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Updated: August 29, 2024
In the parable of the talents the man that gets least general attention is the man that stands in the middle. The five-talent man gets distinction, and the one-talent man gets rebuke, but the two-talent man, the man with ordinary gifts and ordinary returns from them, seems to be an unexciting character.
One sees five-talent men fail and two-talent men take their place; average gifts persistently used yielding rich returns, and the promise of usefulness lying, not in abundant endowments of nature, but in the using to the utmost what moderate capacities one has soberly accepted as trusts from God.
Two-talent men march in millions, but the ten-talent men are few and far between. Many scientists one Newton. Thousands of poets but the Elizabethan eras are separated by centuries. Great is the company of the orators but to each generation only one Webster and one Clay. As each continent hath but one mountain range, so the elect minds stand isolated in the ages.
The one-talent man is its real object, and the lessons of larger endowment are only by the way. The one-talent man is not the bad man, for to him also God gives a trust, but this man is given so little to do that he thinks it not worth while to do anything. He is not the many-gifted five-talent man, or even the average two-talent man, but he is simply the man of no account.
The parable humbles the privileged and encourages the disheartened. There is no distinction of reward between the five-talent man and the two-talent man. Each has done his own duty with his own gifts, and to each precisely the same language of commendation is addressed. They have had proportional responsibility, and they have identical reward.
The Lord of the vineyard still sends into the white fields ten-talent men, two-talent men and one-talent men. Each hath his own task, and each must grasp the handle of his own being. Genius is widely distributed. Not many Platos only one, and then a thousand lesser minds look up to him and learn to think. Not many Dantes one, and a thousand poets tune their lyres to his and catch its notes.
The risk of the five-talent man is his conceit; the risk of the two-talent man is his envy; the risk of the one-talent man is his hopelessness. Why should this insignificant bubble on the great stream of life inflate itself with self-importance? Why should it not just drift along with the current and be lost in the first rapids of the stream?
Nature gives the raw material, character is the carved statue. The raw material includes the racial endowment, temperament, degree of vital force, mentality, aptitude for tool or industry, for art or science. These birth-gifts are quantities, fixed and unalterable. No heart-rendings can change the two-talent nature into a ten-talent man. No agony of effort can add a cubit to the stature.
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