Our Duty with Respect to Public Opinion
Canon Liddon. Galatians 1:10 For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. Public opinion is that common stock of thought and sentiment which is created by human society, or by a particular section of it; and it in turn keeps its authors under strict control. It is a natural product, it is a deposit which cannot but result from human intercourse. No sooner do men associate with one another, than a public opinion of some kind comes to be. And as civilization advances, and man multiplies the channels whereby he ascertains and governs the thought of his fellow-men, public opinion grows in strength, in area, and men voluntarily, or rather instinctively, abandon an increasing district of their understandings and conduct to its undisputed control. It varies in definiteness and in exigency with the number of human beings which it happens to represent. There is public opinion proper to each village and town, to each society and profession, to each country, to each civilization, to the world; but between the most general and the narrowest forms of this common body of thought and sentiment, there are bands and joints which weld the whole into a substantial unit; and in modern times public opinion has taken a concrete body and form, such as two centuries ago was undreamt of. It lives, it works in the daily press. In the press we see visibly embodied before our eyes this empire of opinion, with its countless varieties and sub-divisions, with its strong, corporate, and substantial unities. And so, face to face with the press, every man who hopes to keep his own conscience in moderately good order knows that in public opinion he encounters a force with which, sooner or later, on a large scale or a small, before the world or in the recesses of his own conscience, he must of necessity reckon; and that, whether he bears like St. Paul a commission from heaven, or endeavours to be loyal to such truth as he knows of chiefly or altogether among the concerns of earth. What is the duty of the Christian towards this ubiquitous, this penetrating agency? Is he to shut himself up and despise it, as might some Stoic of the earlier Stoic school? Assuredly not. St. Paul did not do that. He was respectful, even towards heathen opinion... Are we, then, to place ourselves trustfully under public opinion, to defer to and obey it, at least in a Christian country; and is it to furnish us in the last resort with the rule of conduct and criterion of moral, even religious, truth? Again, most assuredly not; for it is, in fact, a compromise between the many elements which go to make up human society; and the lower and selfish elements of thought and feeling are apt upon the whole to preponderate. Public opinion is too wanting in patience, in penetration, in delicacy, to deal successfully with religious questions. It cannot be right to cry "Hosanna" now; to-morrow, "Crucify"; to applaud in Galilee what you condemn in Jerusalem; to sanction in this generation what was denounced in that; to adore what you have burned, to burn what you have adored with conspicuous versatility, merely because a large body of human beings — the majority of them, it may be, quite without particular information on the subject in hand — love to have it so. To attempt to please men in this sense is, most assuredly, incompatible with the service of Christ. The Christian has, or ought to have, upon his heart and upon his conscience, the rove. lation of truth which in these great crises of life sets him above the exigencies of public opinion. He that is spiritual judgeth all things, but he himself is judged of no man. He will not, indeed, break with it lightly or wantonly; he will look ones and again, aye and a third time, to be sure that he is not himself deceived, if not in his principle yet in its application. But when this point is once clear, he will resolutely go forward. (Canon Liddon.) Parallel Verses KJV: For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. WEB: For am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? For if I were still pleasing men, I wouldn't be a servant of Christ.