If we are 'slaves,' what kind of Master is God?
The two masters that Christ puts before us are wholly different. It is emphatically not 'Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven,' as Milton put it.
The two masters that Christ puts before us are wholly different. It is emphatically not 'Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven,' as Milton put it.
Editor’s Notes
In the last part, Fr Coleridge explained the ways in which we can be said to be the ‘slaves’ of God.
In this part, Father Coleridge tells us…
How the character of God our Master makes his service reasonable, sweet and ennobling.
That true devotion begins with hatred of sin, and turns into love of God.
Why Satan’s service can only be endured with misery, and contempt for God.
He shows us that the choice of masters is settled by love for one and loathing for the other.
Single Service
The Sermon on the Mount (To the End of the Lord’s Prayer)
Chapter VII
St. Matt. vi. 24; Story of the Gospels, § 33
Burns and Oates, London, 1878
Character of the Master
If there is anything that seems hard and severe about these conditions of the service of God, which show us how entirely engrossing that service must be, all such impressions vanish at once when we remember, as is indeed hinted by our Lord, that the character of our Master becomes more and more known to us in proportion as we give ourselves entirely to His service.
Our Lord does not speak of two services, but of the two masters. The work itself, indeed, in which the service of God engages us is the noblest as well as the happiest in the world. It consists in the highest actions of which our nature is capable, it brings us across the loftiest objects of knowledge and contemplation, it reveals to us the magnificence and glory of the creation of which we are a part, and of the conditions under which our lot is cast.
But in all that we have to do as servants of God, and especially if we are called to His service in any special manner or degree, we learn Who it is that we serve in the reasonableness and easiness of the yoke which He puts upon us, in the liberality with which He supplies us with all that is wanted for the execution of our commission, in the manner in which He takes the intention for the deed, and considers in all that we do the desire of the heart as the same as its accomplishment, in the greatness of His promises to encourage our faithfulness, and in the over—abundant munificence of the rewards which He bestows upon us.
Some, indeed, will be inclined to carry this thought further, and consider the whole life and teaching and example of our Blessed Lord as one great revelation of the character of our Master, made, among other things, for the especial purpose of drawing our hearts to Him, and making His service a delight and an ambition to us for its own sake, because it is His.
The alternatives
Our Lord uses four remarkable words to express the contrast between the service of God and the service of His enemy, as to the impression which the knowledge of each will produce on the heart.
He says that no man can serve two masters, and, as we have seen, He has in his mind God and Satan as the two possible masters between whom the choice has to be made. No man can serve the two, ‘for he will either hate the one and love the other, or he will sustain and endure the one and despise the other.’
The alternatives before us, therefore, are these, either to hate the devil and love God, or to put up with and endure the devil and despise God.
We are brought to choose the service of God by hating the devil and loving God, and we are led to choose the service of Satan and the world by making up our mind to sustain and endure the yoke of the world, and to make light of and despise God. When our Lord speaks of hating the one and loving the other, He seems to put Satan before God in the order of thought. For the service of God begins with us by the detestation of sin.
We find out, like the Prodigal Son, the miseries of our condition, the height from which we have fallen, the hardships to which we have made ourselves subject, and, above all, the cruelty and meanness of the ‘citizen of the far country,’ to whom we have made ourselves slaves. Then there comes in the thought of our Father and our Father’s house, the happiness and care which reign there, because He is so good. And so we hate the tyrant under whom we have placed ourselves, and a fresh spring of love towards the Father Whom we have left bursts forth in our heart, a fountain of living water, as our Lord says, always fresh, never drying up, feeding and fertilizing our whole life with the charity that never fails.
This is the service of the true Master, the Father Whose children we are, even after we have made ourselves unworthy of the name, and fit only to serve Him as hired servants.
We may very well take the case of the Prodigal as a full illustration of this passage. After his return to his home and his welcome by his Father, we may be sure that his one great motive for faithfulness and devotion in his duties would have been the love of his Father, and that, at the same time, if any overtures could have reached him from the cruel master from whose slavery he had escaped, he would have turned from them with intense repugnance, and with a great loathing for the character of him from whom they proceeded.
But those who serve God have not only to meet with the overtures from the devil which may be addressed to themselves—they find him in their way on every side, spoiling everything that is good, working through all instruments, often through good men more than through bad men, defiling, debasing, hindering, perverting, stamping out the seeds of good before they begin to generate, and blighting the fair prospect and promise of fruit when it was almost ripe. The knowledge which the servants of God acquire of the character and policy of Satan is certainly of a kind to make them hate him with all the intensity of which their hearts are capable as the enemy of God and man.
Hardness of the service of Satan
On the other hand, the service of Satan may very well be illustrated, in reference to our Lord’s words, by that earlier stage in the history of the Prodigal Son which intervened between his departure from and his return to his Father’s house.
It was, in the first place, a hard servitude, without joy, without freedom, without indulgence, without mitigation—something that human nature can perhaps tolerate and make up its mind to when it is inevitable, but which it can never love. Love is a word that can never be applied to the relations between Satan and his servants. But as man must serve some master, he may endure and sustain the hard service of Satan, even though he have nothing better to feed upon but the husks of the swine.
But what is the attitude of the servants of Satan towards God? He is their lawful Master, their true Father, and every item of the work which they do for the tyrant under whom they have placed themselves is work against their Father’s interests, and against the allegiance which they owe to their Master and King. They cannot forget God, or live as if He were not. Their conscience still remains, not entirely dead, and all their reason and all their recollections of better things are in revolt against the constrained and unnatural service which they have taken up. Even the evil which they do they are obliged to veil to themselves under the name of good, and they are forced to endeavour to persuade themselves either that God is indifferent or that He will overlook what they are doing, or perhaps they buoy themselves up on the hope that by-and-bye they will repent.
In each one of these mental processes there is contained something of a contempt of God or a neglect of His inspirations, an indifference to His warnings, a perversion of His laws, or the turning of His goodness against Himself, sinning in the hope of future pardon. And the harder the heart gets on its downward course, the more does it begin to share the contempt of God, if we may use such words, which is the habitual state of the fallen angels, who are too proud to accept of God’s mercy, even if it were offered to them.
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Truly it is better to serve God, but for so many they have to taste hell first.....I think Marx and Saul Alinskey both lived that Milton quote. Certainly Russia has spread its errors...............I believe St Katarina de Sienna said the road to heaven is heaven! How do we get this understood? Thanks and Blessings!
Thank you for this wonderful reminder of who it is we are called to serve. It took me many years to truly understand this, but I can now say with humility that As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord, and no other.
Crux sacra sit mihi lux.