“If on the other hand, you have only one talent, remember that you are the man who is in the greatest danger of neglecting gifts. The man with the five talents did not bury them, nor did the man with the two talents; but the man with the one talent was the one who buried his. He said he never should be the foremost man, so he gave up trying to be anything.
“Yours is a more classical type of mind; very well then, study the classics diligently. Neglect not the gift that is in thee.
“Suppose that you who have five talents do only as much as the brother with one talent, that will not do, for you have to account for the five talents which God has given you. If you have the swiftness of the hare, it is not enough for you to be a little ahead of the tortoise; you can go so much more rapidly, and God expects you to do so.
“[One pastor] has turned out to be a dreadful apostate in the pulpit. I do not know how it is; but often an excess of cleverness is often accompanied by an excess in other directions, and so a man’s brains get turned.
“You may neglect your gift so much as not to know that you have a gift. … Now, brethren, I do not want you to have self-conceit, there is too much of that already in the world, but do you know what true humility is? Humility is not to think too little of yourself, but to appraise yourself at your real value. … It is not humility for a man to think, ‘I have only one talent,’ when he has five, or at least two. What will his Master say to him when he says, ‘My Lord, I never thought I had more than one talent’? Will that let him off? I trow not. If he had the five,or the two, it will not do for him to think he has only one.”
An address to the students at the pastor’s college. Selections from chapter 8 in Spurgeon’s Forgotten College Addresses
