15-Competition and Self-Surrender

XV. COMPETITION AND SELF-SURRENDER’.

Php 2:3-4. “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.”

LIKE all our English institutions, our great schools are being constantly brought under the criticism of the public opinion of the day. It is no unfriendly criticism, certainly, for we are all proud of our public schools, the like of which are not to be found in any other land; and there can hardly be an Englishman of the middle and upper classes who has not personal reasons for being interested in one or more of them. In the newspapers and in conversation, schools and school life are always a welcome subject of discussion. But when this anniversary brings you together in the place of your common worship, it is the office of the preacher to remind you that schools like this are not only English but Christian schools. You have another judgment to think of than that of your countrymen; a standard to aim at which is not set by the tradition of English schools or by the best modern culture. Your presence here confesses that you are under law to Christ.

I am thankful that in these days we are not permitted to hold our Christianity lazily separate from our practical life. The keen and anxious spirit of inquiry which is abroad forbids it. It probes hollow profession, asking eagerly, “What is the Christianity you profess? Will it stand, will it live and work, in this modern age? Are you really acting upon it in the strain of life, or is your scheme of conduct framed according to other principles? “ It is good for us, though it may be at the cost of pain and disturbance, to be thus called to account. We may well regard anything as a boon, which forces our faith and our life into closer contact, and which will help us to know the glory and power and hope of our calling.

Speaking then as a Christian to Christians, I shall ask you to-day to consider one very conspicuous feature of education as it is now, and to bring it honestly into comparison with a great law of our Christian calling. There is an apparent discord between the two, to which we ought not to be insensible. The principle of Competition has been introduced into every part of our educational system, and is impressed upon it beyond all former precedent; Suppression of self is the Christian principle to which it seems to be opposed. The age is exhorting you, “ Strive incessantly in all things to be foremost; “ the voice of Christ says to you, “ Follow me, in lowliness and self-sacrifice; many that are first shall be last and the last first.” Let us consider how far, and under what conditions, competition may be approved by those who would conform themselves sincerely, however imperfectly, to the mind of Christ.

Competition is no new thing in education, any more than in the business of life. Teachers have at all times endeavoured to stimulate their pupils by appealing to the desire of each to outdo his fellows. “Always to excel and to be superior to others “ has been the motto of the trainers of youth in every generation. But there is something new in the prodigious development of the system and machinery of competition which has taken place within my own memory. From infancy upwards, boy is matched against boy, young man against young man, in every department of effort. Let a youth look before him along what line he will, he sees a prize tempting him. If he can beat his competitors, he may carry off something desirable, an honorary distinction, a book, an exhibition, a scholarship, an appointment for life. There never was anything like it before. Keen eyes seem to be perpetually ranging over the whole compass of human activity, in the hope of discovering some form of exertion to which prizes have not yet been offered, so that one more department, however insignificant or incongruous, may be added to the domain of formal competition. Nor is it only in serious pursuits that registered success is thus made the object of effort. It is so at least equally in games. Sports are pursued, not so much from love of the occupation or for the sake of refreshment from labour, as with a view to beating competitors. Cricket, one might fear, would lose half its charm, if scores were not kept and published. As in horse-racing no one thinks of the enjoyment of the sport by the horses, so in boating the pleasure of the exercise is completely subordinated to the necessity of coming in first. The shooter, I believe, is hardly less solicitous about the number of the lives he takes than the cricketer about his score. The climbing of mountains became a passion when it was made a form of racing as to height and time. That predominance of bodily exercise against which all educated good sense is now beginning to protest, and which will have to be in some way checked, is manifestly due, not to imitation of the Greeks or to theories of the moral value of muscular exertion, but to the fact that the honours and prizes which youths desire are to be won by athletics and boating and cricket.

I speak the more freely, perhaps, because it is not my purpose to denounce this all -subduing system of competition. It would be a serious attempt, indeed, to assail it, one not to be undertaken with a light heart. Besides, I know not who could commence the attack with clean hands. No one thinks it a sin to accept the benefits of competition when they come in his way. Nor can any one easily resist the evidence of the good done by the stimulation of rivalry for prizes, in the promotion of really beneficial effort. This seems to me so unquestionable, that I should have no more scruple than others have in offering prizes and inviting the young or grown-up persons to compete for them, as, for example, with the aim of extending certain advantages to a poorer class. We may all justly lay on each other some share of responsibility for the system which has become so dominant in the England of our day. But now let us recall to mind that we are Christians. It is true that even from the Christian point of view our calling has been described in terms borrowed from the splendid games of ancient Greece. We are reminded that we have a race to run, that we are engaged in a contest which demands all our energy. He whom we follow is said to have kept his prize in view. In looking to Jesus, we look to one who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame. But what was the joy set before him? That of saving his brethren. Nothing exclusive, nothing that could feed selfish pride or vanity. The mind that was in Christ Jesus was shewn in the emptying of self, in voluntary descent and humiliation. The Apostle says to us Christians, “Let this mind be in you.” He proposes to us the glory of caring for others more than for ourselves, of putting self back, of willingly relinquishing the objects of human desire whenever the great end of building up the body in harmony and efficiency may thereby be promoted. It is because this suppression and sacrifice of self is so difficult to us that the language of the arena is applied to it. It is so natural to love pre-eminence, to love praise, to love pleasant and precious things, that we are reminded of the necessity of struggling against these desires as the wrestler struggled against his antagonist. To look round on our neighbours and say, “Here are competitors to be beaten,” is to know them after the flesh; to know them after the spirit or after Christ is to say “Here are brothers to be served and helped.” Those that would be Christians have the law of self-surrender unmistakably declared to them, the joy of ministration and sympathy and of pleasing the Father unmistakably held out to them as their prize.

What then is the attitude which we ought to take as loyal Christians towards the method which stimulates exertion by offering prizes to those who outstrip their fellows?

Let me endeavour to give some partial answer to this importa-nt question, in reflections which I hope may be practical for you who hear me.

I. I have intimated already that I do not think we are called upon, as a Christian community, to abolish the whole system of competition. We can see that it has certain good effects. These are entitled to fair consideration. It is unlikely that a practice out of which good comes should be itself intrinsically and necessarily evil. We are warranted in taking into account all the bearings of the question. We are at liberty to inquire, with our best judgment, whether the system of competition does on the whole more good or harm. We must not rashly assume that if it were removed its place would instantly be taken by ideally perfect motives. Suppose, for example, that every prize and comparison of one boy with another were abolished in this school, and that no competition remained in either mental or bodily exercises; you would probably find school work and school life considerably flatter, and we have no reason to believe that by this simple process they would be made nobler or more Christian. Dullness and inertia form no natural soil for the highest qualities to grow in. Experience and analogy seem to prove that competition is an appointed condition of the merely natural order throughout all human existence. The struggle for the first place does not lose its usefulness until it is absorbed into higher motives. Some day, possibly, we may grow out of the competition of buying and selling; but if we ever issue from it, it must be by growing out of it; we cannot decree that there shall be no competition. Nature would baffle us, and in attempting to accomplish our desire we should find ourselves throwing away a convenient and indispensable force without being able to put another in its place. So it is with regard to the play of competition in educational training. It is right, let us say, to recognize and to use it. We want very much any agency that promises to promote life and activity, if it is not an incurably unwholesome one. We want some means of selection also, in which the community can place confidence. And on the whole the plan of getting boys to exert themselves by inducing them to try to beat one another is found in practice to work better than that of leaving them without this stimulus.

2. But if we recognize and use competition as a natural and therefore in a proper sense Divinely ordained condition of human life, we are bound to take care that it does not usurp an undue predominance over the life of Christians. There are things which we are to use without abusing them, which we are to use as instruments without allowing them to become our masters. And it will hardly be questioned, in a vigorous school like this any more than in the outside world that we are in danger of having our minds too much engaged and possessed by incessant emulation, by incessant comparison of the producible work of one with that of another, by incessant anxiety to gain distinctions. It is not desirable, or at all events not the most desirable characteristic, in a boy-community, that the most energetic should be taught and compelled to be always thinking of gaining competitive victories. I gladly admit that the particular evil which would have been feared beforehand, that of spoiling goodwill and friendship between rivals, does not appear to have been produced in any painful amount by competition. I have no doubt it has been proved here, as it certainly has been elsewhere, that spirited competitors may be hearty and affectionate friends.

If this were impossible, the system would be decisively stamped as unchristian. But to be matched against a friend for a highly valued prize, and still more to be defeated by a friend, can hardly fail to be now and then a severe trial of friendship. And the tone of mind produced by the tension of these contests is not the noblest any more than the happiest.

It is a great point, then, to see clearly that competition belongs to the lower to what St Paul would probably have called the fleshly order. It ought to be kept down in its lower place. It has no sacredness in it to the Christian mind, no high moral dignity. The real question of interest about man or boy is not whether he has beaten such or such competitors, but how well he has done the work committed to him, how high he has risen, not by comparison with certain other persons, but in the real Divine scale.

3. But, thirdly, let the strong pressure which this system is continually bringing to bear upon us be an argument for fixing our thoughts the more earnestly upon the mind that was in Christ. This is the best way to deal with anything questionable in the customs of that world of which we individually form so powerless a part. It is often difficult to make up our minds whether an existing custom has on the whole an influence for good or for evil; it is very difficult to reorganize society in any important respect according to our minds; it would be still more difficult to secure that nothing but good should come in with the change. But it is always possible, when there is anything in external order or method that does not look like a Christian form of life, to take this as a warning to cherish with more thorough devotion the essentially Christian mind. Take for example the distribution and employment of wealth amongst us. This must often strike us as painfully unlike the Christian ideal. Well, whatever it may be possible and right for any of us to do in the way of promoting change in the relations of the rich and the poor, every one of us may constantly remind himself of the supreme principles which Christ has laid down, as that each is the steward and not the absolute owner of what he possesses, that all possessions should be made available for the common good, that riches are dangerous to spirituality, that every poorer person has a kind of natural claim on every richer, that the weaker or less comely member ought to be the more honoured in the body of Christ. So, if the age is setting you to race and struggle with one another, it is the more necessary to take to heart those eternal principles of the Christian calling which ambition has at least the appearance of thwarting.

Let me name first the sentiment of generous goodwill. Our public schools have not been wanting in the power of cementing mutual attachment amongst those whom they have trained. Let the corporate spirit which lives in the atmosphere of a great school be exalted into Christian goodwill, and clothe itself with gentleness, with consideration for the weak, with refinement. Let all inclination towards grudging and jealousy, all impulse to pass unfair and detracting judgments, and still more, let the baseness which would take a mean or dishonest advantage, be shamed in disciples of Jesus Christ by the true Christian consciousness. Chivalrous feeling is a genuine element of the Christian mind. And there is something in competition, as in the generous rivalry of Arthur’s knights, which may even stimulate it. But it is well that those who are thrown into the arena together should seek, not merely to breathe the conventional sentiment of honour, but to imbibe at its perennial fountain the more vital instinct of sympathy which joins member to member in the body of Christ.

There is another disposition which the Christian is plainly called to cultivate, and which the temptations of competition might naturally bring to our mind. It is the endeavour to abide in one’s own place, and to do the duty of that place in contentment and modesty. We have the happiness of believing that we are objects of Divine care and providence, not coming into the world by chance to struggle for existence, but having each of us an assigned place, with work answering to it, and endowments which will enable us to perform the work. This faith is the basis of Christian patience, modesty, and sense of responsibility. St Paul teaches “ Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ;” but he adds almost immediately, “Every man shall bear his own burden,” and he exhorts therefore, “ Let every man prove his own work.” The probation of life may be said to consist in finding out with the help of experiments what our appointed work is, and then in trying how well we can do it. The temper of mind thus encouraged is a different one from the restless eagerness to be before others which constant struggling is apt to engender, and it is surely a most desirable one for both boys and men to cultivate. There is real lasting strength in it, and it is the safeguard of many virtues. Not only will our life be happier and more wholesome, but our work will in the end be more perfectly done, if we can say, “My business is not to get before others, but to do well what is given me to do. I must not waste my time, which is not indeed mine to waste.

I must do the best I can to satisfy those for whom and under whom I work; but it is not to them that I am ultimately responsible. Let me live and labour as ever in the great Taskmaster’s eye. If God has not endowed me with faculties which enable me to be first in the race, let me not be discouraged or grudge to others their success. God above does not measure success by these external standards.” If we could count upon Christian convictions like these in all who have been baptized into the name of Christ, we might throw to the winds the machinery of competitive rewards, and be well rid of it. Let us not be beguiled into any forgetfulness of the need, the blessedness, the practical value, of this faith.

Once more, it is the pride of the Christian to love and desire knowledge for its own sake, and not for the honours and prizes it will bring. Knowledge, as the Christian understands it, brings him nearer to God himself. The things that we know are the ways and works of God. It is true that all things are not equally good to know. It is important that a wise selection of studies be made, so that what is learnt may be best calculated to enrich, expand, and elevate the mind. But knowledge, I repeat, is sacred to the Christian. He looks upon it as a treasure compared with which gold is valueless. To lay out all the energy of our Divinely given faculties in acquiring knowledge, and to do this only or mainly for the sake of gaining a prize or of being declared before the world to have earned so many more marks than some other candidate, must seem to one who re.verences his calling an unworthy act. I know that there are motives far higher than covetousness or vanity which create an eager desire for success. The thought of the joy that others will feel in his triumph, of the pride he may put into the hearts of those who have taught him and of those who love him, is often the chief stimulus to the efforts of the aspiring student. There is nothing unworthy in working for such a reward. But even in such a case knowledge has missed its due honour. It is an unhappy sign when youths care for no knowledge but that which will bring success. And it is to be regretted, I venture to say, when they are so urged by whatever pressure to competitive efforts as to have no time or energy left to push forward their reading or inquiry in channels of their own choice.

I have endeavoured thus briefly to indicate how the ancient teaching of the Gospel of Christ may nourish in the members of a community like this habits of mind that will control and correct the inferior influences which act upon them. Let us be thankful that we who call ourselves after the name of Christ are not ultimately subject to the traditions of a past age or to the opinion of the present. We have reason indeed to confess our deep obligations to the noble institutions and customs handed down to us, and to rejoice in the progress and achievements by which our own age is illustrated. But we have an eternal standard by which to measure ourselves, an unseen Teacher from whom to learny a heavenly Father to honour and please. May God grant to this noble school, not only a continuance of its intellectual vigour and prosperity, but also the dignity and the happiness and the power of doing good beyond our estimate, which are the rewards of loyalty to Christ!