Fidelity, Being Faithful: The Test of Men

1905

One recognizes in our own rough daily judgments that fidelity is the discriminating test of men. We are told that So-and-So has made a certain statement. That gives the statement no significance of value to us. But So-and-So also made it. That quite alters the matter. He is a faithful man and his own trustworthiness covers all that issues from him.

It is what we seek in servants — simple fidelity in all quiet and unostentatious duty. And it is what we crave in friends. "Give us a man," said Dean Stanley, "young or old, high or low, on whom we can thoroughly depend, who will stand firm when others fall; the friend, faithful and true; the adviser, honest and fearless; the adversary, just and chivalrous; in such a one there is a fragment of the Rock of Ages." For, as Paul joyfully realized, fidelity is the very nature and characteristic of God. Whatever else changes, he changes not. He abides faithful because it is his own being. He cannot deny himself.

Love, says Paul, is a greater thing than faith or hope, but love in this sense is simply fidelity, the realization in life of the faithfulness of God. Paul's doctrine is that fidelity, which is simply veracity in action is sovereign over life. And this is Christ's doctrine: "Be thou faithful unto death and I shall give thee a crown of life." That was the closing verse in a small Christian tract prepared for distribution to the Japanese soldiers going to Manchuria. A captain read it with delight. "That is the religion for us," he said.

A curate whom the late Archbishop Temple proposed to send to a very difficult post, was urged by his friends to decline, on the ground that he would not live two years in the strain and trial of it. He came to Temple. "Yes, it may be so," was the reply, "but you and I don't think of things like that, do we?"

Dying is a trifle, an incident in the temporary episode of life, but fidelity is no trifle. It is an anchorage in the eternal moral integrity of God. To betray it for the sake of life or any other bauble is to trade glass for diamond; to build hay, whose end in fire, instead of gold, which is to be tried and to endure.

This conception of what, after all, is the greatest thing in life, dignifies our common ways. It brings the heroic within the reach of each one of us. If we can display the divine nature in our common living, then that glory is possible to everyone. And it is by taking advantage of this possibility of fidelity in the ordinary things of life that we shall come some day without knowing it to the glory of the divine character realized in life. — Robert E. Speer.

—The Ada Evening News, Ada, Oklahoma, January 21, 1905, page 2.