; that is more than all creeds and more than all worship; for to a man in his wrong-doing it makes no earthly difference what he does believe, and as for worship, there is no such thing as worshipping God with one set of faculties at the same moment that we are disobeying Him with another set. Daniel faced the situation, saw his duty, and did it. Having seen it, and seen it distinctly, he did not obfuscate the situation by mixing in a mass of foreign ingredients that had no concern with the immediate case. He might have said that whatever might have been his duty if he had remained in Jerusalem ceased to be such on moving into a country where other customs obtained; and that a man, out of regard to the feelings of others, ought to consult to a considerable degree the habits and usages that are in vogue in his present environment. There is no known method by which we can trim our behaviour to others' ideas, and still keep a live conscience. On that day of his temptation, what be knew to be right stood out before him with lines as distinct as though they had been the lineaments of a personal face, and lineaments, too, so full of majesty and kingliness that they were apprehended by him as being the features of the face of God. So, instead of losing God by fooling with his duty, God became nearer to him, and duty a more impressive and superb reality by its discharge. The first thing to say about this is that a man is not safe except when the contrast between right and wrong is as sharp to his conscience as the contrast between black and white is sharp to his eye. That is not at all saying that there will not be questions of right and wrong that will be difficult of decision. It is merely saying that our only security lies in having so energetic a moral sense that right, when once we have decided where it lies, is felt by us to be tremendously right, and wrong felt by us to be devilishly wrong. No sliding scale between them; no fading off of the one into the other. Adam could not have transgressed so long as the tones of Divine command were distinctly ringing in his ears. That was the very genius of diabolic ingenuity. Adam's attention was diverted, his attention was twisted from the single point at issue, and distinct considerations of personal gratification thrust before his regard instead. And sin begins to-day exactly as it began then. It begins by dragging into the decision of moral questions something beside moral considerations. Now that is the point where Daniel beat Adam. If, instead of pinning his eye to the moral element of the case, he had commenced to take into the account the advantages personal to himself that would have been certain to issue if he had become partaker of the king's meat and wine, it would morally have been the instant death of him. Perdition comes in instalments, and the first instalment is just as much perdition as the last one is; and the first instalment comes when a man or a child fronts a question of right or wrong, and instead of facing it and answering it on its own basis, wriggles off on to a side issue, and refers it to the arbitrament of considerations that have nothing to do with the case. Now that is the way that a considerable number of current Christians are settling current questions. If a man attends the theatre, having settled the question for himself on grounds that are distinctly and unmixedly moral, then it is no man's business but his own. But I know that there are a great many people who attend who have not settled the question for themselves, and who go there borne upon the current of contemporary usage. For them there is no moral ground involved; they have slipped in under the seal of example. In a word, although it is a conscience question, their own conscience has not faced it and answered it. They have not — if they have decided in the manner just described — they have not ruled out side issues and collateral considerations, and met the one only point, viz., Is it right? If there is anything that is calculated to stir moral indignation to its very bottom it is to see men and women, grown up, with intelligence, congenitally endowed with a conscience, professedly concerned for the weal of their times, and yet allowing practical questions that are crammed full of moral elements to be decided by considerations of usage or convenience or emolument that have no slightest relevancy to the distinct moral issue. A pretty kind of Daniel those people would have made! Now that is what is the matter with us. People are not planting their own feet down on distinct solid moral ground of their own. A man cannot extemporise heroism. Daniel could not have stood up in the face of the whole Babylonian empire and have dared the empire to do its worst upon him had he not had in him the stuff that goes to compose daring. To do right meant to him so infinitely and so divinely much that the pains of it and the dangers of it signified too pitifully little for his arithmetic to be able to take hold of and numerate. I know that people are lacking in moral vigour to-day because I know that they are lacking in courage. People are afraid. There is a cowardice that is despicable. The crowd rules. There are men and women that are more afraid of the despotism of public opinion than Daniel was afraid of King Nebuchadnezzar and all his hired butchers. Men do not dare to speak out. Hesitant virtue, cowardly integrity, is iniquity's auxiliary. You can depend upon it that vice will keep in good spirits till you brand it, but if you go into the branding business you do it at your peril: well, what of it? And let me say only once more that this same moral fibre is not only the material of heroism, but it is also, of course, the material of indignation. Indignation is one of the moral trachea, and is the spark that solid virtue has elicited from it when struck by villainy. A man's power of indignation is measured exactly by the vigour and intensity of his power of moral appreciation. To be patient is sometimes the most eloquent symptom possible of ethical insipidity. Moreover, meagreness of moral vigour is what accounts for indignation's fitfulness. A man's conscience needs to have a pretty good constitution in order to be able to keep indignation in stock — in order, that is, to be steadily in condition to resent vicious encroachments. There occur what are popularly known as spasms of virtue. The phrase expresses it well. The case is to be diagnosed in this way; it is virtue, but so sparingly accumulated and loosely fibred as hardly to be more than aflame before it is consumed — a sort of sky-rocket affair that makes momentary diversion, and that only renders subsequent darkness but the more palpable and ponderable. The greatest thing a man can do is to do right, for while that is not the completion of the entire edifice, it is the plumb-line, dropped from Heaven, along which every stone requires to be laid that aspires to be a permanent element in the edifice. (C. H. Parkhurst.) Parallel Verses KJV: But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king's meat, nor with the wine which he drank: therefore he requested of the prince of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself. |
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