*'In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength," that was the motto which Keble chose for the Christian year, a motto which every Christian, day by day, may con- sider his own. ' ' He shall not strive nor cry. ' ' The evangelist who saw the fulfilment of those words in his Master had also seen the quiet- ness and confidence of Christ as they stood out in clearest contrast to the contentions of the rabbis and the wrangling of the scribes.

1. THE TRUE AMBITION
BY RICHARD JOHN KNOWLING
NOTE from editor: "All of my recent uploads, and many to come are from the ten volume series
titled MODERN SERMONS BY WORLD SCHOLARS. You can find this online for around 150
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Professor of divinity in the University
of Durham, England, since 1905; born
Devonport, September 16, 1851; educated
at Blundell's School, Tiverton; Baliol
College, Oxford; fellow of King's Col-
lege, London, 1899; professor of New
Testament exegesis in King's College,
London, 1894-1905; canon residentiary
of Durham; chaplain to the archbishop
of Canterbury, and to the bishop of
Exeter; emeritus professor of King's
College, London ; Boyle lecturer, 1903-05 ;
author of '^Witness of the Epistles,"
**Acts of the Apostles" in ''Expositor's
Greek Testament," ''Our Lord's Virgin
Birth," "Epistle of St. James (West-
minster Commentaries)."
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2. THE TRUE AMBITION
Prof. R. J. Knowling, D.D.
Edited by Glenn Pease
** Wherefore we labor that, whether present or absent,
we may be accepted of him. ' ' — 2 Cor. 5 : 9.
We make it our ambition.
Such is the possible and allowable force of the
word which Paul uses, a word which prompted
the famous comment of Bengel, "haec una amhitio legitima."
How fully Bengel had himself made that
ambition his own, we may learn from the
words repeated to him as his eyes closed in
death: ''Lord Jesus, unto thee I live, unto
thee I suffer, unto thee I die; thine I am, liv-
ing or dying."
It is an ambition attained, and yet never
satisfied, at least on this side of the grave.
* ' Not as though I had already obtained, or am
already made perfect."
2

3. It has indeed been urged recently, that the
word translated, "we labor," which occurs
three times in Paul's epistles, seems to have
lost its original idea of emulation or ambi-
tion, and to mean little more than to strive
eagerly. The evidence, too, of the papyri
may be fairly quoted in favor of this view.
But still, the fact that the revisers in all
three cases connect the word with ambition,
would appear to afford no small justification
for Bengel's comment: "We make it our am-
bition, whether present or absent, to be ac-
cepted of him. ' ' How deep is the calm which
that ambition, unlike every other ambition,
sheds upon every Christian life! The waves
and the storms of this troublesome world, the
tossings of its restless sea, do not cease — and
yet there is a great calm.
It may seem strange perhaps to connect
such a thought with the epistle which, of all
others penned by Paul, is the most agitated
by personal feeling, by a torrent of righteous
indignation.
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4. There is, however, one verse in the New
Testament which closes our daily morning and
evening prayer, and hence perhaps so fa-
miliar to us that we forget its force and con-
tent: **The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
and the love of God, and the fellowship of the
Holy Ghost be with you all evermore." The
verse, with all its calm and beauty, comes to
us from this same impassioned epistle to the
Corinthians, revealing to us a heart full of
longing to impart the highest gifts, and yet
a heart no longer restless or fearful of results,
because resting on, and in communion with
an untiring and unchanging love; in the
strength of that union, no weapon forged
against a man could prosper, no shafts of
malice could injure him, no misrepresentation
or desertion could leave him resourceless.
Who hath the Father and the Son,
May be left, but not alone.
And so, closely united with that deep un-
4

5. ruffled calm which possesses the man whose
one ambition is to know Christ and to be
found in Him, there is a consideration for
others which forgives in the person of Christ,
which entreats by the gentleness of Christ.
Could anything exceed the pathos of that
appeal, wrung from the heart so fitly called
the heart of the world, the heart upon which
there came daily the care, the rush, as it
were, of all the churches : ' ' Who is weak, and
I am not weak ? Who is made to stumble, and
I burn not?"
And then with all this considerateness there
was a fearlessness begotten of the fact that
in all his regard for his fellow men, the
apostle was not seeking primarily to please
them, but the Lord Jesus Christ. ''Do we
begin again to commend ourselves?" *' Hav-
ing this ministry, we faint not." ''Having
such a hope, we use great boldness of speech."
This is the natural language of a man who
could say amidst all his labors, "Wherefore
we make it our ambition, that whether pres-
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6. ent or absent, we may be accepted of him. ' '
It has been recently said that the word
"ambition" is not found in the Bible, and
in the Old Testament hardly ever the idea ^ —
that the view of the New Testament, so far as
exprest, is uncompromising; in the Christian
community there is no room for ambition.
And certainly no Christian would be pre-
pared to deny that there is a sense in which
this must be so. That was a frank, and at the
same time a brutal confession of Frederick
the Great : ' ' Ambition, interest, the desire of
making people talk about me carried the
day, and I decided for war." Perfect our
civilization as we may, human ambition, hu-
man passion, must always be a factor with
which we are bound to reckon.
But still there is a wise and a right and a
divine ambition no less than an ignoble and a
mean one.
6

7. Bishop Butler long ago wrote: "Religion
does not demand new affections, but only
claims the direction of those you already
have. . . . We only represent to you the
higher, the adequate objects of those very fa-
culties and affections. Let the man of ambi-
tion go on still to consider disgrace as the
greatest evil, honor as his chief good. But
disgrace in whose estimation ? Honor in whose
judgment? this is the only question."
Only once in the world's history has there
appeared a Person who could teach us that
the assertion and the maintenance of the high-
est and rightful claims is an imperative duty,
and yet a Person whose whole life was a life
of submission and dependence. ''I came not
to do mine own will " ; ' ' if I honor myself my
honor is nothing. ' ' And that same spirit, that
same divine example, was it not the stay and
the mainspring of Paul's work and labor?
Surely no man in any church was ever
called upon to adjudicate in a greater variety
7

8. of subjects than those which claimed Paul's
attention in Corinth. There were intellectual,
moral, social, ritual difficulties, and how were
they met? — by an appeal in every case to the
person or the life or the teaching of Christ.
And so it ceases to be surprizing that in no
epistle do we meet with the introduction of
the name of Christ so continuously as in the
First Epistle to the Corinthians.
And that name was so often on his lips be-
cause, altho the apostle was absent from his
true home, Christ was present in his heart, and
his sole ambition and his only glory was
to be able to say, "We have the mind of
Christ. ' ' There is one other passage in Paul 's
writings, in which he again connects that
same word — ''we aim, we make it our ambi-
tion" — with his ministerial and missionary
labors.
And there again, we note his courage and
fearlessness, his confidence that the strength
8

9. of Christ would rest upon him. "Yea, ma-
king it my aim," he writes from this same
Corinth to the church in Rome, "being
ambitious so to preach the gospel, not where
Christ was already named, but, as it is writ-
ten, they shall see to whom no tidings of
him came."
Paul then was not content to confine him-
self always to the same ground, to work, as
it were, in the same groove; he would seek
to plant his message amidst new surround-
ings; he would look for a harvest on fresh
soil.
Truly, it was a grand ambition thus in his
own poverty to make many rich.
And yet, even in such a result as the
obedience of the Gentiles, boasting was ex-
cluded. "I will not dare to speak of any
things save those which Christ wrought
through me."
This boldness of aim, this keen desire to
9

10. evangelize, fully and at any cost, this reso-
luteness to make God's way known to all
sorts and conditions of men, His saving
health unto all nations, is it not characteristic
of the Church of to-day? It is a grand am-
bition; how can the Church fulfil it?
It is very striking to note how Paul, after
meeting the philosophers at Athens, falls
back, as it were, even in Corinth, upon the
simple message of the gospel: ''I determined
not to know anything among you, save Jesus
Christ and him crucified."
And if that message succeeded in Corinth,
where shameless glorying in vice had
become a byword and a proverb, where every
pretentious intellectual craze addrest itself to
itching ears, Paul was confident that it would
succeed anywhere.
And so, when he writes from Corinth to
Rome of fresh regions won over to the faith,
of fresh ventures on untrodden soil, he still
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11. speaks of his work of preaching the gospel
as ''fulfilling" the gospel of Christ.
Yes, renewed and further efforts, if you
will, wider fields to be conquered, distant na-
tions to be gathered in, but the same sim-
plicity, and withal the same definiteness, the
same gospel which won much people in Cor-
inth, where it had been subjected to such
a supreme test, the gospel which Paul had
made it his ambition to preach from Jerusa-
lem, and round about even unto lUyricum,
thus marking the whole extent of his labors.
''Without God in the world" — it is, indeed,
a terrible picture which Paul draws in such
words. But it would be a more terrible pic-
ture still if any modern painter could point
us to a world without God.
At least, for every Christian there is one
motto which runs beneath all the changing
scenes and manifold interests of human life,
making, it is true, their sins and errors ap-
11

12. pear more exceeding sinful, but giving life to
those that sit in darkness, guiding their feet,
if they will, into the way of peace; it is the
motto which meets us in the great cathedral,
which raises the cross of Christ crucified above
the wealth and merchandise, the Babel and
confusion of the streets of London : ' ' Sic Deus
dilexit mmidum'' — ^'So God loved the world."
To realize that love and to impart it to others
— ^'Jiaec una amhitio legitima." We are fel-
low workers with God.
But once again Paul employs the word of
the text. He is writing, on this occasion, to
the church at Thessalonica, and he exhorts
his converts that they study to make it their
ambition — it is the same word — to be quiet
and to do their own business. How many a
parish might have been saved trouble if the
clergy had always acted not as having do-
minion over men's faith, but as being par-
takers of their joy, if they had remembered
how, in his treatise ''On the Priesthood,"
Chrysostom warns the priest that his soul
12

13. should be clear on every side from the am-
bition for office ; if the laity had always stud-
ied to be quiet, and to do their own business.
There are people in every parish who are
always fussing and fuming — they can not
let things alone. If they plant a seed, or if
any one else plants it, they must always be
pulling it up, to see how it is growing.
But Paul would have us all make it our am-
bition to be quiet.
John Keble, who wrote the book which, of
all others, molded the religious life of the
Church of England in days when men were
craving for any novelty or excitement, was
content to pass most of his days in a quiet
country parish. Ambition, vulgar, self-as-
sertive, petty — what could such a man know
of it? Nothing.
*'In quietness and in confidence shall be
your strength," that was the motto which
Keble chose for the Christian year, a motto
13

14. which every Christian, day by day, may con-
sider his own. ' ' He shall not strive nor cry. ' '
The evangelist who saw the fulfilment of those
words in his Master had also seen the quiet-
ness and confidence of Christ as they stood
out in clearest contrast to the contentions of
the rabbis and the wrangling of the scribes.
And it was the author of the ^'Imitatio
Christi" who could write, "The noble love of
Jesus impels a man to do great things, and
stirs him up to be always longing for what is
more perfect."
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