The Church The church, which is his body.—Ephesians 1:22-23. 1. Every article of the Creed is the subject of controversy. There are those who challenge the existence of God; there are those who dispute the Divinity of our Lord; there are those who deny the personality and presence of the Holy Ghost. But those who make such denials are for the most part outside the Christian Church. They are men who disbelieve in revealed religion altogether. When, however, we come to discuss the subject of “the Church,” we are entering upon what is a matter of angry debate amongst Christians themselves. Of all wars, the most bitter and disastrous are civil wars. “The Church” is an occasion of civil war amongst Christian folk; it stirs up internecine strife; it splits up Christian people into antagonistic and hostile camps. Right away from the days of the Donatist controversy to these days of ours, it has been the fruitful cause of division and conflict. Its disastrous effects are only too manifest; it has inflicted upon Christ’s cause infinitely more damage than all the attacks of critics and sceptics from Celsus down to Robert Blatchford; it has weakened the efforts of Christian people and paralysed their energies. The strength that ought to have been employed in fighting the world, the flesh and the devil, is frittered and wasted in mutual recrimination and strife. The swords that ought to be turned against a common enemy we turn against one another. Look at the Christian people of England at this time, rent and torn and divided as they are, suspicious of one another and often fiercely hostile to one another. Think of that miserable education controversy which has been, for all these years, embittering and poisoning the very springs of our social and national life. The quarrel—to our shame be it said—is a quarrel amongst Christian people. If Christian people would only compose their differences, the quarrel would be settled in a week; but the quarrel drags its ugly length along, the interests of the child are sacrificed and the interests of religious instruction itself are jeopardized, all because Christian people cannot live together in peace and concord. This bitter strife, these fierce and incessant quarrels of ours—they give the devil his opportunity, but they must make the angels weep. “Tell Mr. Horne,” said the Bishop of London not very long ago, referring to some joint action he and Mr. Silvester Horne had taken for the moral welfare of the metropolis, and in which they had been brilliantly successful—“Tell Mr. Horne we can always win when we are united.” Yes, united we could always win. In every great fight for liberty and righteousness and truth and purity, we could always win. We are baffled and beaten because, instead of being united, we are split up into a number of warring sects. “Divide et impera!” was the cynical advice of the Roman statesman; “Divide and rule!” “Split up your opponents and so retain the supreme authority.” Looking abroad over the religious condition of England, one is almost tempted to say that that has been the devil’s policy. He has sown seeds of dissension amongst the Christian people, and while they have been quarrelling, he has kept his power; he has split up our forces and beaten us in detail.1 [Note: J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 147. 2. Unity will never be secured by banishing the question of the Church from our public speech; unity is to be gained only by arriving at right views about the Church. It is difference of view that keeps us apart at present; it is only a true understanding of the Church that will ever bring us together. Behind all the divisions and antagonisms I detect a real spiritual unity. And as I gaze at all these sects at war amongst themselves, I seem to behold them melt into a glorious and blessed fellowship. Behind these manifold and differing churches, I believe there is a Holy Catholic Church. Turn to your hymn-book, and you will see what I mean. Men who belonged to different churches, and who were separated from one another by ecclesiastical party walls, meet in our hymn-books; Roman Catholic, Anglican, Non-conformist—they jostle one another in its pages. When we want to sing the praises of Jesus, this is what we sing: Jesus, the very thought of Thee, With sweetness fills my breast; and it is the monk, Bernard, that leads our song. When we want to offer a prayer for guidance we cry: Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on; and it is Cardinal Newman that leads our song. When we want to sing of our duty to foreign lands and heathen people, this is the hymn we sing: From Greenland’s icy mountains, From India’s coral strand; and it is the Anglican Bishop Heber who leads our song. And when we want to sing of the “sweet wonders of the Cross” we say: In the Cross of Christ I glory, Towering o’er the wrecks of time; and it is actually the Unitarian, Sir John Bowring, who leads our song. There is a Catholic Church. Even the most exclusive churches are constrained to acknowledge it. Isaac Watts never was allowed to preach in Westminster Abbey, but scarcely any great function takes place there but they sing Isaac Watts’s hymn: O God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come. There is a Catholic Church. Behind all our divisions there is a great and blessed unity.1 [Note: J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 159. 3. The doctrine of the Church reaches its completest statement in the Epistle to the Ephesians, and perhaps the words of the text sum up the Apostle’s teaching. We do not sufficiently recognize the ardour of faith which glows in St. Paul’s language. Christianity was then a very small thing in the world; it had behind it no famous history, rich in heroic and saintly memories; it had not expressed itself in a vast and various literature, including the masterpieces of the human mind; it did not preside over the world’s proudest civilization. Christianity was the creed of a few obscure communities scattered thinly over the Roman Empire, and composed mostly of the humblest members of society—slaves, freed-men, poor artisans. The Apostle could be under no delusions on the subject; and, as a matter of fact, he was now in prison at Rome, in a position well calculated to chasten enthusiasm. Yet he writes in these sublime terms of the Church. The little Christian congregations become transformed by his ardent faith. He sees them inspired with Divine energies, commissioned for eternal destinies, crowned with heavenly beauty. All the world is petty in comparison with them; they are marked out for universal sway. All history leads up to them, and in their fortunes is bound up the welfare of the nations. They enshrine the hopes of the human race, for they carry the graces of the Redemption. The historic triumph of Christ finds in them its visible expression; they are the instrument of His conquests. The work which Christ came to do on earth was not completed when He passed from the sight of men: He, the Head, needed a body of members for its full working out through the ages: part by part He was, as St. Paul says, to be fulfilled in the community of His disciples, whose office in the world was the outflow of His own. And on the other hand His disciples had no intelligible unity apart from their ascended Head, who was also to them the present central fountain of life and power.1 [Note: F. J. A. Hort, The Christian Ecclesia, 148. The subject is the Church as the Body of Christ. We may consider— I. The Use of the Words “Church” and “Body.” II. The Ideal Church. III. The Ideal made Actual. I The Words “Church” and “Body.” 1. Church.—The word “Church” is used in the New Testament upwards of one hundred and ten times; and the fact that it occurs so frequently, and that it is used in the most solemn and important connexions, is sufficient proof of its pre-eminent importance, and sufficient reason why our ideas of its significance should be consistent and luminous. (1) In not one single instance is the word used to describe a building, whether of stone or of other material, of imposing splendour or of humble pretensions. When the places in which we meet for the worship of God are called by this sacred name, it is by that common figure of speech by which ideas are transferred from the thing itself to the principal instrument, or means, by which it is embodied, or represented. Thus, when we speak of the power of the press, we mean not the mere iron or steel of which it is constructed, but the thoughts and ideas and information that are by its means multiplied and spread abroad. (2) Fundamentally, the word is “an assembly”; not ecclesiastical, but civil. Nor is it used exclusively in the ecclesiastical sense in the New Testament. The town clerk of Ephesus “dismissed the assembly.” The word used by St. Luke would bear the interpretation that “he set free the Church.” But there is no confusion in the use of the term; there is no doubt in which cases it means “the Church,” and in which cases it means something else. (3) But even when the meaning is a Christian one, it is not always the same. There is more than a shade of difference between one case and another, and the difference is important. For example, we have mention of the church in the house of Priscilla and Aquila, and of the church in the house of Philemon; and of Lydia being “baptized, and her household.” In these cases it may imply the family, and a few surrounding neighbours who were in the habit of meeting for common prayer. (4) It is used next of the Churches or assemblies of Christians in particular localities, as when we read of the Church of Jerusalem, or the Churches of Asia or Galatia, or the Church that is in Corinth. (5) Lastly, it is used of the whole body of believers in all times and in all places, as when our Lord said, “Upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”; or, as when St. Paul describes it as “the pillar and ground of the truth.” It is this last and widest use of the word that is characteristic of the great Epistle to the Ephesians. When St. Paul talks about Christ being Head of all things to the Church, when he talks about Christ loving the Church and giving Himself for it, it is not simply the Church at Ephesus he is thinking of, but that greater Church, that universal Church, which embraces and includes the holy and the loving and the good everywhere. 2. Body.—The only point about the use of the word “body” to be observed at present is the distinction between Christ’s body which He took of Mary and His body which is the Church. Christ’s body which He took of Mary He wears in Heaven. He is manifested there in it, as “the Lamb as it had been slain,” i.e. with the wound-prints upon Him. He wears for ever the robe of our nature, the glorified yet real human form; the angels see it. But He is manifested on earth in His mystical or spiritual body, which in some way expresses and manifests Him. He is clothed in a body here, He is still incarnate here in the Church, He still acts and speaks among men. So He said again and again, “I will not leave you comfortless, I will come to you.” “The world seeth me no more; but ye see me”—ye, the disciples; i.e. those who in every age have eyes to see. Why did our Lord institute the Church in the world? What is the one great doctrine? It is summed up in words the most exact that human speech could find—the Church, the immortal Body of Christ. That body which was mortal here, and was so marvellously changed, has gone up yonder, but the immortal body of Christ is here; the body in which He lives, still to speak the truth of God, to work the works of God, with these folded hands to plead as intercessors. Oh! for the Church, the body of our Lord, that it might wear on earth the beauty of the Lord, and be His representative on earth until He come!1 [Note: Life of J. B. Paton, 287. II The Ideal Church 1. The Church doctrine of this Epistle is inestimably precious. The word “Church” occurs frequently. We have it here, in a connexion high as the heavens, and full of the very deepest spiritual suggestions. We have it in chapter Ephesians 3:10, where “the Church” is beheld as the scene in which, even now, “the governments and the authorities in the celestial regions” get informed of “the variegated wisdom of God, according to His purpose of the ages.” We have it again in Ephesians 3:21, where “glory” is given to the Eternal Father, “in the Church, in Christ Jesus,” throughout eternity. And in the fifth chapter (23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 32) we have it set fully before us as the Bride and Spouse of the Lord Himself. He is the Church’s Head, the Saviour of the Body; it is subject to Him, with wifely reverence; He loved it, He gave Himself for it, to hallow it, to cleanse it “by the bathing of the water attended by an utterance,” to present it to Himself glorified, spotless, holy. He nourishes it and cherishes it. He and His Spouse are one. Here is on the one hand an Ecclesia which is lifted for our view far above mere terrestrial and visible limitations. The one allusion to the external is the reference to the “water,” but even this is at once so connected with the “utterance” (ῥῆ ?ìá) of the everlasting Covenant as to point us straight through the ordinance to the heavenly blessing which it seals. The whole conception soars in the high air of direct spiritual relations between the Lord and a redeemed Company, whose units are all joined in an ineffable reality of faith and love to Him, and so member to member. We may call it the Ideal Church. We may call it the Invisible, in the sense of invisibility which points to an Organism seen in its true limits and relations by God alone. Yet it is a something which refuses to be really identified with any one organization, or aggregate of organizations, officered and tabulated by human ministers. It is related more nearly, may we not say, to heaven than to earth. It is, in its essence, with Christ where He is. It is the wonder of angels. It is the sphere within which glory is given to God as much in eternity (Ephesians 3:21) as in time. It (not parts of it, but it) is to be presented to its Lord at last in the heavenly light. Let us beware of lowering the radiant sublimity of the conception by definitions of the Church essentially conditioned by time. There is a particular conception of the nature of the Church to which I desire to give prominence and distinctness, believing that in this conception is to be found the key which will reduce into order the various notions which the word “Church” sets floating in our minds. In our Collect for All Saints’ Day the term “mystical” is associated with the Church, or we should say that the Collect is describing the Church when it speaks of knitting “together Thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of Thy Son Christ our Lord.” To many, perhaps, the word “mystical” is nearly the same as mysterious: others would explain it as meaning spiritual. I would suggest that the nearest modern equivalent to it in this place would be “ideal.” The mystical body of Christ is a body which exists in idea. The Church is primarily an idea of the living God—an idea, not as we should speak of your idea or mine or any other man’s, but, what is a very different thing, an idea of God, and of a God who lives and works, and in the creative mind a foreordained purpose which God is working out by degrees in the world of His creatures.1 [Note: J. Ll. Davies.] 2. Is there any better way out of our difficulties than to lay hold of that conception of the Church as an ideal body which St. Paul suggests to us? In thinking thus of the Church we start from God and Christ, and not from visible organizations. We find the substance and reality of the Church, not in the forms with which it clothes itself in the development of the ages, but in the purposes of God which He is revealing to us in history. We may gain some help by thinking of the design of a picture or a group of sculpture which exists in the artist’s mind. The work has reached a certain stage, but we cannot say that this, as it stands, is the picture or the sculpture. We have received perhaps some notion of what is in the artist’s mind, but we do not think of the incomplete material representation as the work of art, as the artist’s creation. The Apostles have given us the conception of a body of Christ, which they themselves derive, not so much from verbal instruction as from the ardent contemplation of Christ Himself. They saw that Christ raised and exalted was a Head who must have a body; they looked round on the societies which they had been impelled to form, and this helped them to conceive what a perfect body of Christ might be. They beheld an immeasurable number of human beings all attached by spiritual apprehension to Christ, fulfilling the most various functions, in the happiest harmony with each other, and so leading to the growth and perfection of the whole body; they believed in this design of God as working creatively in the formation of Christian societies, in a Divine power, the same as that which brought in the exaltation of Christ, continually urging design into outward, living fulfilment. If ever the question arose, What is fundamentally and distinctively the Church? the inquirer would be referred to the Divine pattern, that heavenly conception of Christ with associated men into which actual Christian life, with its manifold imperfections, was by Divine energy being built up. The Church of God was both visible and invisible, but it was the invisible form that was satisfactory, permanent, unifying, complete. If in our own time, seeking for the true Church, we can look through visible societies and members to the real pattern of God, we should not allow our faith to be too much disturbed by the scene which Christendom presents to our view. It is in many respects a shocking scene, with its divisions and corruptions, its faithlessness and its strife, contradicting, one might be tempted to say, the elementary conception of a Catholic Church. But the Divine energy in its marvellous condescension is content to work with the materials of human weakness and perversity, and our joy must be to recognize an institution of apostolic authority, a living expression, revealing the Divine idea of humanity and tending towards visible fulfilment of it.1 [Note: J. Ll. Davies.] This is the difficulty of all the highest service of life, namely, that the spiritual is invisible, and yet omnipotent; public attention is fixed upon the human agent, and professions of spiritual inspiration and impulse are treated with distrust, if not with contempt, by the most of mankind. It is the invisible Christ who is with the Church. Were He present manifestly, it is supposed that greater results would accrue from Christian service; but the supposition must be mistaken, inasmuch as He to whom such service is infinitely dearer than it ever can be to ourselves has determined the manner of Christian evangelization. What, then, is the great duty and privilege of the Church? It is to realize the presence and influence of the Invisible. The Church is actually to see the Unseen.2 [Note: J. Parker.] 3. Except as an ideal, except as a vision, the perfect outward symmetry and beauty have never yet been seen, because the professing Church and the true Church have never yet been coextensive. The magnificent conception of the perfect spiritual temple in all its majestic proportions has never been realized. You can see the great outline, you can admire the grand simplicity and the marvellous harmony of the design, as you may in some great Cathedral on whose glorious beauty Time has laid his defacing hand; but as in that there may be the crushed and defaced pillar, and the ugly rents and fissures and gaps even in the central tower, so the visible Church of Christ has been torn by heresies and schisms, her very safety threatened, her very central tower shaken and ready to fall, had not the hand of God stayed up her pillars and repaired her ruins. The situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yet, here in this miserable, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest,—here or nowhere is thy Ideal! Work it out therefrom!1 [Note: Carlyle.] Remember, it is the Ideal that rules the world, that moves the world; and the true Church of Christ is ever an ideal, a dream, a prophecy, a vision, an aspiration; but a dream, a prophecy, a vision of the future, in seeking after which is ever found the best hope for the practical life of the present. For it is the idealists, the seers of the race, who are ever the reformers; it is the men who see visions and dream dreams of possible progress and happiness, and not the pessimistic and social agnostics, who make the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.2 [Note: C. W. Stubbs.] The intense enthusiasm with which Mr. Gladstone entered into the subject and the object of the moment was apt to dim, if not obliterate, the little loves and affections which crowd the life of smaller men. The execution of his great work was the one thing in his eyes, and the instruments and tools he used were dearer to him than anything else; and the men associated with him at the moment were always greater than the men who had passed away. He became absorbed in the task, whatever it might be, which he had set himself to do; he was not one of those who, having put their hand to the plough, knew what it was to turn back.3 [Note: Algernon West, Recollections, ii. 33. Have we not all, amid life’s petty strife, Some pure ideal of a noble life That once seemed possible? Did we not hear The flutter of its wings, and feel it near, And just within our reach? It was. And yet We lost it in this daily jar and fret, And now live idle in a vague regret. But still our place is kept, and it will wait, Ready for us to fill it, soon or late: No star is ever lost we once have seen, We always may be what we might have been. Since Good, though only thought, has life and breath, God’s life—can always be redeemed from death; And evil, in its nature, is decay, And any hour can blot it all away; The hopes that lost in some far distance seem, May be the truer life, and this the dream.1 [Note: Adelaide Procter.] III The Ideal made Actual How is this ideal Church to be made the Church that we see and know? How is the Church to fulfil its office as the Body of Christ? How is it to be the Body of Christ in deed and in truth? That is the great question which when answered answers all other questions concerning the Church. 1. The Church must establish a living relationship with the risen Lord.—“And gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body.” The figure used by the Apostle shows what kind of relationship exists between Christ and His Church. In this relationship we see the fundamental truth, the central truth, the truth which contains every other truth, concerning the Church. One of the Old Testament prophets—Isaiah—poetically describes God’s constant remembrance of His own, “Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands.” This poetic imagery has become a glorious fact in Jesus Christ. Through His Incarnation and Crucifixion and Resurrection, we can say that God now has the marks of the nails upon His hands which always make Him mindful of His own. As King and Head of the mediatory kingdom, Christ must have His people even as a sovereign must have his subjects. And they need not only His rule but also His Divine strength in them. The Church can never succeed without Christ. The risen Lord made the Church, the risen Lord keeps the Church, the risen Lord fills the Church all in all. “That ye may know what is the exceeding greatness of his power to usward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, and hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” The communion which the members of His body have with the Head is threefold. (1) It is a communion of mind. “We have the mind of Christ.” “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.” (2) It is a communion of heart. “Fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ.” “The fellowship of his sufferings.” (3) It is a communion of power. “Ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me.” This threefold communion with the risen Lord is finely expressed in F. W. H. Myers’ Saint Paul: Then thro’ the mid complaint of my confession, Then thro’ the pang and passion of my prayer, Leaps with a start the shock of His possession, Thrills me and touches, and the Lord is there. Scarcely I catch the words of His revealing, Hardly I hear Him, dimly understand, Only the Power that is within me pealing Lives on my lips and beckons to my hand. Whoso hath felt the Spirit of the Highest Cannot confound nor doubt Him nor deny: Yea with one voice, O world, tho’ thou deniest, Stand thou on that side, for on this am I. 2. The Church must recognize a real brotherhood among its members.—We shall be helped to understand the meaning of the Apostle’s doctrine concerning the Church as a brotherhood if we see what he has written in other portions of his Epistles. In the text he declares that the Church is the body of Christ. He uses the same figure of speech many times. “But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ; from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.” “For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.” “Now ye are the body of Christ, and members each in his part.” Nothing can be clearer, in the light of these words, than that the Church of Jesus Christ means a real brotherhood among the members. A comparatively new method of Christian work is what is known as the Brotherhood Movement. The meetings of this movement are held mostly on Sunday afternoons, and they give a pleasant hour to thousands who never otherwise attend any place of worship. Doubtless the movement has been a boon and a blessing. The president of the movement recently said: “We are part of organized Christianity, and we must ally our forces with other parts of God’s great army, and present to the world a united front, and together attack the forces of evil.” In the same address he presented some of the perils of the movement, and sounded, not without reason, the note of warning. The Sunday school can speak of its losses through the pleasant enticements of the Brotherhood meetings. Experience will teach us how to avoid the perils, and to secure the best service and most helpful work in the one and the other. The gleams of God’s glory shine in buoyant hope wherever the truth of brotherhood is declared. The Church of Christ, which is His body, meets all human needs. The claims of brotherhood are recognized as being far-reaching. These claims are founded upon the relationship which exists between each member and the risen Lord. In Christ we are all brethren.1 [Note: J. C. Owen.] The name of brother carries with it a sweet and delectable sound, and is in itself an argument for peace. It is true that the complication of interests strangely relaxes the fraternal tie; brethren pursuing their fortune by the same path often jostle and hinder one another; but a common faith originates a true and perfect brotherhood, which nothing should ever be allowed to disturb. The beautiful ideal of brotherly kindness is always a reason for peace. Fraternal discord is an odious spectacle. Strife between those who should be friends is more grievous than an outbreak of plague.… Quarrels among brethren are always unnatural, and in the presence of unbelievers—the Canaanite and the Perizzite in the land—unspeakably mischievous. There is always a common foe around us, within earshot of our brawling and controversy, rejoicing in our internecine warfare, and watching for our fall. On the other hand, it is beautiful and impressive when men who are united by a common faith and hope live in love and peace. “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” Religion should extinguish strife, And make a calm of human life.1 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, i. 47. 3. The Church must fulfil its mission to the world.—Through the Church, which is His body, Christ carries on the work of salvation. Thought cannot express itself apart from the body, even so Christ cannot carry on His work without His Church. “As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” Over the waves of the ages sound the marching orders, “Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” It is as the Church realizes and expresses the mind and purpose of Christ, that He finds in it the reward of His great sufferings, the satisfaction of His beneficent desires. The stars obedient in their courses, and the flowers lovely in their season, are emblematic of a higher and an enduring perfection in the moral world, where men are won to Christ and choose His will as their highest good. His wisdom, and purity, and grace, and love will then become their abiding possessions, they will be transformed into His nature, and be filled with His disinterested affection, and be moved with a benevolence from whose all-comprehensive sweep nothing can escape.2 [Note: G. Packer.] By holding fast at home Christ’s truth in greater purity; by growth in love; by devotion deepened and increased; by more frequent and earnest communion; by a wider, more enduring, more steadfast unity; by being more filled with the Spirit; by being transfigured into Christ’s likeness; by sitting always beneath His Cross; by bearing His burden; by learning to do common things in a higher spirit of self-sacrifice and grateful love to Him;—by those, beyond all other ways, shall we become able as a Church to cast abroad a brighter light of truth and to gather in more largely the fulness of the heathen to our Saviour’s fold.3 [Note: Bishop S. Wilberforce.] People think we missionaries go out to those parts of the world, and from morning to night do nothing but preach sermons. It is quite a mistake. It is not the preaching of a sermon so much as the living the life that tells on the native heart. It is by living a Divine life, by striving to follow in the footsteps of Him who came to express the Father’s love, that we win the heart of the savage, and raise him up to become a true man in Jesus Christ.1 [Note: James Chalmers; Autobiography and Letters, 274. One holy Church of God appears Through every age and race, Unwasted by the lapse of years, Unchanged by changing place. From oldest time, on farthest shores, Beneath the pine or palm, One Unseen Presence she adores, With silence, or with psalm. Her priests are all God’s faithful sons, To serve the world raised up; The pure in heart, her baptized ones, Love her communion-cup. The truth is her prophetic gift, The soul her sacred page; And feet on mercy’s errand swift, Do make her pilgrimage. O living Church, thine errand speed, Fulfil thy task sublime; With bread of life earth’s hunger feed; Redeem the evil time!2 [Note: Samuel Longfellow.] The Church Literature Davies (J. Ll.), The Gospel and Modern Life, 1. Eyton (R.), The Apostles’ Creed, 143. Fyffe (D.), The Essentials of Christian Belief, 206. Goodman (J. H.), The Lordship of Christ, 1. Grant (W.), Christ our Hope, 303. Henson (H. H.), Ad Rem, 143. Howard (H.), The Conning Tower of the Soul, 45. Jones (J. D.), Things Most Surely Believed, 145. McConnell (S. D.), Sons of God, 27. Rainsford (M.), The Mystery of His Will, 149. Sampson (E. F.), Christ Church Sermons, 78. Smith (D.), Christian Counsel, 31. Varley (H.), Some Main Questions, 131. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xv. No. 1058. Westcott (B. F.), The Historic Faith, 113. Christian World Pulpit, xxxi. 155 (Perowne); xxv. 353 (Davies); xlix. 392 (Packer); lx. 211 (Stubbs); lxxix. 229 (Owen). Contemporary Pulpit, 1st Ser., x. 257 (Goodwin). Homiletic Review, xxi. 143 (Davis). Salvation the Gift of God By grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.—Ephesians 2:8. These are pregnant words to be written by a prisoner at Rome. St. Paul was always most free in spirit when he was most fettered in body. The longer he lived in drear captivity the riper grew his spirit. This, the last of his great Epistles, is like the swan-song sung in view of inexorable death. For him eternity is filled with God. The Father folds in His bosom the blessed Son, and the Son helps to create the beatitude of the Father. There he reads the mystery, hidden from the ages, but now revealed, that all men might be one in Christ. Then he looks down on man, dead in trespasses and sins, but redeemed in Christ, according to the eternal purpose of God. Then he looks up and sees principalities and powers in heavenly places, learning through Christ the manifold wisdom of God. Then, glancing out, he sees renewed humanity, the Church of Christ, with all its graces and with all its glory. He traces all this to Divine grace working through human faith, all of God, all through man, and the more God passes into man, the more grandly man becomes the image of the living God. I The Nature of Salvation 1. It is a salvation from spiritual death.—In the Bible the word “salvation” is not a technical theological term. It means deliverance generally. Any special import in a particular passage must depend on the context. In the present instance the context clearly shows what kind of salvation St. Paul is thinking of. This is neither rescue from earthly poverty and pain—the lower old Jewish salvation, nor escape from future torment—the lower Christian salvation. It is deliverance from a present spiritual death. The soul is saved from itself. Salvation is not only the rescue and deliverance of a man from evils conceived to lie round about him, and to threaten his being from without, it is also his healing from evils which have so wrought themselves into his very being, and infected his whole nature, that the emblem for them is a “sickness unto death,” of which this mighty Physician comes for the healing. But salvation is more than a shelter, more than an escape. It not only trammels up evil possibilities, and prevents them from falling upon men’s heads, but it introduces all good. It not only strips off the poisoned robe, it also invests with a royal garb. It is not only negatively the withdrawal from the power, and the setting above the reach, of all evil, in the widest sense of that word, physical and moral, but also the endowment with every good, in the widest sense of that word, physical and moral, which man is capable of receiving, or God has wealth to bestow. 2. It is an accomplished salvation.—Salvation is a Divine act completed, but regarded as continuous and permanent in its issues. The Revised Version slightly modifies the translation of the Authorized Version and reads, “ye have been saved” (A.V. “are saved”). The saving was a fact, finished, rounded, completed, realized once for all. In an earlier Epistle St. Paul said, “We are saved by hope.” Despair means death. But here the saving is a fact and a process. It is done and it continues until man obtains the beatitude of God. Out there swims the lifeboat. The man may be lifted into it from the devouring waves, and you say he is saved. But leaving him there in the open boat, tempest-tossed, wind-driven, you expose him to death as certain, though more slow-footed. And so the saving of man, though the work of God, is a process that goes on till the boat reaches the eternal shore, and we step on to the firm land to realize the larger freedom and the diviner end. 3. It is the gift of God.—Salvation is entirely God’s gift to us; and it must be so. For we cannot make it or get it for ourselves; we have no power of our own to make it for ourselves, nothing of our own to offer in exchange for it. If our salvation does not come to us as God’s free gift, it can never come to us at all. This is what St. Paul keeps insisting upon over and over again in his statements of the doctrine of justification; it is the foundation upon which the whole doctrine has to be reared. And so the very first step in the way of our salvation must be taken by God Himself; we can have nothing at all to do with it. “Not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.” This word has often been misunderstood, as if it referred to the faith which is mentioned just before. But that is a plain misconception of the Apostle’s meaning. It is not faith that is the gift of God; it is salvation by grace. That is plain from the next verse: “not of works, lest any man should boast.” What is it that is “not of works”? Faith? Certainly not. Nobody would ever have thought it worth while to say, “Faith is not of works,” because nobody would have said it was. The two clauses necessarily refer to the same thing; and if the latter of them must refer to salvation by grace, so must the former.1 [Note: A. Maclaren, Creed and Conduct, 37. Alas! many don’t understand the nature of Christianity, which is one great giving from beginning to end. Christ, God’s Son, was a gift. The salvation He has procured us is a gift. The sacrifice which got that salvation is a gift. Heaven, with all its eternal felicities, is a gift—a free, a full, a perfect gift. And yet for Christ’s cause there are men who can, and who will, do nothing! It is astonishing the forms, the methods, the excuses which people will sometimes adopt—people with wealth—to get off from giving to God a little of what God has given so lavishly to them.2 [Note: Dr. MacGregor of St. Cuthberts, in Life by Frances Balfour, 44. II The Source of Salvation “By grace.” 1. The fountain of all our deliverance from sin lies in the deep heart of God, from which it wells up undrawn, unmotived, uncaused by anything except His own infinite loving-kindness. People have often presented the New Testament teaching about salvation as if it implied that God’s love was brought to man because Jesus Christ died, and turned the Divine affections. That is not New Testament teaching. Christ’s death is not the cause of God’s love, but God’s love is the cause of Christ’s death. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” When He loves, He loves freely and unmodified except by the constraint of His own Being. Just as the light, because it is light and must radiate, falls upon dung-hills and diamonds, upon black rocks and white snow, upon ice-peaks and fertile fields, so the great fountain of the Divine grace pours out upon men only by reason of its own continual tendency to communicate its own fullness and blessedness. “Grace” is a word our fathers understood and loved better than we. It was defined as “favour.” And favours even of God are not agreeable to the proud spirit of man. But no common term can ever exhaust, or express, this great and rich idea. “Grace” expresses and denotes at once the feeling that prompts the favour and the gratitude the favour begets. It denotes both the beneficence that comes of a joy that cannot be uttered, and yet must be expressed, and the joy that cannot bear the sight of pain and misery, and guilt and death, confronting it on this wide earth.1 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn, in The Preacher’s Magazine, January 1909, p. 8. Do you know what it is to be impressed by a word? Lately, the word grace, especially as used in Galatians, has come to me morning, noon, and night, with a fullness of meaning it never had before. What an infinite mercy it is that salvation from beginning to end is by grace! How useless and how needless to look anywhere for merit, and how simple just to take! This has a commonplace look now it is written, and yet it has meant so much to me.2 [Note: John Brash, in Memorials and Correspondence, 9. There is another term that stands near “grace”—the term “love.” But the two terms are worlds apart. All grace is love, but not all love is grace. Grace loves to do good in an equal measure to all; but love can never dispense with a fit object. Grace is a thing of nature so infinite that no man who has it dare resist or disobey its command. The beautiful spirit incarnated in beautiful speech is gracious. The gracefulness which is the delight of gods and men comes from the loveliness of perfect deeds. There is a grace which corresponds to the word of the old philosopher, “The best and the last part of beauty is grace.” Grace has been called beauty in motion, beauty in action. God is gracious by the nature He bears as Deity. But man is gracious by gift. The beneficence of God creates grace in man. But a heathen man could have spoken of grace in some such terms as we have used. St. Paul, however, took the term, made it Christian, baptized it, and lifted it into a new and splendid sense. It meant to him absolute freedom in all that God gave. God is no infinite creditor, and we are no infinite debtors. Grace cannot be bought, not even by blood; for He who is gracious gave to the death the Son of His love. See, then, grace is free, sending the Son to make that glorious sacrifice whereby we are all redeemed. Because grace is free it is given without fee, merit, or reward. Only the mercy of God, only the grace of heaven, only the free unfettered love of the Father, can save men.1 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.] 2. Through universal grace, all walls of partition fall down, and men stand alike and equal before God. Before St. Paul’s day men appended God to a race, a priesthood, a sacrifice. They read God through what they did, and through themselves alone. But St. Paul read man through God. He read history through heaven. St. Paul brought the great and splendid conception of grace to vivify all that man signified, and all that he could achieve. Can you think what was done when, instead of coming to God with all the terror of soul that seeks to buy His grace, and to pay Him in blood, and by pain and suffering have merit before Him, men came to Him simply because of His infinite mercy? Did you ever think that what happened then was that men, instead of coming to God as an infinite power whose pity they must buy, looked at mankind through God’s own eyes? The eyes of grace brought to the interpretation of man the great and glorious dream of an Eternal and Universal Father who could not will but save. He is a grand King who is the Father of His people, and the grandest of all discoveries was made by the Apostle when he said, Not by might, not by any merit of our own, not by any works, but altogether of grace is God’s great action. When he said this, down fell the wall of partition, down came every act which divided and distinguished men. Where God is gracious, men who through His grace are saved become one mankind. Grace is given for the merits of Christ all over the earth; there is no corner, even of Paganism, where it is not present, present in each heart of man in real sufficiency for his ultimate salvation. Not that the grace presented to each is such as at once to bring him to heaven; but it is sufficient for a beginning. It is sufficient to enable him to plead for other grace; and that second grace is such as to impetrate a third grace; and thus the soul may be led from grace to grace, and from strength to strength, till at length it is, so to say, in very sight of heaven, if the gift of perseverance does but complete the work.1 [Note: Newman, Difficulties felt by Anglicans, 70. The play of chances which brings up a ternion or a quaternion is nothing compared to what has been required to prevent the combination of which I am reaping the fruits from being disturbed. If my origin had been less lowly in the eyes of the world, I should not have entered or persevered upon that royal road of the intellectual life to which my early training for the priesthood attached me. The displacement of a single atom would have broken the chain of fortuitous facts which, in the remote district of Brittany, was preparing me for a privileged life; which brought me from Brittany to Paris; which, when I was in Paris, took me to the establishment of all others where the best and most solid education was to be had; which, when I left the seminary, saved me from two or three mistakes which would have been the ruin of me; which, when I was on my travels, extricated me from certain dangers that, according to the doctrine of chances, would have been fatal to me; which, to cite one special instance, brought Dr. Suquet over from America to rescue me from the jaws of death which were yawning to swallow me up. The only conclusion I would fain draw from all this is that the unconscious effort towards what is good and true in the universe has its throw of the dice through the intermediary of each one of us. There is no combination but what comes up, quaternions like any other. We may disarrange the designs of Providence in respect to ourselves; but we have next to no influence upon their accomplishment. Quid habes quod non accepisti? The dogma of grace is the truest of all the Christian dogmas.2 [Note: E. Renan, Recollections of My Youth, 326. III The Channel of Salvation “Through faith.” 1. Faith is the condition of salvation on man’s side. The Christian requirement of the condition of salvation is expressed in the word “faith.” “Ye have been saved by grace”—there is the source; “ye have been saved by grace, through faith”—there is the condition, the medium, the instrument, the channel. It is a thousand pities, one sometimes thinks, that the word was not translated “trust” instead of “faith,” and then we should have understood that it is not a theological virtue at all, but just the common thing that we all know so well, which is the cement of human society and the blessedness of human affection, and which only needs to be lifted, as a plant that had been running along the ground, and had its tendrils bruised and its fruit marred, might be lifted and twined round the pillar of God’s throne, in order to grow up and bear fruit that shall be found after many days unto praise, and honour and glory. There is something on our side, by means of which we are to accept the salvation, and if that something be not exercised salvation may be brought to our doors but it will not do us any good. You may bring the biggest nugget of gold in the world to my door; there it may be outside on a wheelbarrow, and I may be inside dying of starvation; the nugget will do me no good if I do not take it in. If I do not turn it into money, and apply it to the satisfaction of my wants, I shall be as badly off as if the nugget had never been presented to me at all. The glorious gift of salvation is brought to our doors, and the question is, Have we taken it into our hearts?1 [Note: W. H. M. H. Aitken, Mission Sermons, 119. Faith is as distinctive of man as grace is distinctive of God, for this reason—while grace describes God’s attitude to man, faith describes man’s attitude to God. While grace speaks of the relation of the ideal to man, faith speaks of the relation of man to the ideal. Hence all faith speaks of man in relation to God. Where His grace works our good, our faith responds to His grace. The one is the answer to the other—the response of earth to the voice that speaks from heaven.2 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.] We got, I forget how, to the subject of the Divine permission of Evil, which Wordsworth said he had always felt the hardest problem of man’s being. When four years old, he had quaked on his bed in sharp conflict of spirit on this subject. “Nothing,” he said, “but Faith can keep you quiet and at peace with such awful problems pressing on you—Faith that what you know not now, you will know in God’s good time. It is curious, in that verse of St. Paul’s about Faith, Hope, and Charity or Love, that Charity should be placed the highest of the three; it must be because it is so universal and limitless in its operations: but Faith is the highest individual experience, because it conquers the pride of the understanding—man’s greatest foe.1 [Note: H. N. Pym, Caroline Fox, Her Journals and Letters, i. 305. 2. Why is faith selected as the channel of salvation? (1) Faith has been selected as the channel of grace because there is a natural adaptation in faith to be used as the receiver. Suppose that I am about to give a poor man an alms; I put it into his hand—why? Well, it would hardly be fitting to put it into his ear, or to lay it upon his foot; the hand seems made on purpose to receive. So faith in the mental frame is created on purpose to be a receiver; it is the hand of the man, and there is a fitness in bestowing grace by its means. Faith which receives Christ is as simple an act as when your child receives an apple from you, because you hold it out, and promise to give him the apple if he comes for it. The belief and the receiving relate only to an apple; but they make up precisely the same act as the faith which deals with eternal salvation; and what the child’s hand is to the apple, that your faith is to the perfect salvation of Christ. The child’s hand does not make the apple, or alter the apple, it only takes it; and faith is chosen by God to be the receiver of salvation, because it does not pretend to make salvation or to help in it, but it receives it. (2) It gives all the glory to God.—The hand which receives charity does not say, “I am to be thanked for accepting the gift”; that would be absurd. When the hand conveys bread to the mouth, it does not say to the body, “Thank me, for I feed you.” It is a very simple thing that the hand does, though a very necessary thing; and it never arrogates glory to itself for what it does. So God has selected faith to receive the unspeakable gift of His grace, because it cannot take to itself any credit, but must adore the gracious God who is the giver of all good. (3) It unites man to God.—When man confides in God, there is a point of union between them, and that union guarantees blessing. Faith saves us because it makes us cling to God, and so brings us into connexion with Him. Years ago, above certain great falls, a boat was upset, and two men were being carried down the current, when persons on the shore managed to float a rope out to them, which rope was seized by them both. One of them held fast to it, and was safely drawn to the bank; but the other, seeing a great log come floating by, unwisely let go the rope, and clung to the log, for it was the bigger thing of the two, and apparently better to cling to. Alas! the log, with the man on it, went right over the vast abyss, because there was no union between the log and the shore. The size of the log was no benefit to him who grasped it; it needed a connexion with the shore to produce safety. So, when a man trusts to his works, or to sacraments, or to anything of that sort, he will not be saved, because there is no junction between him and Christ; but faith, though it may seem to be like a slender cord, is in the hand of the great God on the shore side; infinite power pulls in the connecting line, and thus draws the man from destruction. (4) Faith touches the springs of action.—If I walk across a room, it is because I believe my legs will carry me. A man eats because he believes in the necessity of food. Columbus discovered America because he believed that there was another continent beyond the ocean. Many another grand deed has also been born of faith, for faith works wonders. Commoner things are done on the same principle; faith in its natural form is an all-prevailing force. God gives salvation to our faith, because He has thus touched the secret spring of all our emotions and actions. He has, so to speak, taken possession of the battery, and now He can send the sacred current to every part of our nature. When we believe in Christ, and the heart has come into the possession of God, then are we saved from sin, and are moved towards repentance, holiness, zeal, prayer, consecration, and every other gracious thing. The next day I again went to Farringford. I found Tennyson walking up and down the ballroom. I walked up and down with him for three-quarters of an hour. After talking of various matters, he came back to the subject of immortality. “It is hard,” he said, “to believe in God, but it is harder not to believe in Him. I don’t believe in His goodness from what I see in nature. In nature I see the mechanism. I believe in His goodness from what I find in my own breast.” … Then he said, “I wonder what the earliest Christians thought of it all.” I said that I thought that they were content with seeing in Christ a revelation of God and an assurance of God’s love; later came the controversies and the need for definition. He said that, of course, we must have doctrine. I assented, remarking that the form must be more or less human. “After all,” he said, “after all, the greatest thing is faith.” Having said this, he paused, and then recited, giving earnest emphasis to the long rolling lines which sang of a faith victorious, a faith which can wait till the opening doors of Heaven disclose what faith waits for:— Doubt no longer that the Highest is the wisest and the best, Let not all that saddens Nature blight thy hope or break thy rest, Quail not at the fiery mountain, at the shipwreck, or the rolling Thunder, or the rending earthquake, or the famine, or the pest Neither mourn if human creeds be lower than the heart’s desire! Thro’ the gates that bar the distance comes a gleam of what is higher. Wait till Death has flung them open, when the man will make the Maker Dark no more with human hatreds in the glare of deathless fire!1 [Note: Bishop W. Boyd Carpenter, Some Pages of My Life, 269. 3. The entire system of salvation revealed in the Gospel is based upon this foundation doctrine, that the faith which saves the soul is a faith which looks immediately to, and which terminates definitively in, the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ as the almighty and atoning Redeemer. Now, it is of exceeding importance to have a clear and distinct understanding of this cardinal doctrine, that, in order to salvation, there must be a personal faith in a Personal Saviour. Wrong views here are ruinous. Any mistake as to the object of faith is fatal error. Yet there may be and there is a belief of the truth of Scripture which is not faith in the New Testament and saving sense of the term. There may be a belief of all that God has revealed in His Word, and even an intellectual apprehension of the remedial scheme as set forth in the Gospel, altogether apart from that faith which is connected with the elements of spiritual life and the earnest of salvation. And the explanation of this is to be found in the nature of the case. The object of saving faith is not the truth about Christ, but the Person of Christ; it is not the testimony, but the Testifier. Of course there must of necessity be the believing of the truth about Christ, the crediting of the testimony given in the Word concerning Him. But what is the relation which the truth and the testimony bear to Christ? Why, the truth is but the light under which He is revealed; the testimony is only the platform on which He is exhibited. And what is the relation which faith bears to the truth and the testimony about Christ? Why, faith eyes Christ as He is seen by the light of the truth; it occupies itself with Him as He is set forth in the testimony. But faith is not satisfied with the mere speculative knowledge and the certified evidence of Christ’s Saviourhood. Faith breaks through all his Scripture surroundings and presses forward to Christ Himself, and finds its proper focus and fruition in the Person of the revealed and realized Saviour. As Dr. Liddon so moved among his fellow-men, so thought of them and approached them, he seemed as one who was often thinking of the gaze of Christ lighting on him, the Hand of Christ pointing to some act of service, the Voice of Christ prompting some witness to the Faith. There was a memorable tone that came into his words when in preaching or in argument or in conversation he spoke of that which he condemned as slighting or disloyal to Christ. It was, quite simply, like the way in which a man fires up when any one has, even unawares, spoken rudely or contemptuously of his friend; and there are parts of his writings in which, for those at least who knew him, that same tone still sounds. It was but one sign of a real habit of thinking constantly of his Master; of a very attentive listening for His command; of an earnest, anxious desire to go straight forward in His cause, to live and die as His.1 [Note: J. O. Johnston, Life and Letters of H. P. Liddon, 403. Salvation the Gift of God Literature Aitken (W. H. M. H.), Mission Sermons, iii. 109. Beeching (H. C.), Inns of Court Sermons, 168. Campbell (D.), The Roll Call of Faith, 1. Cunningham (W.), Sermons, 203. Dale (R. W.), Christian Doctrine, 148. Davies (D. C.), The Atonement and Intercession of Christ, 108. Drummond (H.), Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 331. Grant (W.), Christ our Hope, 215. Harris (H.), Short Sermons, 182. Jackson (G.), Memoranda Paulina, 186. Jeffrey (R. T.), The Salvation of the Gospel, 171. Kuyper (A.), The Work of the Holy Spirit, 378. Lynch (T. T.), Three Months’ Ministry, 49. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Ephesians, 98. Maclaren (A.), Creed and Conduct, 31. Murray (W. H.), The Fruits of the Spirit, 168. Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, vii. 321. Pulsford (J.), Christ and His Seed, 65. Romanes (E.), Thoughts on the Collects for the Trinity Season, 163. Roose (J. S.), Our Protestant Faith, 89. Salmon (G.), Gnosticism and Agnosticism, 272, 292. Spurgeon (C. H.), Messages to the Multitude, 55. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xviii. (1872), No. 1064; xxvii. (1881), No. 1609. Tholuck (A.), Hours of Devotion, 182. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), New Ser., xxii. No. 1222. Watts-Ditchfield (J. E.), Here and Hereafter, 11. Webb-Peploe (H. W.), Calls to Holiness, 97. Christian World Pulpit, xxv. 371 (Stevenson); xxix. 100 (Sunman); xlvii. 221 (Stalker); lxv. 161 (Fairbairn). Church of England Magazine, lxii. 272 (Cardale). National Preacher, xxviii. 91 (Harding). Preacher’s Magazine, xx. 7 (Fairbairn). God’s Workmanship For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them.—Ephesians 2:10. This chapter contains an argument which is a good illustration of the two-edged way in which the sword of the Spirit cuts enemies who come from different directions. On the one hand, St. Paul strikes at those who would teach that licentiousness is possible to men who are saved by grace. We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, for good works. It is true that we do not improve ourselves. It is all of grace, yet good works are binding upon us all the more. On the other hand, let us not take any credit to ourselves. If we are elevated or refined, it is because God has taken pains with us; otherwise we should be as coarse and foul as any one. Indeed, we should never have come into the workshop but for the heavenly artist. “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” It is, as old Mr. Honest said, when the rest of the pilgrims came to watch him cross the river, “Grace reigns.” The teaching of St. Paul, then, is that men and women are not the sole architects of their own characters; the Supreme Architect who works upon them is God. We are saved by grace—by a long series of Divine interpositions, by Heavenly compulsions and impulsions, by the energies of a ceaseless Hand that works upon us and brings out the Heavenly design, and completes the Divine symmetry. It is easy, of course, to turn such a thought into folly. Human nature is, unfortunately, so constituted that very few minds are capable of seeing both sides of the truth. Thus it happens that those who cling most to the consoling thought of a gospel of pure grace often neglect the equally binding gospel of a ceaseless struggle after goodness. And again, the good people who build up a life of flawless honour, integrity, and virtue, often find, because they have not learned to need it, a gospel of grace incomprehensible. Yet both are true, just as it is true that a ship depends for its movement equally on the men who work the pulleys and on the wind that fills the sails. So we work out our own salvation; but we move to no heavenly shores till the wind comes out of the waste heaven, and God touches us. For it is by grace, by a Divine interference, that we are saved; nor is salvation possible without it. It was the supreme truth of God’s free grace that converted both Luther and Wesley. The one rose from Pilate’s staircase in Rome with the dawn upon his brow, as a man enfranchised of a new world; the other in Aldersgate Street in half-an-hour cast the husk of twenty years of ritualism, and emerged into unbounded spiritual liberty. For us also to grasp this truth is life. Yet so ill-balanced and frail of judgment are we that there is only too much peril of wresting such a truth to our destruction. Rather for us the most necessary truth to-day is that goodness can be found only by effort, that the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, that God will not save us by any spiritual necromancy, that if we are not prepared to be as earnest over religion as we are over our worldly affairs, there is no religion and no salvation for us.1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Divine Challenge, 107. “Hamlet,” says Professor Bradley, “usually speaks as one who accepts the received Christian ideas, yet when he meditates profoundly he seems to ignore them.” There has been too much of this Hamlet-spirit in the Church. Yet her shortcomings have only thrown into more brilliant relief the quenchless patience of God’s love, and the tenacity of His revelation. The vital truths of the faith have refused to be ignored for long. It has been a revelation to the world, as well as to the Church itself, how vital and undying is the sheer grace of God in Christ, often thwarted, often grieved, but never chilled by human imperfections.2 [Note: J. Moffatt, Reasons and Reasons, 28. I A Divine Creation “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus.” 1. The term rendered “workmanship” signifies “a poem,” and the idea is, that as a poem owes its conception to the singer’s intellect and fancy, so a believer in Christ owes his character and standing to God. We are indebted to the Greeks for the word, and for its beautiful meaning. A poem with them was, first, anything made; but as beauty and harmony are elements in all truly original or created works, the word “poem” came to be applied more and more exclusively to the expression of truth and beauty in rhythmical form. Only in one other place does the word occur in the New Testament. That place is Romans, chapter 1 Eph 2:20; and there the Apostle uses it with reference to the wonders of creation. This bright and beautiful world in which we live is full of God’s poetical works. “The heavens are telling the glory of God;” the starry sky, with the sun and moon, is not only a Divine poem, but also an oratorio, full of celestial harmonies. The little islands are the poetry of the sea. Gems and precious stones, such as the diamond and the emerald, are the poetry of the mineral kingdom. Flowers are the poetry of the vegetable kingdom. The young ones of living creatures are the poetry of the animal kingdom. Children are God’s poetical works in the world of mankind; we remember the lines which Longfellow addresses to them— Come to me, O ye children! And whisper in my ear What the birds and the winds are singing In your sunny atmosphere. For what are all our contrivings, And the wisdom of our books, When compared with your caresses, And the gladness of your looks? Ye are better than all the ballads That ever were sung or said; For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead.1 [Note: C. Jerdan, Manna for Young Pilgrims, 102. “We are His poem!” Each Christian age has been a canto of it; each Christian life and death a word. Its strains have been pealing down the centuries, and “though set to a tune which admits of such endless variations that it is often difficult to detect the original melody amid the clash of the chords that conceal it, it will eventually be resolved, through many a swift modulation and startling cadence, back to the perfect key.”1 [Note: H. G. Miller, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, 93. Biographers of Wordsworth have marked the exact period when his genius reached its height, and after that the glory came only at intervals, and the real poems were rare. And because a true poem is so rare a thing, it has always been appraised as the highest form of literature. Many great books come—and go; but a true poem is as fresh after long centuries as when it was first written. “Poesy never waxeth old,” and knows no decay. It knows no decay because it is permeated with the spirit of beauty; because it is the enduring monument of a combination of fine gifts, whose final result is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. That is what a poem is, and St. Paul says that we are the expression of the mind of God, as the In Memoriam is the expression of the full mind and heart of Tennyson. We are God’s Poems.2 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Divine Challenge, 111. If thou hadst been a poet! On my heart The thought flashed sudden, burning through the weft Of life, and with too much I sank bereft. Up to my eyes the tears, with sudden start, Thronged blinding: then the veil would rend and part! The husk of vision would in twain be cleft! Thy hidden soul in naked beauty left, I should behold thee, Nature, as thou art! O poet Jesus! at thy holy feet I should have lien, sainted with listening; My pulses answering ever, in rhythmic beat, The stroke of each triumphant melody’s wing, Creating, as it moved, by being sweet; My soul thy harp, thy word the quivering string.3 [Note: George MacDonald, “Concerning Jesus” (Poetical Works, i. 255).] 2. The poem depends entirely upon the poet for its creation. It is the unveiling of the deepest and most intimate secrecies of his heart. His own image is projected over every page, and it is the poignant personal element in poetry that makes it so beautiful, and gives it its enduring charm. Men, then, are God’s poems. The intimacies of God’s heart are expressed in man—God’s highest thoughts, God’s deepest emotions. The prayer of Moses was that the beauty of God might rest upon him. When a man is finished at last in the likeness of Christ, God’s sense of beauty is satisfied in him, God’s art has found its finest expression and the beauty of God does rest upon him. The true Christian is God’s poem in a world of prose, God’s beauty in a world of gloom, God’s fine and finished art in a world where men forget beauty, and are careless of moral symmetry and spiritual grace. There is no bioplasm in the spiritual world. By no means or contrivance can a soul live the life of God without the direct interposition of the Holy Spirit. You may galvanize a dead bird into a flutter, but there is no life in a galvanic shock. The Gospel, which is such a rich exhibition of pathos, beauty, and prospect, when its truths are naturally presented, may create emotion, but it cannot give the new heart by outward experiment. Life comes from life, and not from declarations of truths. We may touch and move the external nature, but God alone can give the new life.1 [Note: T. Davies, Sermons, ii. 116. I remember once seeing a little fountain playing in the room of a house in which I was staying. I went near to examine it and heard the click and whirr of machinery! The fountain was the product of a mechanical contrivance; it went by clockwork. It was wound up and played for a little while and then sank into stagnancy again. How different from the spring! One plays in feverish spasms; the other flows in restful persistence. “Not of works”: that is the manufactured fountain. “We are his workmanship”: that is the life of the spring. The Christian life is quietly natural; it is the creation of the ceaseless energy of God.2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in The Examiner, Nov. 19, 1903, p. 508. 3. The new creation is “in Christ Jesus.” One of the earliest and most majestic names of God is Maker, Creator. The Psalmist says, “Thy hands have made me and fashioned me.” We wear the image of the earthly Adam by our natural descent, and in this sense we are the creatures of God. But the first creation has been marred, and we need to be created again by being brought into connexion, relationship, and union with the second Adam, the Lord from heaven. We are created in Christ Jesus. Now, if every Christian is a true poem of God, and if the Holy Catholic Church is the supreme Divine epic “created” in our world, who is the Hero of the composition? Our text answers that the Hero is the Lord Jesus Christ. The poem is full of Him. God’s people are “created in Christ Jesus for good works.” This Hero is both Divine and human. He is the Son of God and the Flower of men, and also the one Mediator between God and us. God has purchased the Church, and every individual member of it, with His own blood. The Church is Christ’s body, “the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” His Spirit dwells in the heart of every believer. His glory fills the entire Society of His people. Every poem of which He is the Hero shall spread His name and His fame throughout the universe to all eternity.1 [Note: C. Jerdan, Manna for Young Pilgrims, 105. In every great poem there is a definite subject, a leaping thought, or a hero around whom everything gathers. The central figure of Homer’s Iliad is Achilles, a typical Greek—handsome, brave, passionate, hospitable, affectionate. The hero of the Odyssey is the wandering Ulysses, also an ideal Grecian of the Homeric age. The hero of Virgil’s Æneid is “the pious Æneas,” a famous Trojan, one of the principal figures of classical legend. Dante’s Commedia is the great poem of retribution, his own figure dominating the whole of it. The outstanding personality in Milton’s Paradise Lost is Satan, while that in Paradise Regained is Jesus of Nazareth. The hero of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King is King Arthur of the Round Table, or, as some would have it, Sir Lancelot of the Lake.2 [Note: Ibid. 104] II The Practical End “For good works.” 1. St. Paul indicates in one brief phrase the right relation of good works to the Christian life. It is “for good works” that we are created in Christ. Or, to put it otherwise, good works, holiness, Godlike character, are the aim of God in creating us afresh. They are His ultimate goal; accordingly they cannot be the cause of our being saved, but must be its issue and consequence. They are the fruit of the good tree, not its root or vital sap; and we are said to be created for good works just as a tree is created, or exists, for its fruit. Hence the true relation is altogether distorted and reversed when character and conduct are made pre-conditions of our obtaining Divine grace, instead of the joyous result of our having accepted it. This is a problem exactly parallel to that of slave labour. If the end of labour be taken as the maximum of production, then the question history had to solve was this, How is this end attained most effectively?—by slave labour or by free? In Greece, in Rome, in our own dependencies a hundred years ago, an unhesitating answer was given in favour of slavery; yet emancipation had only to become a fact to prove that, even from the economic point of view, freedom was inestimably the more advantageous of the two. So is it also in religion. Let men believe that they must purchase salvation by hard, grim toil, as the mere bond-slaves of God, and their hands will sink in weakness and despair. But tell them that in Christ Jesus they are the sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty, and grateful love and wonder will evoke a beauty and a wealth of goodness of which else they had vainly dreamed.1 [Note: H. R. Mackintosh, Life on God’s Plan, 55. Wordsworth has described in a memorable and familiar passage the history of human life as it is developed under the influence of the world, the sum of external and transitory things. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But He beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. This description of the experience of the growing child is the exact reverse of the truth in regard to the life “in Christ.” The fresh rays of glory which the boy sees about him do not “fade” or “die away” with advancing years, but, as his power of vision is strengthened and disciplined by continuous use, are seen to spread from point to point with undimmed lustre, till at last all Nature is flooded with the heavenly splendour. The solitary star is found to be the quickening sun. Love for the Ascended Christ continually calls forth fresh and more glorious manifestations of His Person and will (John 14:23). Life “in Christ” is, in other words, a progressive realization of a personal fellowship with God in thought, word and deed, which brings an ever-increasing power of discerning Him in His works and a surer faith by which we apprehend the invisible (Hebrews 11:1). Thus the Christian appropriates in action little by little what has been done once for all, and gladly recognizes “the good works, which God afore prepared that [he] should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). He is himself God’s “workmanship” and his character is a reflection of the living Christ, gained in the common business of life as he places himself before His open presence (2 Corinthians 3:18).1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, Christian Aspects of Life, 24. 2. The Christian life is always metrical, beating in harmony with the will of God. It is in religion as in music. Nature is full of musical voices, of simple notes that sound melodiously in every ear; but out of these the cultured and quickened imagination of the master can create harmonies such as Nature never has created or can create—can in his Oratorio weave sounds into symphonies so wondrous that they seem like the speech of the gods suddenly breaking articulate upon the ear of man, speaking of passions, hopes, fears, joys too tumultuous and vast for the human tongue to utter; or opening and interpreting for mortals a world where, remote from discord or dissonance, thought and being move as to the stateliest music. So in the spiritual sphere the truly holy religious person is the master spirit, making audible to others the harmonies his imagination is the first to hear. In him the truths and ideas of God, as yet indistinctly seen or partially heard by the multitude, are embodied, become as it were incarnate and articulate, assume a visible and strenuous form that they may inspire men to nobler deeds, and show them how to create a higher manhood and purer society. Professor Gilbert Murray writes of the Greeks that “the idea of service to the community was more deeply rooted in them than in us, and that they asked of their poets first of all this question: ‘Does he help to make men better? Does he make life a better thing?’ ” These were the questions that Signor (Mr. Watts) asked himself daily and hourly. I remember how pleased he was when Verestchagin agreed heartily with his aphorism, “Art should be used to make men better.”1 [Note: Mrs. Watts, in George Frederic Watts, ii. 279. Tennyson, in one of his earlier poems, gives his conception of the place and work of the true poet: The poet in a golden clime was born, With golden stars above; Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love. He saw thro’ life and death, thro’ good and ill, He saw thro’ his own soul. The marvel of the everlasting will, An open scroll, Before him lay: with echoing feet he threaded The secretest walks of fame: The viewless arrows of his thoughts were headed And wing’d with flame. The poet, says another, is the writer who pours forth his thought and inner life in the melody of metre, and under the inspiration and power of a Divine emotion. Poetry, like all creation, is self-revelation. It is the highest form of expression. In literature the imperial minds worthy of the name poet are few. The Hebrew race had but one David, the Greek but one Homer, the Italian but one Dante, the German but one Goethe, the English but one Shakespeare.2 [Note: A. Lewis, Sermons Preached in England, 125. In your concord and harmonious love Jesus Christ is sung. And do ye, each and all, form yourselves into a chorus, that being harmonious in love and having taken the scale (or keynote) of God, ye may in unison sing with one voice through Jesus Christ unto the Father, that He may both hear you and acknowledge you by your good deeds to be members of His Song of Solomon 3 [Note: Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesians.] When Carlyle describes Elizabeth Fry standing fair as a lily, in pure womanliness, amid the abominable sights of old Newgate; or Longfellow describes Florence Nightingale moving with her lamp among the wounded at Scutari— And slow, as in a dream of bliss, The speechless sufferer turns to kiss Her shadow, as it falls Upon the darkening walls— what is the effect on the mind? It is the effect of poetry. We feel touched, purged, exalted: we know that these women were in truth God’s poems. And there are men and women in the world still who touch the soul by the same Divine magic.1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Divine Challenge, 113. III A Comprehensive Design “Which God afore prepared that we should walk in them.” 1. God’s great plan includes the Christian life and all its conditions. By the revelation of the moral law He has already fixed the pathway of the believer’s obedience, and by creating us in Christ, He fits us by disposition and aptitude for that obedience. For each of us a path of spiritual development has been prepared beforehand, our travelling by which will be the realization of the Divine ideal of our life which has hovered before the mind of God from the beginning. For every life God has a plan that touches the details as well as the great issues of the life, and there comes into the life of the believer nothing unknown to God. There are certain words that we make use of very often. We say that a certain contingency has arisen, an exigency, a combination of circumstances, that such and such a thing happened. All those words may be very necessary when we are talking about our own arrangements and our own outlook upon life, but they find no place in the vocabulary of God. There is no contingency that can surprise or startle Him, no exigency that He does not see; no detail of a human life is enshrouded in the mystery of an unborn hour so that God cannot detect it. I think, as I look back over my life, that there is hardly a single thwarting of my wishes, hardly a single instance where things seemed to go against me, in which I cannot even now see, that by God’s profound mercy they really went for me all the while; so that if I could have looked forward only so far as the time now present I should have longed for and welcomed all those things which I have feared and grudgingly accepted.… There is nothing that God does not work up into His perfect plan of our lives: all lines converge, all movements tend to do His will, on earth as in Heaven.1 [Note: Francis Paget, Bishop of Oxford, 49. 2. God, who does nothing vainly or at random, delights in that which is individual; He prepares us for the pathway of good works because He has also prepared the pathway for us; the two have originated together in His mind. It has been chosen for us, as a fitting stage to educe and develop our special powers; we have been created for it, and therefore endowed with the powers it will call for. Men differ in gifts and aptitudes as infinitely as do the leaves of a tree in form and texture; and one of the beautiful and inspiring thoughts that lie, like precious grains of gold, beneath the surface of this text, is the message that God has His own ideal for each one of us, and therefore would have us manifest the Christ-like and Christ-nourished life each in his own way. God keeps no set moulds into which character must run; rather the mould is broken after the emergence of each new life. For each the end of the journey is the same, when we shall all come to the measure of Christ’s fullness; but one may approach the far-shining summit up a gentle slope, soft with grass and deep with flowers, another over morass and torrent, and at last along the flinty way where the tender feet are bruised, and the wind blows keen across the snow. It matters little, if only we tread the ordained pathway of God. Mrs. Josephine Butler, for whose heroism he had a deep veneration, was one of four women of mark whom Signor (Mr. Watts) wished to include in his series of portraits for the National Gallery. Her portrait was painted, and at Limnerslease, where she came to stay with us. Very lovely in her youth, in age her delicate sensitive nature still gave true beauty to a face that bore but too plainly the marks of an heroic crusade. When she saw the portrait for the first time she said but a few words. She left the room and went to take the rest which at intervals was now necessary for her. Before she came downstairs to dinner she had written what she had not been able to say to Signor:— “When I looked at that portrait which you have just done, I felt inclined to burst into tears. I will tell you why. I felt so sorry for her. Your power has brought up out of the depths of the past, the record of a conflict which no one but God knows of. It is written in the eyes, and whole face. Your picture has brought back to me all that I suffered, and the sorrows through which the Angel of God’s presence brought me out alive. I thank you that you have not made that poor woman look severe or bitter, but only sad, and yet purposeful. For with full purpose of heart she has borne and laboured, and she is ready to go down to Hades again, if it were necessary, for the deliverance of her fellow-creatures. But God does not require that descent more than once. I could not say all this aloud. But if the portrait speaks with such truth and power to me, I think it will in some way speak to others also.”1 [Note: Mrs. Watts, in George Frederic Watts, ii. 250. Some time ago, when in Manchester, I saw men at work pulling down whole streets of houses to make room for a new railway station. All appeared ruin and disorder. Here was a party digging out foundations; in another place the bricklayers were building walls; elsewhere some were laying foundations for other walls; beyond them others were still pulling down. It seemed like chaos, and yet in the architect’s office could be seen the elevation and picture of the complete whole. Every man was working to a plan. And so God has His elevation, but He does not show it. “It doth not yet appear.” When Joseph was in jail, he was in the path of Providence, and the fetters of iron were as much part of the plan as the chain of gold he wore when brought to the summit of greatness.2 [Note: T. Champness, New Coins from Old Gold, 86. To erect a great building, to paint a great picture, to carve a great statue, to compose a great oratorio, to write a great poem, requires a great theme, and to live a great life requires a great purpose. So we, God’s poems, to fulfil our mission in the world, must have a great purpose. Gladstone, Wellington, Grant, Lincoln, Washington, Luther, Savonarola, Paul, were all men of purpose and noble ambition. Frances Willard, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, and Susanna Wesley were women of purpose, as have been all those who have accomplished anything worth the doing.3 [Note: A. Lewis, Sermons Preached in England, 143. 3. The sense of a high vocation will go far to redeem life from failure. Our consciousness of being in touch with God would be deepened if we would only recognize that He has prepared the specific enterprise and exercise of duty for us, and is ready to meet us face to face upon that line. Whatever love may be, it is dutiful; it assigns duties to others, and to itself. To ignore this truth is to miss one of the dimensions of His great love. To accept it is to reach a new degree of cheerfulness and effectiveness in our service of God and man. More than that, to believe “we are his workmanship” here because we are needed for some end of His own makes us aware of the wonderful precision and definiteness with which God uses the details of our individual lives to draw us into the destiny of our tie to Jesus Christ. We are created in Christ Jesus for good works. They are not irrelevant to our spiritual career any more than they were to His. If we understand anything of the moral energy which throbs in God’s redeeming purpose, we shall grow more and more conscious that our duties are a vocation, and that they become for each of us a private interpretation of the great will of Love with its design and its demands. I have been reading Margaret Fuller’s love letters. Sometimes the letters are light and frolicsome, glancing along the surface of things as a swallow skims the stream. At other times one is dropped sheer down into inconceivable depths. Here is a phrase which laid hold of me from these strange epistles. She is writing to the one she cared for and loved. “May God refine you and chasten you until the word of your life is fully spoken.” “The word of your life!” As though every life was purposed to be some articulated word, clearly and fully spoken. It is only another way of saying that life is ordained to be a distinct and distinguished poem, expressing in some altogether peculiar way the mind and will of God.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in The Examiner, Nov. 19, 1903, p. 508. Among the art treasures of Rome there is a mysterious unfinished statue. It represents a barbarian king in chains—one of those tall fair-haired men of the North—men of our own blood—who, even when they stood in captivity before their Roman conquerors, extorted admiration by their splendid physique and their royal dignity of bearing. The peculiarity of this statue is that it has never been finished. The work is wrought with great care and skill up to a certain point—then it suddenly stops short. Conjecture has been busy about the statue. Why did the sculptor stop, after having done so much? Was the reason caprice, or accident, or sudden death, or impatience at his failure to realize the ideal aimed at? Who can tell? The secret lies buried in a forgotten past. But He who labours at the chiselling of new men and women in Christ never loses patience, never tires of His task. Obstacles may delay, but they can never finally baffle His sublime purpose.1 [Note: Martin Lewis.] There’s heaven above, and night by night I look right through its gorgeous roof; No suns and moons though e’er so bright Avail to stop me; splendour-proof I keep the broods of stars aloof: For I intend to get to God, For ’tis to God I speed so fast, For in God’s breast, my own abode, Those shoals of dazzling glory, passed I lay my spirit down at last. I lie where I have always lain, God smiles as he has always smiled; Ere suns and moons could wax and wane, Ere stars were thunder-girt, or piled The heavens, God thought on me his child; Ordained a life for me, arrayed Its circumstances every one To the minutest; ay, God said This head, this hand should rest upon Thus, ere he fashioned star or sun. And having thus created me, Thus rooted me, he bade me grow, Guiltless for ever, like a tree That buds and blooms, nor seeks to know The law by which it prospers so: But sure that thought and word and deed All go to swell his love for me, Me, made because that love had need Of something irreversibly Pledged solely its content to be.2 [Note: Browning, “Johannes Agricola in Meditation.”] More than once in those long nights I spent on the Atlantic, I went on deck when all was still, and felt how insignificant a thing was man, in all that lonely immensity of sea and sky. There was no sound save the cry of the wind among the spars, the throb of the great engines, the sound of the many waters rushing round the vessel’s keel. I felt the mystery of life; I was conscious of “the whisper and moan and wonder and diapason of the sea.” And then out of the stillness there came a voice, clear and ringing—the voice of the man on the look-out crying to the night, “All’s well, and the lights burn bright! All’s well, and the lights burn bright!” How did I know all was well? What knew I of the forces that were bridled in the mysterious throbbing heart of those unceasing engines, of the peril that glared on me in the breaking wave, or lay hidden in the dark cloud that lay along the horizon? I knew nothing; but the voice went sounding on over the sea: “All’s well, and the lights burn bright!” And the wind carried it away across the waters, and it palpitated round the world, and it went up soaring and trembling, in ever fainter reverberations, among the stars. So I stand for a little while amid great forces of which I know little; but I am not alone in the empty night. The world moves on to some appointed goal, though by what paths I know not; it has its Steersman, and it will arrive. And, amid the loneliness and mystery, the peril and uncertainty, I have learned to hear a Voice that cries, “All’s well!” and tells me why all is well; if is the Voice of Christ saying, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” God has not left His world. He is working out His supreme art in it every day, and if we be true Christians we are God’s poems wrought in Christ Jesus unto good works.1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Divine Challenge, 118. Lord, in my spirit, one by one Thou dost repeat the wonders done At Thy creative work begun. When first I came from out the night, The earliest sense that woke was sight, And Thou didst say, “Let there be light.” I saw pass by Thy shining car; I had no thought of near or far; I tried to catch the bright day-star. But when I found my strength was spent The air with infant cries I rent, And met therein my firmament,— I learned that distance vast divides The river in the sky that glides From ebb and flow of earthly tides. Then grew I up from eve to morn, With each beginning newly born, Leaving each former stage forlorn. First, as a plant of field I grew, Unmindful of the winds that blew, Unconscious that I nothing knew. Next, with the cattle on the plain, Bird of the air, fish of the main, I rose to sense of joy and pain. Then woke the spirit of the man, With laws to bind, with hopes to fan, With powers to say “I ought,” “I can.” One stage remains to make me blest, The brightest, loveliest, and the best; My bosom must become Thy rest. In vain from peak to peak I go, If on the summit of pure snow I cannot Thy communion know. For bird of air and fish of sea The earth was made a rest to be; I came to be a rest to Thee. Creation’s Spirit most doth move, And mightiest on the waters prove, When life has found a home for Love.1 [Note: George Matheson, Sacred Songs, 155. God’s Workmanship Literature Blunt (J. J.), Plain Sermons, i. 195. Champness (T.), New Coins from Old Gold, 79. Dawson (W. J.), The Divine Challenge, 107. Gregg (J.), The Life of Faith, 22. Howatt (J. R.), The Children’s Pew, 201. Jerdan (C.), Manna for Young Pilgrims, 101. Lewis (A.), Sermons Preached in England, 132. McGhee (R. J.), in The New Irish Pulpit, 465. Mackintosh (H. R.), Life on God’s Plan, 43. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Ephesians, 108. Moffatt (J.), Reasons and Reasons, 25. Pearse (M. G.), Parables and Pictures, 13. Ramsay (A. A.), Things that are Lovely, 19. Romanes (E.), Thoughts on the Collects for the Trinity Season, 234. Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 321. Westcott (B. F.), Christian Aspects of Life, 23. Christian World Pulpit, xxviii. 95 (Spurgeon); liv. 295 (Sheepshanks). Examiner, Nov. 19, 1903, p. 508 (Jowett). Homiletic Review, lii. 58 (Morgan). The Commonwealth of Christ So then ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God.—Ephesians 2:19. 1. These words were addressed to Christians of Gentile birth who had been brought out of the darkness of paganism into Gospel light. The Apostle reminds them that in the days of their ignorance they had no part in God’s promises or in the hope of Israel. They were separated by a great wall from the elect people. The Jews were God’s household, and the Gentiles were outside. But now the cross of Jesus has broken down the dividing wall and brought Jew and Gentile together. The Heavenly light shines equally on the faces of both. Faith makes all races of one kin and kind. We are all alike fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God. 2. St. Paul had to labour strenuously and continuously against Jewish exclusiveness. The last thing that the Jews would think of was to admit the Gentiles to equal rights with themselves. One has smiled, rather sadly, to see men whose desperate eagerness to keep hold of some small privilege they had got was even exceeded by their desperate terror lest anybody else should get hold of anything like it. Now St. Paul set himself to put this selfish and jealous littleness down. So far, he has quite succeeded. For though human beings do yet try to keep worldly advantage and privilege to themselves, excluding others, it is ages since any professed Christian thought to keep God’s grace or Christ’s mercy so. Everybody knows that there is no more certain mark of really being within the Fold than the earnest desire that all we know and care for should be brought into it likewise. No Christian can even be imagined as desiring to keep this great possession to himself, or as grudging any human being his entrance. We have the believer’s feeling on this matter in memorable words once spoken by him who wrote this Epistle—words which, when and where they were said, combined well the grace which comes of high culture with the heartiness of Christian kindliness—“I would to God, that not only thou, but also all that hear me this day, were both almost, and altogether such as I am, except these bonds.” I heard Dr. Alexander Whyte, of Edinburgh, speak recently about the great Puritans John Owen and Thomas Goodwin. He bade us read them; he told us of his own debt to them. “Thomas Goodwin and John Owen, and Richard Baxter and Matthew Henry, they are all upon my shelves. But not they alone! Side by side with the Puritans stand the works of great Catholics and great Anglicans. It is not with the Puritans alone I hold fellowship; I hold fellowship also with those other Christians between whom and the Puritans there seemed to be a great gulf fixed. I hold fellowship with Augustine, and pour out my soul in the words of his Confessions. I hold fellowship with À Kempis, while he teaches me the Imitatio Christi. I hold fellowship with William Law while he addresses to me his Serious Call, and with Jeremy Taylor while he discourses about Holy Living and Holy Dying. I hold fellowship with Newman and with Robertson, as I read their sermons—two men sundered far from each other, and both of them ecclesiastically separated from me. In my study every day of my life I enjoy the ‘Communion of Saints.’ ”1 [Note: J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 178. I The Disabilities of Aliens 1. The Gentiles hitherto had been in the position of strangers and sojourners. As aliens they had no rights of citizenship, and all they could look for was temporary hospitality. They had no real standing within the commonwealth. Gentiles and Jews stood apart in their agelong traditions and customs. The Apostle has expressed in strong, emphatic language the ancient separation between the two. He has spoken of the Greeks as “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,”—as those “that once were far off,”—of the “middle wall of partition” to be broken down; and no words could picture too strongly the great gulf that had divided these families of men. The descendant of Abraham—conscious of the election of his race to stand alone among men, as the people of Jehovah; exulting in the noble train of lawgivers and prophets who had come forth from the secret place of God to proclaim the final glory of the Jew; trained to believe in one great Invisible, of whom there was no likeness “in the heaven above or in the earth beneath”—had learned to look with hatred or contempt on the outcast, lawless Gentile, with his image of God in every valley and on every hill. And the Greek—living as the free child of nature; having no law but the darkened light of conscience; feeling in heaven and earth to find the presence of an Infinite Beauty, whose Image he tried to carve in grace and majesty in snowy stone—had come to look with philosophic pride on the stern land of the Hebrew, and in philosophic scorn on his strange, exclusive loneliness. But not only were they at enmity with each other, they were both at enmity with God, and tried painfully by ceremony and sacrifice to avert His eternal wrath. 2. The chasm that divided the one from the other seemed almost impassable. There were deep and seemingly irreconcilable differences between them. Those differences did not vanish even when Jew and Gentile both turned Christian; they continued to subsist, as any reader of the New Testament may discover for himself. It is no exaggeration to say that there was, in the early days of Christianity, a Jewish Church and a Gentile Church. And yet “in Christ” the differences were solved, and Jew and Gentile might greet one another as brethren. “So then,” cries the Apostle, exulting in the effects of the reconciling work of Christ, “ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God.” The alienation of Gentiles from the Divine covenant was represented in the structure of the temple at Jerusalem by a beautifully worked marble balustrade, separating the outer from the inner court, upon which stood columns at regular intervals, bearing inscriptions, some in Greek and some in Latin characters, to warn aliens not to enter the holy place. One of the Greek inscriptions was discovered a few years ago, and is now to be read in the Museum of Constantinople. It runs thus: “No alien to pass within the balustrade round the temple and the enclosure. Whosoever shall be caught so doing must blame himself for the penalty of death which he will incur.”1 [Note: C. Gore, The Epistle to the Ephesians, 104. II The Widening of the Commonwealth 1. Every race had looked forward to some hoped-for better society.—The Jews had for generations, often with the fiercest impatience, expected the coming of the Messianic kingdom. The Greeks had been encouraged by their teachers and philosophers to aim at creating the perfect city and perfect state. Plato himself had not only written his wonderful book on the ideal Commonwealth, but had for a time acted as Prime Minister to a despot who was willing to make such laws as the Athenian statesman might suggest. The Spartans, the Athenians, and the Macedonians had each in turn tried to build up the ideal state, and the bloody and treacherous history of the Greeks in general is not without nobility when we watch it as a tragic effort at making a really Godlike state. Far more impressive than the Greek history had been the Roman patriotism and the Roman imperialism. This forced itself upon the world as something gigantic and irresistible, that bound together nations and religions the most diverse in one mighty whole. Here in the Roman empire that Stoic doctrine of the brotherhood of man spread far and wide, and made many hope that better things were in store. 2. Christ came to found an ideal society.—How did He do it? He selected a few men who had the faculty of believing. They were not men of great imagination, or talent, or culture. They were men who could believe in the unseen. These men He trained, until at last one of them uttered the faith that had been growing in the hearts of all, and said to Jesus, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Immediately Jesus saw that His long and arduous task was on the way to completion. He saw that He had in this little group of men the lever with which He would turn the world upside down. He was filled with exultation and delight. He was beginning already to see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied, and He cried out, “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah.… I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.” The great word was out now and the great idea launched upon the world. One confused fisherman, with a few men of like mind of whom he was the leader, formed the solitary rock in the midst of a world of shifting sand, and upon this rock Jesus would build His Church—a society embodying His spirit, living according to His laws, steadfastly administering His principles to the whole world, little by little leavening the lump, the society of the meek who should inherit the earth! The Roman Empire had in Paul’s time gathered into a great unity the Asiatics of Ephesus, the Greeks of Corinth, the Jews of Palestine, and men of many another race; but grand and imposing as that great unity was, it was to Paul a poor thing compared with the oneness of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. Asiatics of Ephesus, Greeks of Corinth, Jews of Palestine, and members of many another race could say, “Our citizenship is in heaven.” The Roman Eagle swept over wide regions in her flight, but the Dove of Peace, sent forth from Christ’s hand, travelled farther than she. As Paul says in the context, the Ephesians had been strangers, “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,” wandering like the remnants of some “broken clans,” but now they are gathered in. That narrow community of the Jewish nation has expanded its bounds and become the mother-country of believing souls, the true “island of saints.” It was not Rome that really made all peoples one, it was the weakest and most despised of her subject races. What the early Christians felt when they embraced Christ and joined the little churches in their own cities, was that they had become members of a new race, a new and heavenly community, which was their proper and eternal home. Until now they had thought themselves mere human beings, born into a very strange and often cruel world, without any definite or trustworthy knowledge as to their destiny, plagued with toil and hardship, I disease and the fear of death. But now suddenly their whole perspective was altered. Instead of being citizens of this world they were citizens of heaven, and only sojourners and strangers in the earthly life. Instead of being units in a confused and wearisome life that soon went out into nothingness, they were members of a blessed and everlasting family of which God was the Father, and Jesus Christ the loving herald of His purposes.1 [Note: N. H. Marshall.] Foremost and grandest amid the teachings of Christ were these two inseparable truths—There is but one God; all men are the sons of God; and the promulgation of these two truths changed the face of the world, and enlarged the moral circle to the confines of the inhabited globe. To the duties of men towards the Family and Country were added duties towards Humanity. Man then learned that wheresoever there existed a human being, there existed a brother; a brother with a soul immortal as his own, destined like himself to ascend towards the Creator, and on whom he was bound to bestow love, a knowledge of the Faith, and help and counsel when needed.1 [Note: Mazzini.] 3. Salvation comes to the individual through society.—The salvation in the Bible is supposed usually to reach the individual through the community. God’s dealings with us in redemption thus follow the lines of His dealings with us in our natural development. For man stands out in history as a “social animal.” His individual development, by a Divine law of his constitution, is rendered possible only because he is first of all a member of some society, tribe, or nation, or state. Through membership in such a society alone, and through the submissions and limitations of his personal liberty which such membership involves, does he become capable of any degree of free or high development as an individual. This law, then, of man’s nature appears equally in the method of his redemption. Under the old covenant it was to members of the “commonwealth of Israel” that the blessings of the covenant belonged. Under the new covenant St. Paul still conceives of the same commonwealth as subsisting and as fulfilling no less than formerly the same religious functions. True, it has been fundamentally reconstituted and enlarged to include the believers of all nations, and not merely one nation; but it is still the same commonwealth, or polity, or church; and it is still through the Church that God’s “covenant” dealings reach the individual. It is for this reason that St. Paul goes on to describe the state of the Asiatic Christians, before their conversion, as a state of alienation from the “commonwealth of Israel.” They were “Gentiles in the flesh,” that is by the physical fact that they were not Jews; and were contemptuously described as the uncircumcised by those who, as Jews, were circumcised by human hands. And he conceives this to be only another way of describing alienation from God and His manifold covenants of promise, and from the Messiah, the hope of Israel and of mankind. They were without the Christian society, and therefore presumably without God and without hope. A lonely faith is an undeveloped, undiscovered, untested, unedified faith. Like a man cast on a desert island, it does not know what is in it; it cannot open out its natural germs. It is through the slowly realized recognition of its part in the manifold and multitudinous kingdom of which it has become a member that it discloses its increasing capacities.1 [Note: H. Scott Holland, God’s City, 35. The devout meditation of the isolated man, which flitted through his soul, like a transient tone of Love and Awe from unknown lands, acquires certainty, continuance, when it is shared-in by his brother men. “Where two or three are gathered together” in the name of the Highest then first does the Highest, as it is written, “appear among them to bless them”; then first does an Altar and act of united Worship open a way from Earth to Heaven; whereon, were it but a simple Jacob’s-ladder, the heavenly Messengers will travel, with glad tidings and unspeakable gifts for men.2 [Note: Carlyle, Miscellanies, iv. 11. It is so easy in happy family life, in absorption in one’s special work, to forget the duties of a citizen, to avoid the fret and stress, may-be the hardships and the danger, of politics and social duty. But it is not enough for men to be “kind towards their friends, affectionate in their families, inoffensive towards the rest of the world.” The true man knows that he may not decline responsibility for those whom God has made his fellow-citizens. And higher still, higher than family or country, stands Humanity; and no man may do or sanction aught for either, which will hurt the race. Ever before Mazzini stood the vision of the cross, Christ dying for all men, not from utilitarian calculation of the greatest number, but because love embraces all.3 [Note: Bolton King, Mazzini, 266. III The Privileges of Citizens 1. They were now citizens—no more strangers, that is, outside the Kingdom of God entirely; nor even sojourners, that is, resident foreigners, such as were found in most ancient States, enjoying some measure of protection and privilege, but not the full rights of citizens. Such was the position of proselytes in Israel. But now, Paul says to his Gentile readers, ye are no longer in any inferior position, but fellow-citizens with the saints, i.e. the people whom God has separated to Himself out of the world. Ye have all the privileges which these enjoy; nay, ye have them in common with them, so that there is absolutely no difference, since all alike now have these privileges on the same ground, that of the reconciling work of Christ. Ye have, through Him, an even more blessed position than the saints under the old covenant had, ye are “of the household of God”—not merely citizens of the Kingdom of God, but children of His family. This flows from the access to God as Father asserted in Ephesians 2:18. Roman citizenship was in many respects a unique thing. At least there is nothing in the modern world quite like it. When you speak of a citizen of Leicester or of London, you think of one who has either been born or has spent the best years of his life there, who has home, friends, and interests centred in its activities. Roman citizenship did not mean that. It was an imperial privilege rather than local. London indeed gives its freedom to a few honoured strangers, and that bears a faint resemblance to the Roman practice. The Roman citizenship was conferred upon a few persons all over the empire, persons who, had never set foot in the great city. It was given to them for some service they had done, and descended to their children. Paul did not see Rome until he was an old man, but he was all his life a Roman citizen. And it meant in brief three things:—First, it was a grand Freemasonry. It brought a man into companionship and brotherhood with Romans everywhere. It gave him entrance to the best society. It made him one of a superior race, and put upon him a mark of nobility. Secondly, it conferred upon him certain legal rights. It was an aegis of protection over him. Roman law and all Rome’s power were behind him. He could not be tried, condemned, or punished save by Romans, and if ever he was wronged, misjudged, falsely accused, he had the privilege of carrying his cause to the highest court, and appealing to Cæsar himself. And thirdly, there was his responsibility. Wherever he lived, in Tarsus or Ephesus, he remembered that he was a Roman, that Roman manners were expected of him, that his conduct must be that of an imperial race, and that he must try to fashion the place of his abode and the things of daily life as far as possible after Rome’s best models.1 [Note: J. G. Greenhough, Christian Festivals and Anniversaries, 159. In the time of the Apostle when the mass of the population were slaves, the goods and chattels of their masters, lying at their absolute disposal for life or death, to be a Roman citizen was a distinction the value of which those who know nothing of slavery but the name can only very inadequately estimate. To be a citizen was to be a man, an integral part of a commonwealth. It was to be identified with its glory: it was to be shielded and armed with the majesty of its influence. In the very name there was a power that commanded the instant reverence of all that could not boast the privilege, and the sympathy of all that did. Hence the alarm of Lysias upon discovering that Paul was a Roman, and the deference which he, who had only purchased his freedom, could not help paying to the man who could declare himself freeborn. But what is mere civil freedom in comparison with spiritual freedom—freedom “from the law of sin and death”; freedom from the curse and tyranny of evil and the evil one; the freedom conferred by “the perfect law of liberty”; freedom to obey the instincts and impulses of our spiritual and immortal nature, and to enter into communion with the Invisible and the Eternal. “He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, and all are slaves besides.”2 [Note: J. H. Smith, Healing Leaves, 410. 2. They now belong to the fellowship of the saints.—They are citizens in the holy state—the commonwealth of the people consecrated to God—citizens with full rights and no longer strangers or unenfranchised residents. The idea of the chosen people all through the Old Testament is that they are as a whole consecrated to God. Priests and kings appointed by God to their several offices may indeed fulfil special functions in the national life, yet the fundamental idea is never lost, that the entire nation is holy, “a kingdom of priests.” It is because this is true that the prophets can appeal as they do to the people in general, as well as to priests and rulers, as sharing altogether the responsibility of the national life. Now the whole of this idea is transferred, only deepened and intensified, to the Christian Church. That too has its divinely-ordained ministers, its differentiation of functions in the one body, but the whole body is priestly, and all are citizens—not merely residents but citizens, that is, intelligent participators in a common corporate life consecrated to God. To the Apostle Paul every Christian was a saint. Turn to the inscriptions of his letters. This is the kind of address we find: “Paul and Timothy, to all the saints in Christ Jesus which are at Philippi.” “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ which are at Colossae.” “Paul, unto the church of God which is at Corinth, even them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.” It is quite obvious the references here are to living men and women, the men and women who formed the membership of these various churches. These were Paul’s “saints.” And, further, he does not confine the term to a select few in each church, conspicuous for their special piety. The people whom Paul addresses as “saints,” we soon discover, were very far from being perfect people. They were, indeed, full of faults and imperfections and failings. Think of the people at Corinth with their quarrellings and excesses and sensualities! And yet Paul thinks and speaks of them as “saints”! It is not simply that in these faulty and imperfect Christians he sees the promise of the glorified saint, just as the naturalist may see the giant oak in the tiny acorn! Faults and all, these Christians were “saints,” in this sense, that they were consecrated to God, and had given themselves to Christ. For that is the New Testament meaning of the word “saint”; it means one dedicated, set apart, to the will of God. And, in spite of all their shortcomings and sins, these early Christians had given themselves to Christ; the deepest thing in them was the love they bore to Christ; the life they lived, they lived in the faith of Christ. And every one of whom that can be said, according to the Apostle’s teaching, is a “saint.”1 [Note: J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 169. After being in China more than twenty years Griffith John said to young missionaries, “Preach the Gospel, and take time to be holy as the preparation.” In the Mission Conference in Shanghai, in 1877, he said, “The missionary must above everything be a holy man; the Chinese expect it of him. I am persuaded that no minister can be a great spiritual power in whom this is not in good measure seen. He must be more than a good man; a man who takes time, not only to master the language and the literature of the people, but to be holy.… Brethren, this is what we need if this empire is to be moved by us. To this end the throne of grace must be our refuge; the shadow of the Almighty must every day and every hour be our dwelling, we must take time to be filled with His power, we must take time to be holy.”2 [Note: A. Murray, Aids to Devotion, 47. 3. More intimately still, they belong to the family or household of God.—A household is a place where a family is provided for, where there is a regular and orderly supply of ordinary needs. And the Church is the Divine household, in which God has provided stewards to make regular spiritual provision for men, so that they shall feel and know themselves members of a family, understood, sympathized with, helped, encouraged, disciplined, fed. But there is another idea which, in St. Paul’s mind, attaches itself strongly to the idea of the “divine family.” It is that in this household we are sons and not servants—that is, intelligent co-operators with God, and not merely submissive slaves. It is noticeable how often he speaks with horror of Christians allowing themselves again to be “subject to ordinances,” or to “the weak and beggarly rudiments,” the alphabet of that earlier education when even children are treated as slaves under mere obedience. “Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you.” “Why do ye subject yourselves to ordinances? Handle not, taste not, touch not.” It is perfectly true to say that what St. Paul is deprecating is a return to Jewish or pagan observances. But this is not all. He demands, not a change of observance only, but a change of spirit. The prominent characteristic of a family is mutual affection. A family is held together by love. There is the love of the father for each and all, and there is the love of all for him and for each other. And so it is in the Divine family. “God is love”; pure, infinite, eternal love. This, as it is the glorious summary of His perfections, the grand resultant expression of all His attributes, is the characteristic of every individual member of His spiritual family. “We love him because he first loved us” and “This commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.” That, however, which the Apostle seems to have had more particularly in view is the high privilege which attaches to this Divine relationship. “Ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God”: that is—as children of God, born of His Spirit, and genuine members therefore of His spiritual family, you have a peculiar interest in His love and care. He, the Father of all men, is emphatically your Father. Others He regards indeed with the love of benevolence, but you He regards with the love of complacency. Others participate in His universal goodness, but you are the objects of His special solicitude. A child has a certain right to the consideration of his father which no stranger to the family possesses: and so you, as members of God’s family, have a claim upon His affection which none but His spiritual children can allege. Having received from Him not “the spirit of bondage again to fear,” not the spirit of a slave, which shuns His presence and quails before His eye, but “the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father,” so He privileges and encourages you to come before Him lovingly and trustfully, with all the freedom and confidence of a child, casting all your care upon Him, and looking for all things in that boundless love which has pledged all His attributes and excellences, all His treasures of grace and glory, for your perfection and blessedness. Sin brings separation from God. The word “depart” uttered to the workers of iniquity is not an arbitrary one. It voices a law of God that runs through all His moral realm. Sin pushes the prodigal away from his home and friends, his property, his pleasures, his reputation, his character, even his clothes and his food. The law of the word “depart” has driven him away from everything that was beautiful and of good report. Behold him in his rags and loneliness—feeding swine. Think it not strange, if that man is driven from God and goodness who yields himself to sin. By a changeless law of moral repulsion, he is pushed away. Is it hopeless? Yes, as long as his back is turned toward God. But let him “come to himself,” let him feel his sin and degradation, let him long for home, for forgiveness, for his Father’s face, and the law of changeless love takes hold of him.1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 77. 4. The higher status involves a heavier responsibility.—The enfranchised must do credit to their citizenship; they must live as becometh saints, and manifest the spirit, not of slaves, but of sons. Christian citizenship must begin with the thought of our individual life and purpose. The truly good citizen is made out of the truly good man. The common life is made of our individual lives, and the whole cannot be better than the constituent parts. If, then, our citizenship is to be a Christian citizenship, we must first of all be Christian men. The first thing that the Spirit of Christ does for every one who is in any real and vital sense a disciple, or, as we say in our modern phrase, a Christian man, is to lay hold of the spirit, breathing into it new aspirations, creating, as St. Paul would have said, the new man; and the new man in Christ thus born of the Spirit finds his heart aglow with new aims and new ambitions, new purposes and ideals of conduct. He is illuminated with new thought and with new conceptions of duty and of happiness. God knows if I could in any way, by preaching that great part of the Communion of Saints, make men generally feel how they are living one in another, and how every single soul has his share of responsibility for his fellows, and every single soul his blessing from undertaking that responsibility, and how any single soul receives a blessing from the fellowship of his fellows in everything that he undertakes—if I could impress that upon my countrymen generally, I would be content to do nothing more in all my life than to preach this greatest of all Christian doctrines.1 [Note: Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, ii. 312. As Paul waited in his Roman prison, he had all around him soldiers and civilians, high and low, men of various types and kinds, most of whom claimed, we may suppose, Roman citizenship, and, moreover, nearly all of whom were members of the household of Cæsar; and we can imagine the discussions of which these great texts in his letters are the echo. Yes, he says, you claim to be citizens of this great Empire of Rome, you are members of the household of Cæsar, and you are very proud of it all; but do you also remember that you have to think of your real calling as something deeper and broader and higher and more enduring than all of these, if you are to be in the best sense good citizens of the Roman Empire and good members of the Imperial household; why, then you must bear always in mind that you are called of God to live as members of the commonwealth of Christ, to remember in all circumstances that you are fellow-citizens with the saints and of God’s household.2 [Note: Bishop J. Percival.] The Nation some time ago gave the story of a business man, the inheritor of an honoured name and honourable business traditions, who had a temptation put in his way to abandon the old methods of his firm, and join a great trust that cared more for its dividends than the welfare of its workmen. There was money in it, and the man was sorely tempted. But on the night in which the decision was to be taken, he fell into a reverie in front of his fire, and he seemed to behold his old father looking at him, with such concern in his eyes; and at the sight of his father’s face the temptation lost its power; he must act as his father’s Song of Solomon 3 [Note: J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 184. The Commonwealth of Christ Literature Beeching (H. C.), The Apostles’ Creed, 83. Bellett (J. C.), in Sermons for the People, i. 104. Boyd (A. K. H.), Sermons and Stray Papers, 198. Fleming (S. H.), Fifteen-Minute Sermons for the People, 122. Greenhough (J. G.), Christian Festivals and Anniversaries, 158. Hort (F. J. A.), Village Sermons in Outline, 102. Jones (J. D.), Things Most Surely Believed, 166. Pulsford (J.), Christ and His Seed, 81. Smith (J. H.), Healing Leaves, 407. Stuart (E. A.), in Sermons for the People, New Ser., i. 86. Westcott (B. F.), Christian Aspects of Life, 102. Christian World Pulpit, lxv. 397 (Percival). Church of England Pulpit, xliii. 269 (Terry). Churchman’s Pulpit: St. Andrew, St. Thomas, xiv. 48; All Saints, xv. 410. National Preacher, xl. 51 (Smith). Spiritual Architecture Being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief corner stone; in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit.—Ephesians 2:20-22. 1. St. Paul was a Jew, and the Jewish temple had the same fascination for his thought and the same powerful hold upon his imagination as in the case of other Jews. St. Paul had indeed ceased to worship there, but his attachment to the ideas that the temple represented was so strong that it became with him a favourite image and illustration of the Christian Church. Now as a building that temple was one of the most beautiful in existence; and as the chosen residence of Jehovah it was sacred in the mind of the Apostle. And yet one can hardly think that St. Paul was referring here to the temple at Jerusalem, for he was writing not to Jews but to the men and women of Ephesus, men and women who, for the most part, had never seen the temple at Jerusalem, and could neither appreciate its beauty nor understand the allusion. But then Ephesus had its temple too. Paul and the Ephesians were brought together on one occasion in very severe contest about the merits of this temple, the glory of their city, the temple of the great Diana of the Ephesians. That building was one of the wonders of the world. We are told that when it was erected all the architects of celebrity joined in constructing the plan, that it was reared of the most costly materials, and that after it had been burnt down by the hand of a madman or a fanatic equal care was exercised in the reconstruction of it. Every woman of Ephesus brought all that was costly and splendid to aid in the rebuilding of the favourite temple. It was a saying that the sun never shone upon a finer edifice than the temple of Diana at Ephesus. This structure was quite familiar to the Ephesian Christians; they had ceased indeed to be worshippers at the shrine, but they had not ceased to admire the building. Hence the singular appropriateness with which the Apostle points to it as a beautiful illustration of the church or the building of which he was about to speak. 2. What the Apostle is about to speak of is not any material structure or ecclesiastical organization, but the great spiritual fellowship of the redeemed in Jesus Christ. It is a Church in which living men are the materials, of which God Himself is the Architect and the Builder. Its foundation has been laid with His own hand on the ruins of the fallen temple of humanity. It has been in process of construction ever since; its advancement has never been interrupted; it is still rising, this grand spiritual edifice! One day the glorious structure will be completed. That is the Church of which St. Paul writes—no earthly structure, no ecclesiastical organization, but this spiritual Church, built upon the foundation of apostles and prophets. If you liken human life and development to a dwelling, the lower story is on the ground, and made of clay. How roomy, and how full of men that live next to the dirt! Above that, however, is a story of iron. There are men of energy, and of a ruling purpose irresistible, seeking and gaining their ends at all hazards; and this story is populous, too. The next story is dressed in velvet and carved wood, and here are they that dwell in their affections, and are brought together by the sympathy of a common gentleness and kindness—but on the lower levels of life. Above that is a room of crystal and of diamonds, and there are but few that dwell in it. From its transparent walls one may behold the heaven and the earth. Out of it men may see the night as well as the day—men who live a life so high, so pure, and so serene that they may be said to dwell at the very threshold of the gate of heaven itself.1 [Note: Henry Ward Beecher.] I The Materials of the Building The Temple of God is made up of “the blessed company of all faithful people,” the apostles and prophets being the foundation, and Christ Himself the chief corner-stone. This is that one body into which we are all baptized by one spirit. This is the society for which Christ prayed that they might be “all one.” A few years ago I spent an evening at a meeting called for the purpose of deepening the spiritual life. It was a meeting of great power and blessing. That same night a dream came which fixed itself vividly on my mind. I stood on a rocky promontory overlooking a terrible chasm. Spanning the chasm, from one rocky side to the other, was a bridge of the most dazzling beauty, exquisite in design and workmanship, and built of the most costly material. As I stood in awe and wonder, I exclaimed, “How glorious!” No sooner had I spoken than a voice at my side, in tones of reproach, said: “You see only its beauty. Look again and see its size. That bridge is large enough to carry across in safety the entire human race.” Again I looked, and lo! the bridge, albeit the most beautiful thing my eyes had ever seen, was so wide and so strong that the whole race might have crossed over it.1 [Note: C. B. Keenleyside, God’s Fellow-Workers, 31. 1. Where do the materials come from? The stones for this building are dug out of that vast quarry of sinful humanity of which Ephesus formed a part. “In whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit.” A quaint old legend runs thus: Proceeding from a pile of material which had been left as rubbish, after a great building had been erected, a voice was heard shouting, “Glory! glory!” A passer-by, attracted by the rejoicing, stopped to know the cause; and found that the voice came from a mass of marble half covered with dust and rubbish. He brushed away the dirt, and said— “What are you shouting for? There is surely little glory to you in the rubbish heap.” “No,” said the marble, “not much glory now, that is true; but Michael Angelo has just passed by, and I heard him say, ‘I see an angel in that stone.’ And he has gone away for his mallets and chisels, and he is coming back to carve out the angel.” And the stone went off again in an ecstasy, shouting, “Glory! glory! glory!” Humanity was like that stone in the rubbish heap—broken, unclean, useless; but the great Sculptor saw it, and He wondered that there was no one to help. As Angelo saw the angel in that stone, so God sees the image of His Son in the human wreck. Jesus would not have died for us had it been otherwise. To His eye, the flower is in the bud, the fruit in the blossom, the butterfly in the grub, the saint in the sinner, and the hero in the rustic. The grace of God carved a Müller out of the family scapegrace, a Pastor Hsi out of the ruined opium fiend, a John B. Gough out of the bar-room wreck.1 [Note: C. B. Keenleyside.] Exclusive of animal decay, we can hardly arrive at a more absolute type of impurity than the mud or slime of a damp, overtrodden path in the outskirts of a manufacturing town. I do not say mud of the road, because that is mixed with animal refuse; but take merely an ounce or two of the blackest slime of a beaten footpath on a rainy day, near a large manufacturing town. That slime we shall find in most cases composed of clay (or brickdust, which is burnt clay) mixed with soot, a little sand, and water. All these elements are at helpless war with each other, and destroy reciprocally each other’s nature and power, competing and fighting for place at every tread of your foot—sand squeezing out clay, and clay squeezing out water, and soot meddling everywhere and defiling the whole. Let us suppose that this ounce of mud is left in perfect rest, and that its elements gather together, like to like, so that their atoms may get into the closest relations possible. Let the clay begin. Ridding itself of all foreign substance, it gradually becomes a white earth, already very beautiful; and fit, with help of congealing fire, to be made into finest porcelain, and painted on, and be kept in kings’ palaces. But such artificial consistence is not its best. Leave it still quiet to follow its own instinct of unity, and it becomes not only white, but clear; not only clear, but hard; nor only clear and hard, but so set that it can deal with light in a wonderful way, and gather out of it the loveliest blue rays only, refusing the rest. We call it then a sapphire. Such being the consummation of the clay, we give similar permission of quiet to the sand. It also becomes, first, a white earth, then proceeds to grow clear and hard, and at last arranges itself in mysterious, infinitely fine, parallel lines, which have the power of reflecting not merely the blue rays, but the blue, green, purple, and red rays in the greatest beauty in which they can be seen through any hard material whatsoever. We call it then an opal. In next order the soot sets to work; it cannot make itself white at first, but instead of being discouraged, tries harder and harder, and comes out clear at last, and the hardest thing in the world; and for the blackness that it had, obtains in exchange the power of reflecting all the rays of the sun at once in the vividest blaze that any solid thing can shoot. We call it then a diamond. Last of all the water purifies or unites itself, contented enough if it only reach the form of a dew-drop; but if we insist on its proceeding to a more perfect consistence, it crystallizes into the shape of a star. And for the ounce of slime which we had by political economy of competition, we have by political economy of co-operation, a sapphire, an opal, and a diamond, set in the midst of a star of snow.1 [Note: Ruskin, Modern Painters (Works, vii. 207).] 2. The Foundation has been laid by apostles and prophets. They are our spiritual progenitors, the fathers of our faith. We see Jesus Christ through their eyes; we read His teaching, and catch His Spirit in their words. Their testimony, in its essential facts, stands secure in the confidence of mankind. Nor was it their words alone, but the men themselves—their character, their life and work—that laid for the Church its historical foundation. This “glorious company of the apostles” formed the first course in the new building, on whose firmness and strength the stability of the entire structure depends. Their virtues and their sufferings, as well as the revelations made through them, have guided the thoughts and shaped the life of countless multitudes of men, of the best and wisest men in all ages since. They have fixed the standard of Christian doctrine and the type of Christian character. At our best, we are but imitators of them as they were of Christ. If a man is to be a pillar in the temple of his God by and by, he must be some kind of a prop in God’s house to-day. We are here to support, not to be supported. No one can be a living stone on the foundations of the Spiritual House, which is God’s habitation, without being a foundation to the stones above him.2 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 7. 3. Christ is the chief Corner-stone. The idea of the corner-stone, so repeatedly alluded to in Scripture, can be understood only by reference to the buildings of remote ages. We must imagine a massive stone, like one of those at Stonehenge, cut to a right angle, and laid in the building so that its two sides should lie along the two walls, which meet at a corner, thus binding them together in such a way that neither force nor weather could dissever them. This term does not necessarily signify that it would be put at the top or at the bottom of a building; it only means that it occupied a very important position, which it would have if it lay a few courses above the lowest, so as to act by its weight on those below, and to serve as a renewed basis to those above. A corner-stone bound together the sides of a building. Some of the corner-stones in the ancient work of the Temple foundations are seventeen or nineteen feet long, and seven and a half feet thick. At Nineveh the corners are sometimes formed of one angular stone. A corner-stone must, then, be of great importance; hence, more than once in Scripture great princes or leaders of a nation are called by this name of corner, or corner-stone (Judges 20:2; 1 Samuel 14:38; Isaiah 19:13). In A.V. they are called the chief, or the stay, of their people; in the original, the word is “corners,” or “corner-stones.” But in a sense far higher, far beyond that in which any earthly prince can be called by this name, may we apply it to our Lord Jesus Christ. He so applied it to Himself, when speaking the parable of the Householder on the last week of His public teaching, as recorded by St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke (Matthew 21:42; Mark 12:10; Luke 20:17). It was so applied by St. Peter when, confronting the Sanhedrin, he boldly charged them with being the murderers of Christ: “This is the stone which was set at nought of you builders, which is become the head of the corner.” Christianity is not one truth, but many; it is a whole system of truth, and yet is there not one truth in the system that is prominently majestic, as is the sun in the solar system? It is the truth that centres in Jesus Christ. There are many precious truths on which the Church is built; there is one truth on which the Church reposes, as upon the corner-stone. There is one truth on which our hopes and prospects all depend. There are many bright and glorious hopes which we gain from this Bible, but there is one which is more prominent than all the others—it is Jesus Christ, the Saviour of sinners and the King of men. There are many stones in the foundation of our hopes for the future; there is one corner-stone, that is Jesus Christ.1 [Note: R. Vaughan Pryce.] The plain historic truth in regard to the Christian Church is this, that from the beginning the Christian Church has held an attitude towards Jesus that absolutely forbids His classification with other men, that absolutely lifts Him above all that have ever trodden the earth before or since, and pays to Him such honour as can justly be given only to the perfect incarnation of the eternal God. The very first record that we have tells us that the early Church used to sing a hymn to Christ as God early in the morning; and it was for that that He was ever worshipped.1 [Note: H. van Dyke.] Christ is made the sure foundation And the precious corner-stone, Who, the two walls underlying Bound in each, binds both in one, Holy Sion’s help for ever, And her confidence alone. All that dedicated City, Dearly loved by God on high, In exultant jubilation Pours perpetual melody; God the One and God the Trinal, Singing everlastingly. To the temple, where we call Thee, Come, O Lord of Hosts, to-day; With Thy wonted loving-kindness Hear Thy people as they pray, And Thy fullest benediction Shed within its walls for aye. Here vouchsafe to all Thy servants What they supplicate to gain; Here to have and hold for ever Those good things their prayers obtain, And hereafter in Thy glory With Thy blessed ones to reign. Laud and honour to the Father, Laud and honour to the Son, Laud and honour to the Spirit, Ever Three and Ever One: Consubstantial, coëternal While unending ages run.2 [Note: Angularis Fundamentum, Latin Office Hymn, translated by J. M. Neale.] II The Design of the Building The plan of the Spiritual Temple was drawn by the hand of the Master Architect, who threw up the over-arching dome of the skies and scattered it full of worlds; and taught all architects how to design and all builders how to build. The plan bears on its face the Divine imprint. No human mind could have conceived it, and no human hand could have drawn it. It is inherent in the nature of the Infinite. It is not an afterthought of man, but a forethought of God; not a human accident, but a Divine plan. In beauty it as far exceeds anything that man could draw as the blue sky or the star-studded arch of the heavens exceeds in beauty the highest triumph of human skill. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are God’s thoughts higher than our thoughts, and God’s ways than our ways. There is a story of an old mason whose work day by day was the mixing of the mortar for use in the erection of a beautiful building. It was this old man’s custom to contemplate the plan of the finished building as displayed outside the contractor’s office. He said it helped him to mix his mortar so much better if he could keep before his mind the lovely thing that the architect had planned. The Bible is the rule of Faith, the character-builder’s “Vade mecum.” It pictures the Perfect Temple, Christ Jesus. It says that we shall be like Him. And he that hath this hope in him, purifieth himself even as He is pure.1 [Note: E. J. Padfield.] The greatest European painter of the past fifty years Was probably Arnold Boecklin. He has influenced modern painting abroad more, perhaps, than any other. How? When a young man in Florence his soul was filled with an ideal of painting which was quite other than that of any of his contemporaries, and he laboured to put this ideal upon canvas. At first no one would buy his pictures, and he nearly starved to death. But he laboured on because he loved his art. By and by when he became known, his work, it might almost be said, produced a revolution in the art world. It was not this revolution, however, that he had striven for, but the beauties his soul had seen. So with the Church. The Church will reform the world, not by making that reform her object, but by fixing her gaze and desire upon the ideal which has been set before her by her Lord, the ideal of the “Holy Catholic Church.”1 [Note: N. H. Marshall.] 1. There is unity in the design.—The building is not a heap of stones thrown carelessly together. It has a marvellous symmetry. It is fitly framed together. The idea in the Apostle’s mind seems to be a temple, with a number of courts all being built at the same time. At first there seems to be but very little connexion between them, but as the building proceeds, every several building grows into a holy temple. How lovely it is to trace the gradual growth of this building, the simple devotion of the first believers, the brotherly love of the Pentecostal Church, the missionary ardour of St. Paul and his companions, the faith and constancy of the early martyrs, who loved not their lives to the death; the steadfast devotion to truth of Waldenses, and Lollards, the Huguenots, and our own Reformers; the consistent godliness in some unknown cottage home, and the brilliant services of Christian philanthropists, who have overthrown gigantic evils by the power of the cross of Christ. And for all this building the chief corner-stone is Jesus Christ, but if He is the chief corner-stone, we also are to be corner-stones, joining together what would otherwise run counter to one another. The image is that of an extensive pile of buildings, such as the ancient temples commonly were, in process of construction at different points over a wide area. The builders work in concert, upon a common plan. The several parts of the work are adjusted to each other; and the various operations in process are so harmonized that the entire construction preserves the unity of the architect’s design. Such an edifice was the apostolic Church—one, but of many parts—in its diverse gifts and multiplied activities animated by one Spirit and directed towards one Divine purpose. St. Peter and St. Paul carried out their plans independently, only maintaining a general understanding with each other. The apostolic founders, inspired by one and the self-same Spirit, could labour at a distance, upon material and by methods extremely various, with entire confidence in each other and with an assurance of the unity of result which their teaching and administration would exhibit. The many buildings rested on the one foundation of the Apostles. “Whether it were I or they,” says our Apostle, “so we preach, and so ye believed.” Where there is the same Spirit and the same Lord, men do not need to be scrupulous about visible conformity. Elasticity and individual initiative admit of entire harmony of principle. The hand may do its work without irritating or obstructing the eye, and the foot run on its errands without mistrusting the ear. As Hooker lay dying, he was observed to be held in an ecstasy of contemplation; and on being asked what might be the subject of his thoughts, he replied, that he was admiring the wondrous order which prevails throughout all the distinctions and multitudes of the heavenly world. “Without which order,” he added, “peace could not be in heaven.” If on earth, which is “without the gate,” we find so much regularity and order, what may we imagine to be the order and fitness of all things in the house of our Father’s glory?1 [Note: J. Pulsford, Christ and His Seed, 84. Unity in itself, especially unity conditioned upon a common catechism, is not an object. Neither is it a thing to be compassed by any direct effort. It is an incident, not a principle, or a good by itself. It has its value in the valuable activities it unites, and the conjoining of beneficent powers. The more we seek it, the less we have it. Besides, most of what we call division in the Church of God is only distribution. The distribution of the Church, like that of human society, is one of the great problems of Divine wisdom; and the more we study it, observing how the personal tastes, wants, and capacities of men in all ages and climes are provided for, and how the parts are made to act as stimulants to each other, the less disposed shall we be to think that the work of distribution is done badly. It is not the same thing with Christian Unity, either to be huddled into a small inclosure, or to show the world how small a plat of ground we can all stand on. Unity is a grace broad as the universe, embracing in its ample bosom all right minds that live, and outreaching the narrow contents of all words and dogmas.2 [Note: Horace Bushnell, Preacher and Theologian, 62. Himself the staunchest champion of the existing union of Church and State, Stanley practised his own precept of making “the most of what there is of good in institutions, in opinions, in communities, in individuals.” And this sympathy was neither a strategic union, nor an armed truce, nor the tolerance of indifference. It was the real fellow-feeling which springs from the power, and the habit, of descending into those deeper regions of thought and emotion where conflicting opinions find a point of union. To the Baptists he was grateful for the preservation of “one singular and interesting relic of primitive and apostolic times”; to the Quakers, for “dwelling, even with exaggerated force, on the insignificance of all forms, of all authority, as compared with the inward light of conscience”; to the “Dissenting Churches” generally, for keeping alive “that peculiar force of devotion and warmth which is apt to die out in light of reason and in the breath of free inquiry.” Religion, he told his American hearers, could ill afford to lose even “the Churches which we most dislike, and which in other respects have wrought most evil.”1 [Note: R. E. Prothero, The Life of Dean Stanley, ii. 242. 2. The design has holiness written upon it.—In what sense do we speak of the Church as “holy”? The word as applied to the ancient Jewish Church, from which it was inherited by the Christian Church, meant “set apart for God’s service,” “consecrated to Him.” It implied the election of the nation by God for His purposes; as it is said in Deuteronomy, “Thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself.” These covenant privileges the Apostles regarded as being carried on to the Christian Church, and accordingly St. Paul speaks habitually of the members of the Christian society as “holy,” the word which our Version renders “saints”; and St. Peter similarly quotes and applies to the Church the declaration, “Ye are an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation”—holy because elect. But both St. Peter and St. Paul invariably explain that this Holiness in the sense of consecration implies a demand for holiness in the sense of purity of life. “Ye are the temple of God,” says St. Paul, “and the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy.” And so St. Peter, “As he which hath called you is holy, be ye yourselves also holy in all manner of living.” Your holiness must not be merely “separation for God’s service,” it must be conformity to God’s! nature. It must be holiness in the sense in which God can be spoken of as “holy,” i.e. perfect, sinless. “Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” The condition of this freedom from sin is abiding in Christ and His Spirit, and this is not only possible, but a growing reality which will one day be actual fact of experience. The Tabernacle was holy because it was indwelt by God. Of course there is a sense in which all places are indwelt by God. “Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord.” But in a very special sense God chose to make the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, for the time being, His local habitation. There it was He manifested Himself, as He manifested Himself nowhere else, to man. There it was He held converse with those whom He had appointed as the representatives of man. There it was He accepted the sacrifices which prefigured the great Sacrifice which was to be offered in the end of the world. The Tabernacle was holy because it was indwelt by God. The Church of Christ is holy because she is indwelt by God the Holy Ghost. “The Lord (says the Prophet) shall suddenly come to his temple.” May we not say that there was at least one great fulfilment of that prophecy on the day of Pentecost, when God the Holy Ghost suddenly came, and by coming laid the first stones of that great Temple of the living Church of Christ which is the Holy Habitation of the Most High? God occupied, if one may say so, but part of the Tabernacle. God the Holy Ghost occupies every part of the Christian Church. At first sight that seems a truism, but it contains a momentous question for every one of us. If God the Holy Ghost occupies every part of the Christian Temple, if the Church of Christ is filled in every corner by God the Holy Ghost, the question arises, Does God the Holy Ghost dwell in me? If not, then I am not part of that holy temple and I am not part of the Church of God. Let there be no possible mistake; nothing but the indwelling of God the Holy Ghost can make us parts of the true Church of Christ, of that holy temple which is built up of living stones.1 [Note: W. M. Hopkins, The Tabernacle and its Teaching, 92. “Ye are in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.” Wonderful equivalence and exchange! The Lord leaves not His disciple orphaned; He comes to him; He is in him; He manifests Himself to him, and abides in him. And yet it was expedient that He should go away; for otherwise the Paraclete would not come. The Paraclete comes; and behold He mediates and makes for the Christian’s soul and self a Presence of the Lord which somehow is better—far better—for the man in this his pilgrimage and tabernacle than even the joy and glory, if it were granted, of his Saviour’s corporeal proximity—shall I dare to say than his Saviour’s personal indwelling as the Son of Man outside the vehicle of this Presence of the Spirit? This sacred mediation of the heavenly Spirit, this conveyance through Him of every blessing of the vital Union, appears everywhere in the subject. In the imagery of the Building it is “in the Spirit” that the saints, compacted into their Corner Stone, are “being builded together to be the habitation of God.” “Where that Spirit is”—if I may quote words of the Dean of Llandaff—“where that Spirit is, there is the Body, and only there.” And so it is when the exercises and actions of the spiritual life—which life is Christ—are spoken of at large. It is “in the Spirit” that the saint—that is to say, the genuine Christian here below—“has access” in Christ unto the Father. It is those who are “led by the Spirit” who “are” in truth and deed, not in a certain sense, but in reality and nature, “the sons of God” in His Son. It is “by the Spirit” that they “mortify,” that they continuously do to death, “the deeds of the body,” in the power and name of Christ. It is “by the Spirit” that they “walk” in Christ. It is “because of the Spirit dwelling in them” (a truth full of significance as to the nature of the body of the resurrection) that “their mortal body shall be quickened,” in the day when their Lord from heaven shall change it into likeness to His own. Of that harvest the indwelling Spirit is the Firstfruits. Of that inheritance He is the Earnest. So the Sevenfold One is sent forth into all the earth, as the Eyes, as the Presence, of the exalted Lamb of the Sacrifice. It is by Him, and by Him alone, that that presence is in the Church, and is in the Christian.1 [Note: Bishop H. C. G. Moule, All in Christ, 171. 3. The actual is ever approximating to the ideal.—The work keeps moving on. Just as, when any great building is being erected, you see here and there the different workmen engaged with the particular portion which devolves upon them, so it is with the holy temple St. Paul speaks of in the text. The ministers and stewards of God’s mysteries are doing their work in the particular part of the spiritual building assigned to them. One may have his work to do in a part of the building where a skilled and superior workman is required; another in a more humble place, though it too is necessary for the perfection of the whole; some have to chisel wealth into stones meet for the Master’s use; some to chip off the excrescences of intellect, in order that the stones may fit into the walls of God’s building; some have, with ruder hands, to blast the rocks of ignorance and prejudice, and to be content to leave the polished corners of the temple to more experienced hands. But you see, all the while the building is growing; it is rising higher and higher; and as we see more activity, more zeal, more earnestness in the cause of this building of God, we know that Satan trembles; because every living stone in the spiritual building, which is precious in the eyes of the great Architect of the Universe, is a stone rescued from the ruins of the world, destined to have its final place amongst those of which the Lord speaks, when He says, “They shall be mine, when I make up my jewels.” We did not speak of the “higher life,” nor of a “beautiful Christian,” for this way of putting it would not have been in keeping with the genius of Drumtochty. Religion there was very lowly and modest—an inward walk with God. No man boasted of himself, none told the secrets of the soul. But the Glen took notice of its saints, and did them silent reverence, which they themselves never knew.1 [Note: Ian Maclaren, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush.] We call to mind the beautiful description by Tennyson of that mysterious city which Gareth and those with him beheld through the mist. They pronounced it “a city of enchanters,” and it was told them concerning its builders— They came from out a sacred mountain-cleft Toward the sunrise, each with harp in hand, And built it to the music of their harps. For an ye heard a music, like enow They are building still, seeing the city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built for ever. III The Use of the Building 1. It is to be “a habitation of God in the Spirit.”—God is to be the occupant of the Temple. Here is the eternal destiny of the true Church of God. It is not only that it is to be “saved in Christ for ever,” ineffable as is the wonder of that fact. It is not only that it is “to enjoy God fully for ever,” though that amazing prospect is so amply and definitely revealed. It is to be a holy Sanctuary, a Shrine, a Divine Presence-Chamber, a permanent Habitation of God. In measure, the wonderful fact has already begun to be; already He dwells in His people, and walks in them; already the eternal Son resides in the very heart of the true member of the Church, by faith. But all this is as when some building, planned already by the master in its final glory, is slowly rising, and beginning to show, amidst fragments and dust and the noise of the workmen, some hints and outlines of what it is to be; the owner, the intending dweller in it, walks in and out amidst the vast beginnings, and perhaps rests and shelters himself under the unfinished walls and roofs. It will be otherwise when the last stone is in place, and the last splendid equipment of the chambers is completed, and he receives his admiring friends in the banquet-chamber, and shines out amidst the shining of his palace, himself the central splendour of it in all his dignity of wealth and welcome. So it is with the saints, and with their common life as the Church of God. Wonderful are the beginnings. Amidst all the apparent confusions of the field where the building is in progress, its form and scale begin to show themselves, across the perspective of centuries and continents. And when the stones already in place are scrutinized, it is found that each of them is a miniature of the whole; a shrine, a home of the presence of the Lord, by faith. But a day of inauguration is drawing on when “we shall see greater things than these.” Then the Divine indwelling in each “living stone” will be complete and ideal, “for sinners there are saints indeed.” And as for the community, it will cohere and be one thing with a unity and symmetry unimaginable now. There all the millions of His saints Shall in one song unite, And each the bliss of all shall view With infinite delight. Paul seems to say to these Ephesians: “You have in your city a magnificent temple, the wonder of the world, the temple of Diana. It bears witness to man’s need of worship. But you know that that temple is not really a habitation of God. The eternal Spirit of God dwells not in temples of stone and marble. The one real temple of the Divine Spirit is the human heart. Ye are the habitation of God.” Socrates, indeed, and the Stoics had taught this, but St. Paul’s thought goes far beyond that of Socrates and the Stoics. It is not only the individual human heart, says St. Paul, that is the temple of God—it is a Society. “Ye are builded together,” he says, “in Christ into an habitation of God in the Spirit.” Here is the originality of the conception—a new conception of a Society so filled with the life of Christ that it may be said to be “in Him”; built up, like some cathedral, into a glorious unity of idea, with infinite diversity in its members—a conception then new, now so familiar, of a Church, a continuous embodiment on earth of the Spirit of Christ. And this new conception, this dream, has been realized; it took form; it became a living organism; it lives to-day; it is the Church of Christ.1 [Note: J. M. Wilson in The Guardian, May 29, 1911, p. 725. 2. The Church should reveal the power of the indwelling God.—It is a “habitation of God in the Spirit.” This is what no other society is or can be. The Church possesses Divine gifts and powers, because it is the abode of a Divine presence. It is a spiritual Society. The world looks on the Church and sees only a great organization, with much that is imperfect, much perverted, much incomplete. The Divine origin of the Church, the Divine presence with the Church, have never saved it, were never pledged to save it, from the consequences of human wilfulness or error. The world knows nothing of the indwelling Spirit which gives to the Church its essential character. How could it? For we are speaking of that “Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him; but ye know him for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.” Yes; the very meaning and purpose of the existence of the Church is that it is the area, the clothing, the environment, the casket, of the supernatural. If it is not this, it is nothing; it is a mere human society, graceless, giftless, powerless. If it is this, it is verily “the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” In accomplishing the conversion of the world, the Church has two points to prove and testify—first, that Christ is alive and at work now to-day on earth, and that He can be found of them that believe, and manifest Himself to those that love Him; and, secondly, that He is so by virtue of the deed done once for all at Calvary—by which the prince of this world was judged, and the world was overcome, and man given access to God. What proofs can the Church offer for these two points? It has three proofs to give. First, its own actual life. This is its primary witness, that Christ is now alive at the right Hand of God the Father. This is the cardinal testimony. “Christ is alive, otherwise I should not be alive as you see me this day.” And then this personal life of Christ in His Church verifies and certifies to the world the reality of that old life on earth, of that Death on Calvary, of that Resurrection on Olivet. The fact that the man at the Beautiful Gate has this perfect soundness in the presence of all, the very man whom they knew and saw so lame,—this makes it certain that God did send His Son Christ Jesus to be a Prince of Life. And, therefore, the living Church bears a book about with it, the Gospel book, the Apostolic witness, the witness of those who so beheld, tasted, handled, the Word of Life, of those who were actually there all the time in which “the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John, unto that same day that he was taken up from us.” And again, the body carries with it a third witness; not only the Apostolic record, but the Apostolic rite, the act commanded by the dying Christ to be done for ever as a memorial and a witness until His coming again. Ever that society rehearses this deed of the new covenant, that deed which is the seal and pledge to men for all time, of the one covenant sealed with Christ’s blood once for all, even on the night of His betrayal. Ever this rehearsal continues until Christ comes again, and every such rehearsal verifies, to all who take and eat the bread, that great sacrifice which the Lord offered when in the upper chamber among the Twelve, “he took bread, and blessed it, and brake.”1 [Note: H. Scott Holland, Helps to Faith and Practice, 94. Dr. Dale was spending a summer holiday at Grasmere, and had walked over to Patterdale to spend the day with Dr. Abbott, the headmaster of the City of London School, an able and prominent Broad Churchman. In the early evening his friend started with him to set him on his way home, still intent on the questions, religious and ecclesiastical, which they had discussed for many hours. “We were walking together from the head of Ullswater up towards the foot of Grisedale tarn, and he asked me, with an expression of astonishment and incredulity, whether I really thought that if the shepherds of Patterdale—a dozen or score of them—determined to constitute themselves a Congregational church, it was possible for such a church to fulfil the purposes for which churches exist. To such a question there could be but one answer. Great natural sagacity, high intellectual culture, however admirable, are not essential: ‘It is enough if, when they meet, they really meet in Christ’s name—but no man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost.’ ” Christ’s presence with the shepherds of Patterdale would be a sufficient reply to all who challenged their competency to discharge the functions of church government. Whatever gifts and endowments might be necessary for the development of religious thought and life in their full perfection, the Divine presence was its one and its only essential condition.1 [Note: Life of R. W. Dale, 247. 3. Each individual life should be a shrine of the Spirit.—Union with Christ, and a consequent life in the Spirit, are sure to result in the growth of the individual soul and of the collective community. That Divine Spirit dwells in and works through every believing soul, and while it is possible to grieve and to quench It, to resist and even to neutralize Its workings, these are the true sources of all our growth in grace and knowledge. The process of building may be and will be slow. Sometimes lurking enemies will pull down in a night what we have laboured at for many days. Often our hands will be slack and our hearts will droop. We shall often be tempted to think that our progress is so slow that it is doubtful if we have ever been on the foundation at all or have been building at all. But “the Spirit helpeth our infirmities,” and the task is not ours alone, but His in us. We have to recognize that effort is inseparable from building, but we have also to remember that growth depends on the free circulation of life, and that if we are, and abide, in Jesus, we cannot but be built “for a habitation of God in the Spirit.” Till man has personal relations with God, it is hard to conceive of his having any corporate relations. It would be a monstrous unreality to conceive of a society which God could make His abode, in no single member of which was the presence of the Spirit of God. A whole cannot be utterly diverse from its parts. The presence of the Spirit of God and of the life of God in the soul of man must be presupposed before we can even approach the subject of the corporate life of the Church, or, in other words, of the building up of the Christian Society as a habitation of God in the Spirit. There is no doubt there was at one time a great danger of over-individualism among religious people in this land. It was not an uncommon thing to hear people say, “A man’s religion lies between himself and his God.” Why, half the Bible is straight against that! Possibly there may be some little danger the other way now. Man is a temple either for God or His opposite. It is for us to choose whom we will have to live within. The secret of power is the recognition of the all-loving, me-loving, God. All-holy, and therefore never resting, cost Him what it may, till we are holy too. Away with the austere man! Enter and abide, thou striving Spirit of Love! It is a wonderful thing, that consciousness of the Indwelling Jesus. I only lately became positively conscious of this. How, I do not know, of course; but it was so, and He abides. When over us and in us there is One greater and holier, and more filled with love for us than our furthest thought, and we know it and walk in the light of it, there is power and sweet influence.1 [Note: F. W. Crossley, in Life, by J. Rendel Harris, 70. In the days of Trajan there lived a Saint of God named Ignatius, who sealed his testimony with his blood. Ignatius was commonly known as Theophoros—or the Bearer of God. I imagine that there was such a pre-eminent holiness, such a supernatural sanctity in his character that he seemed to be a kind of incarnation of the Divine life. The title given to Ignatius is one to which every Christian who is faithful to his calling may in some degree humbly lay claim. He is a Theophoros, a God-bearer. Christ dwells in him and he dwells in Christ. Christ is “in him the hope of glory.”2 [Note: S. C. Lowry, The Work of the Holy Spirit, 20. We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life. And if aught be lacking, it is not the chance of living in heaven, rather it is watchfulness and meditation, also perhaps a little ecstasy of soul. Though you have but a little room, do you fancy that God is not there, too, and that it is impossible to live therein a life that shall be somewhat lofty? If you complain of being alone, of the absence of events, of loving no one and being unloved, do you think that the words are true? Do you imagine that one can possibly be alone, that love can be a thing one knows, a thing one sees; that events can be weighed like the gold and silver of ransom? Cannot a living thought—proud or humble, it matters not; so it come but from your soul, it is great for you—cannot a lofty desire, or simply a moment of solemn watchfulness to life, enter a little room? And if you love not, or are unloved, and can yet see with some depth of insight that thousands of things are beautiful, that the soul is great and life almost unspeakably earnest, is that not as beautiful as though you loved or were loved? And if the sky itself is hidden from you, “does not the great starry sky,” asks the poet, “spread over our soul, in spite of all, under guise of death?”1 [Note: Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble, 179. Our souls go too much out of self Into ways dark and dim: ’Tis rather God who seeks for us, Than we who seek for Him. Yet surely through my tears I saw God softly drawing near; How came He without sight or sound So soon to disappear? God was not gone: but He so longed His sweetness to impart, He too was seeking for a home, And found it in my heart.2 [Note: F. W. Faber.] Spiritual Architecture Literature Beeching (H. C.), The Apostles’ Creed, 83. Bellett (J. C.), in Sermons for the People, i. 104. Colyer (J. E.), Sermons and Addresses, 173. Findlay (G. G.), The Epistle to the Ephesians, 146. Fleming (S. H.), Fifteen-Minute Sermons for the People, 122. Greenhough (J. G.), Christian Festivals and Anniversaries, 158. Holland (H. S.), God’s City and The Coming of the Kingdom, 29. Hopkins (W. M.), The Tabernacle and its Teaching, 89. How (W. W.), The Knowledge of God, 173. Keenleyside (C. B.), God’s Fellow-Workers, 11. Lowry (S. C.), The Work of the Holy Spirit, 42. Pulsford (J.), Christ and His Seed, 81. Romanes (E.), Thoughts on the Collects for the Trinity Season, 141. Skrine (J. H.), Saints and Worthies, 39. Stuart (E. A.), in Sermons for the People, New Ser., i. 86. Christian World Pulpit, lii. 401 (Pryce); lxv. 397 (Percival); lxxix. 138 (Marshall). Church of England Pulpit, xliii. 269 (Terry). Churchman’s Pulpit: St. Simon and St. Jude, All Saints, xv. 303 (Paget). Homiletic Review, li. 290 (H. van Dyke). The Father and the Families For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.—Ephesians 3:14-15. 1. There are two great prayers in this Epistle. The first is in the first chapter. It seemed to Paul that the gospel was so wonderful that it was impossible for men to See the glory of it unless they were taught of God, and therefore after his lofty account of God’s purpose to bring the heavens and the earth into an eternal unity in Christ, he tells the Christians at Ephesus that he was continually praying that God would give them “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him,” and that the eyes of their heart might be enlightened that they might know the hope to which God had called them, and “the glory of his inheritance in the saints.” Spiritual illumination is necessary if we are to know the contents of the Christian gospel; for the gospel reveals invisible and eternal things lying far beyond the frontiers of the common thoughts of men. The second prayer takes another form. Its central idea is strength. Strength is necessary as well as light. We cannot know the gospel unless its glories are divinely revealed to us; and the spiritual energy necessary to receive it and to hold it fast must also come from God. 2. The prayer which he offers here is no less remarkable and unique in his Epistles than the act of praise in chapter 1. Addressing himself to God as the Father of angels and of men, the Apostle asks that He will endow the readers in a manner corresponding to “the riches of his glory”—in other words, that the gifts He bestows may be worthy of the universal Father, worthy of the august character in which God has now revealed Himself to mankind. According to this measure, St. Paul beseeches for the Church, in the first instance, two gifts, which after all are one,—viz., the inward strength of the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 3:16), and the permanent indwelling of Christ (Ephesians 3:17). These gifts he asks on his readers’ behalf with a view to their gaining two further blessings, which are also one,—viz., the power to understand the Divine plan (Ephesians 3:18) as it has been expounded in this letter, and so to know the love of Christ (Ephesians 3:19). Still, beyond these there rises in the distance a further end for man and the Church: the reception of the entire fulness of God. Human desire and thought thus reach their limit; they grasp at the infinite. Few of us can fail to have been struck with the solemnity and high tone of this prayer. It may be that some of us have thought that it contained a higher standard of feeling and life than we could hope to reach, and therefore have been tempted to abandon the consideration of it in silence; whilst others, striving to force the feelings which it recommends, have been betrayed into false excitement and unreality. The remedy for both these common cases is a careful consideration of the Apostle’s petition as a whole. Almost every word is a rich mine of thought, but there is a lesson contained in its general scope which we must carefully observe. It is indeed very spiritual; but it is not the less practical. It is a pattern for the most advanced Christian; but it is a lesson for the weakest believer. We are not to regard it only as an Apostle’s prayer for the early saints, who lived in days far different from our times. It is a prayer suitable for all ministers of the Gospel, for all times. It shows us what is the object of Church teaching, and therefore points out the state to which all Christians ought to be advancing. The Apostle did not pray for any blessing which his people could not receive; and therefore all he prayed for they were bound to seek. Hence this petition came to the Ephesians not only as an evidence of their pastor’s love and devotion, but with an implied command. And so it is now: the prayers of the Church are exhortations to the faithful. For example: when the earnest petition arises from the altar, “that this congregation here present may with meek heart and due reverence hear and receive Thy holy word,” it is a solemn admonition to cultivate that very meekness and reverence for which we pray. And when the Apostle tells us: “For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father that he would grant you according to the riches of his exceeding glory, to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man”; when he prays “that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith,” and that we may be skilled in the heavenly wisdom of the “love of Christ,” as the members of His mystical body should be—are not these several petitions so many loving exhortations to us to seek after spiritual strength, to acquire a constant faith, to study God’s attributes, especially His love in the Cross, that love which exceeds all other mysteries and surpasses all other knowledge; and to strive after all the perfection which God requires? The Apostle opens the door of his “closet” to show all Christian pastors how they should pray for their people; and all Christian people what they should seek for themselves. As in church solemn lessons are conveyed in the services, so here we are admitted into the awful privacy of an Apostle, to learn our duty whilst we catch his fervour. So beautifully is edification always mingled with devotion.1 [Note: J. Armstrong.] 3. The prayer is conveniently divided into four petitions: “That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that ye may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man”—that is the first. “That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith”—that is the second, the result of the first, and the preparation for the third. “That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”—that is the third. And all lead up at last to that wonderful desire beyond which nothing is possible—“that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God.” I The Occasion of this Prayer “For this cause.” 1. “For this cause,” says St. Paul, “I bow my knees,”—what is the cause on account of which he bows his knees? In order to ascertain this cause we must look back, first of all, to the beginning of the chapter. The chapter begins with the same words, “For this cause I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ, for you Gentiles.” Then there comes a parenthesis, which continues until the verse immediately preceding our text. Therefore, if we want to find the connexion, we must look at the close of the preceding chapter, where the cause is set forth in language beautifully and expressively instructive. There the Apostle has been speaking of those who were “builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit,” of those who, having been previously afar off, had been made nigh by the blood of Christ, who were “no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God”; he had been speaking of those who were saved “by grace through faith,” who had been brought into covenant with God through Christ, through whom they had “access by one Spirit to the Father”; and then he says, “for this cause I bow my knees,” that is, as if he had said: God hath blessed my ministry to you—Ephesians; there was a time when you were “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of the promise, having no hope and without God in the world”; but the God of all grace has reversed all this, and has now “created you anew in Christ Jesus”; and “for this cause I bow my knees to the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” 2. There is, however, an immediate and pressing necessity for this prayer, but it is rather implied than expressed. When he wrote this letter and offered this prayer, Paul was a prisoner in Rome, a circumstance which appears to have had a very depressing, if not a staggering effect on the newly-converted brethren at Ephesus. Retaining some of the follies of their former heathenism, they looked upon this calamity as an evil omen, and drew from it strange inferences. A prisoner in Rome, and an ambassador of the King of kings! A favourite of heaven and shut up in gaol! Can it be? Is Christianity of God? Is Paul true? So thought and so reasoned these novices in the Christian faith, as is evidently implied in the words immediately preceding our text—“Wherefore I ask that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which are your glory.” To save them from “fainting,” and to keep them steadfast in the faith, notwithstanding his imprisonment, he prayed for them. It is occasions that make prayer. We never pray as we ought without having definite cases before our minds, and seeking the Divine help, either for ourselves or others, according to the actual circumstances and the special needs of the time. These Ephesian Christians have passed away, their city lies in ruins; the heron and the stork wander where once the multitude stood. The hand that wrote these lines has long since mouldered into dust; and yet to-day these words are as fresh and appropriate as when first penned. For the fundamental facts of human need and Divine grace remain through all generations, and are true of all nations. To the English Christians of the twentieth century, who represent the same Gentile Church as the Ephesians of the first, the message of the Apostle is suitable: “I bow my knees unto the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that ye may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man.”1 [Note: J. W. Ewing, The Undying Christ, 69. II The Apostle’s Attitude in Prayer “I bow my knees.” 1. “I bow my knees.” Why is that mentioned? Is not posture a small thing compared with spirit? Why does the Apostle refer to the attitude? It is because of what that attitude meant to him and means to every sincere worshipper. Kneeling is the attitude of humility, of confession, of entreaty, of worship. Some have gone further, and thought that kneeling in prayer is a symbol of man’s fallen state, that he can no longer stand erect before God, but is broken and crushed in the presence of Jehovah. Certainly, kneeling is the natural position of man before the Almighty and All-Holy Creator. The holiest and highest of men have approached God thus. Solomon, the greatest, except David, of all Jewish kings, upon the day of the dedication of the Temple, knelt down before all his people and presented his prayer to God. Ezra, the priest, on receiving news of the people’s sin tells us: “I fell upon my knees, and spread out my hands unto the Lord my God.” Daniel, the prophet, when, in the city of idolatry, he heard of the decree forbidding prayer, except to the king, for thirty days, went into his house and “kneeled upon his knees” as before. But we have still higher authority; for did not Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane, withdraw Himself from His disciples a stone’s throw and kneel down and pray? And, after Jesus, what a line of men—the greatest, the purest, the tenderest—we see kneeling in prayer. Stephen, with that stony rain beating out his life, kneels down and cries with a loud voice: “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.” Peter, when Dorcas is dead, kneels down and prays for her restoration. And Paul, when bidding farewell to the elders of this very Church, knelt down on the seashore and poured out his heart to God for those he was leaving. Evidently it was the habit of his life. I was touched by reading yesterday morning of Bishop Latimer, the martyr, that towards the end of his life he used to spend so much time kneeling in prayer that he had to be assisted to rise. He forgot his troubles when pouring out his soul before God. Robert McCheyne spent a large part of his time in prayer. As he said: “Prayer is the link between earth and Heaven.” These men stooped to conquer, knelt to prevail, humbled themselves that Christ might be exalted. I pity the man or the nation that knows not how to kneel in prayer to God.1 [Note: J. W. Ewing, The Undying Christ, 71. 2. Yet no one could be less inclined than Paul to place any emphasis on any possible amount or variety of genuflexion. He knelt, but in assuming that attitude, and in mentioning it, he only gave expression to the humility, the reverence, the earnestness, the concentration of his spirit in devotion. Prayer lies in the heart only, but the words, the attitude, the place, the time, have all their influences directly or indirectly on our heart. We all kneel in private, and no doubt find the attitude helpful, at least to the fixedness of our attention on the work professedly in hand. Would not kneeling in public be equally helpful, and would not its general practice be as seemly as it would be helpful? But, whatever the attitude, let us not forget that the spirit fairly indicated by the Apostle’s expression, “I bow my knees,” is essential to the validity of prayer. The old customary, seemly attitude in prayer was standing. So Jesus said when He described the penitent publican, “He stood afar off and prayed”; so when He commanded His disciples and said: “When ye stand praying, forgive!” So in the godly fear of our fathers I still remember the awe that seized me as a boy when the whole great congregation rose to its feet in prayer, when the feeble old man and the frail man lifted their worn faces uncovered in speechless reverence to the eternal light which descended and suffused them with a glory which makes the burnished nimbus with which the painter ever loved to decorate his saint seem tame and tawdry. So when the subject enters the presence of his sovereign he stands, and in the very act and attitude of his homage shows that he is a free-born citizen conscious of his dignity. But prayer is too large and masterful a thing to be capable of being expressed in any single attitude. There are moments when collective worship is beautiful and seemly, and there are moments when a man is overpowered with a transcendent need and is forced to his knees. The man who is dazzled with excess of light finds that he lives and looks through a medium of vision too perfect for his dim eyes. So the man who for a moment is possessed by a great vision, or is conscious of a great need, may as it were be swept from his feet into the attitude of a suppliant before God. The year when I first entered the University was a year when the most learned of all Scottish thinkers died and passed away. As I saw him he was a frail and shrinking shadow, scarcely equal to the humblest act of articulation, yet round the benches the whisper passed that in strong manhood, when first he came to his Chair and wrestled with the problems of metaphysics, and seemed now and then to wrestle in vain, there would come such a torrent of passion and of intellectual conflict in him, that he would leap from his desk and away from his papers and fall prone before God, that light might come and he might, see.1 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.] Brother Lawrence told me that it was a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times: that we were as strictly obliged to adhere to God by action in the time of action as by prayer in its season. His view of prayer was nothing else but a sense of the Presence of God, his soul being at that time insensible to everything but Divine Love. When the appointed time of prayer was past, he found no difference, because he still continued with God, praising and blessing Him with all his might, so he passed his life in continual joy; yet hoped that God would give him somewhat to suffer, when he should have grown stronger.2 [Note: Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, 21. III The Father “I bow my knees unto the Father.” 1. St. Paul says that he offered his prayer to “the Father.” He did not address a material image, a creation of his own fancy, a power, or even “the Divine totality of being.” He prayed to a Person. With St. Paul prayer was mind addressing mind; heart pleading with heart. Madame Blavatsky, the founder of modern Theosophy, was asked: “Do you pray?” “No,” she replied, “we do not pray; the only Deity we know is an abstraction. We have no time to kneel to an abstraction.”1 [Note: J. W. Ewing, The Undying Christ, 71. 2. The Authorized Version has an addition which we may well wish we could retain. “Unto the Father of our lord Jesus Christ.” There is something peculiarly tender and winning about this title of God. God is brought very near to us as the Father of Jesus. And we can still cherish that beautiful title, for it is used in several other places. All nations, all men, who have cultivated religion, have given names and titles to God, in which they have expressed and embodied as well as they could their most exalted ideas concerning God. So the Jew called upon the God of his fathers by the name of Yahveh (“Jehovah”); and in that name called to mind a whole world of plighted troth, of faithfulness and tenderness. So the Moslem, as he tells his beads, recites the names of God, and passes into a kind of ecstasy as he recalls one by one the lofty titles of the beneficence and power of Allah. St. Paul, like all other Christians since, had no personal name for the God whom he adored, no long string of loud-sounding titles. You will not find in the New Testament any mention made of the Supreme Being, of the First Great Cause, of the Architect of the Universe, or anything else in that line. For St. Paul, and for us, God is simply and for ever “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is hardly too much to say, “that is all we know, and all we want to know, of Him.” (1) The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ means “the Father” of our Lord’s teaching, of those good tidings which He came to bring home to our minds and hearts. That is quite good grammar, and quite good theology. It is (most emphatically) “the Father” of our Lord’s discourses and parables; it is the Father of the Prodigal Son, who went forth to meet him while he was yet a long way off, and fell on his neck and kissed him; it is the Father of whom our Lord testified, “I say not unto you that I will pray for you, for the Father himself loveth you”; it is He alone to whom we bow our knees, because we cannot help it, because His goodness and patience and amazing love are too much for us, because they have tamed our pride and broken down our obstinacy, and shamed us out of our indifference; and now we bow our knees to Him in adoring love, even if we have to add, “Father, I have sinned, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.” There are many people nowadays who claim to know “the Father,” and in the strength of that knowledge they reject the Saviour, reject the Bible, reject Christianity. Yet it remains absolutely true that the New Testament is the one and only book that ever told them anything worth knowing about “the Father”; it is a fact that “the Father” to whom they bow their knees (if, indeed, they ever bow them at all) belongs exclusively to our Lord Jesus Christ. He alone knew Him; He alone revealed Him. Even they have to come to the Father by Christ: as a matter of history, as a matter of fact; there is no other way. And so their position is this: they embrace with effusion the one great and glorious revelation of the Book, and then they throw the Book aside with contempt; they acknowledge with enthusiasm “the Father” whom Christ (and only Christ) declared unto them, and then they dismiss Christ with scant courtesy.1 [Note: R. Winterbotham.] (2) In the second place, it is impossible to doubt (if we believe Himself) that “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” means more than “the Father” of His discourses, of His gospel. There was an ineffable relationship, a mysterious unity, between our Lord Jesus Christ and the Father, which is as strongly marked in His own words as in any creeds which have been made since. Whatever fault may be found with those creeds, they do not assert more strongly than He did Himself a oneness with the Father which passes man’s understanding; which, assuredly, it had been impossible for any other, and intolerable in any other to assert. If we understand that He is indeed the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in such wise that there is absolutely no difference or inequality; that such as the Son is in the Gospels, such is the Father also above us, and such the Holy Spirit within us; even so good, so loving, so pitiful, so faithful and true, so unyielding in the face of wrong, so careful for His own, so just and right in all His ways, so compassionate to error, so grieved for sufferers, so sorrowful for sin even unto death; if we understand this, I say, then we believe our Lord’s saying, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (and cannot possibly be mistaken concerning Him), and we bow our knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ with the most joyful and complete assurance.1 [Note: R. Winterbotham.] Trust My Father, saith the Eldest-born; I did trust Him ere the earth began; Not to know Him is to be forlorn; Not to love Him is—not to be man. He that knows Him loves Him altogether; With My Father I am so content That through all this dreary human weather I am working, waiting, confident. He is with Me; I am not alone; Life is bliss, because I am His child; Down in Hades will I lay the stone Whence shall rise to Heaven His city piled. Hearken, brothers, pray you, to my story! Hear Me, sister; hearken, child, to Me: Our one Father is a perfect glory; He is light, and there is none but He. Come then with Me; I will lead the way; All of you, sore-hearted, heavy-shod, Come to Father, yours and mine, I pray; Little ones, I pray you, come to God!2 [Note: George MacDonald.] 3. When St. Paul said, “I call upon the Father,” he was not saying a truism; he was striking the note that was distinctive of Christianity. He was saying the very central thing which Christ, our Master, came into the world to say. “I call upon the Father.” What does it mean, this belief that God is our Father? We are in the hands of a great power. No one can be such a fool as to think that man is independent. We are in the hands of a vast and universal power on which moment by moment we depend, as for our life originally, so, moment by moment, for the breath we breathe. What is this power? Is it blind force? The Jew alone of all the races was taught to believe that the power which lay behind him was righteousness, and that God was just and righteous; so it was that he set to work to build up the foundations of human society—because he believed that God was righteous, and all this our Lord maintained and deepened. He deepened it into the belief that God was a Father. (1) That means, first of all, that God is love, that behind all the suffering, the misery, the inequality, and the injustice which confront us in this wild and irregular scene of human life, there beats always and everywhere the heart of a Father, the heart of a personal and impartial love. You ask how it was that Christ persuaded men of this truth. It was because of what He was. It was because He was a “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” If some bright angel had come down from heaven with all the glory of miracles, and had flown to the earth and had proclaimed in a voice of thunder and with works of wonder that God was love, we might have shaken our heads and said, “It is all very curious and mysterious, and it is a very nice thing to listen to, but I know better.” Our Lord persuaded men that God was love because He came a man among men, hiding not Himself from His own flesh, moving among men in free and open contact, bearing men’s sicknesses and carrying their infirmities; because He went down Himself into the dark valley of failure and suffering; because He bore all the pains of body, all the racking agonies of mind, all the mysterious sense of failure and desolation, that, generation after generation, have turned philanthropists into cynics and made them mad; all the human history that has lain behind that bitter cry of righteous men forsaken—that cry which we hear in the Psalm, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—those words which rang out of the lips of Christ on the Cross. In our great cities we seem as if we were lost in a crowd. What am I but a tiny little element in some vast human machine that sweeps along in the sway of great forces which move from one end of the industrial world to another and seem to annihilate any sense of the individuality of a single life? It is crushed under the great forces which rush along. So even the old Jew could feel years ago in the Book of Ecclesiasticus, where the writer says: “Say not thou, I shall be hidden from the Lord; and who shall remember me from on high? I shall not be known among so many people; for what is my soul in a boundless creation?” We feel it even more in our modern time, but the assurance of Christ is that it is not true; that there is no one of us lost in the crowd; that there is no one of us created by accident; that we were not turned out in hundreds or in thousands or in nations, that we were created individuals, that God is the Father of each and all; and that behind all the seeming inequalities of position and comfort there is the perfect rectifying justice and equality of God. I believe that God is my Father. That means that He knows all my circumstances, that He values me, not in proportion to my performance, but in proportion to how much I am tried; because, to keep my temper, if I am naturally an angry man, is worth in His sight ten thousand times more than to keep my temper if I am naturally an amiable person without a bad temper to contend with. He knows my circumstances. He knows me and cares about me with the infinite knowledge of the Creator and the Father of everything that goes to make the individuality of my lot, which means the individual love of God.1 [Note: Bishop Gore.] (2) And then, the Fatherhood of God, St. Paul says, is the pattern and source of every fatherhood in heaven, and on earth. It means that God rules by a method of fatherhood. Men are set in groups and societies, and each group and society has one at the head of it, and the model of government is to be fatherhood. So it is in the family, and Christian civilization depends upon maintaining the sanctity and the dignity of the family. To believe in the Fatherhood of God is to set to work to be a good father, a good head of a household in our own families. The other day I had occasion to find out, in very large works, about a great mass of very intelligent men who were workers there, that they were very unwilling that their wives should know how much money they were getting. I thought that was a very bad sign. There can be no sound and healthy married life where the wife does not know what money the husband is getting, because there can be no confidence; there can be nothing of that confidence of heart to heart, that real unity of life, that real fellowship and co-operation which means complete trust; and you know we have a great job to-day if we are to restore home life to its proper sanctity and dignity.1 [Note: Bishop Gore.] Now, look for a moment how the small families of the earth are all made after the fashion of the heavenly family. Did it ever occur to you—surely it must—that God’s invention of the family in this world is just to compel our thoughts to rise up to the great Father, and to recognize the great family? Love is the secret of God; love is the creative power. It is symbolized in birth. See how the child comes into the world, dependent on the mother. See how the child has no notion of bliss but in the mother’s arms, surrounded with the protection of those arms, looking up into the heaven of her face, reading the infinite in her eyes. The child, I say, is compelled to love the mother. He cannot help himself. Of course, there is the faculty of loving in the child, or else he could not love. It is his Divine nature; he is born of love, and he is love; but it can be brought out only in this way—that he shall, through helplessness, passivity in bliss, feeding on the very body of the mother that bare him, seeking the shelter of her bosom at every dread or anxiety or fear that comes upon him, learn that there is an overshadowing, an upholding love, and that love is his very servant, and, I had almost said, Slave. Surely there is no servant in His house like God Himself, for He does everything for His little ones.2 [Note: George MacDonald.] IV The Families “Every family, in heaven and on earth.” 1. “I bow my knees unto the Father, from whom [not the whole family, but] every family in heaven and on earth is named.” The point of St. Paul’s original phrase is somewhat lost in translation. The Greek word for family (patria) is based on that for father (pater). A distinguished father anciently gave his name to his descendants; and this paternal name became the bond of family or tribal union, and the title which ennobled the race. So we have “the sons of Israel,” the “sons of Aaron” or “of Korah”; and in Greek history, the Atridae, the Alcaemonidae, who form a family of many kindred households—a clan, or gens, designated by their ancestral head. Thus Joseph (in Luke 2:4) is described as being “of the house and family [patria] of David”; and Jesus is “the Son of David.” Now Scripture speaks also of sons of God, and these of two chief orders. There are those “in heaven,” who form a race distinct from ourselves in origin—divided, it may be, amongst themselves into various orders and dwelling in their several homes in the heavenly places, and there are those “on earth.” The various classes of men on earth, Jewish and Gentile, and the various orders of angels in heaven, are all related to God, the common Father, and only in virtue of that relation has any of them the name of family. The father makes the family; God is the Father of all; and if any community of intelligent beings, human or angelic, bears the great name of family, the reason for that lies in this relation of God to it. The significant name has its origin in the spiritual relationship. This great and noble conception of the unity of heaven and earth in God is characteristic of that form of Christian theology which is illustrated in this Epistle and in the Epistle to the Colossians. It appears elsewhere; but in these two Epistles, which were written about the same time, it is developed with extraordinary boldness and with a vehement and glorious eloquence. As yet, according to Paul’s conception, the Divine idea is unfulfilled. Its orderly development has been troubled, thwarted, and delayed by sin, by sin in this world and in other worlds. But it will be fulfilled at last. In Christ “were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and unto him”; and in union with Christ, the eternal Son of God, heaven and earth will be restored to the eternal Father. During this tour in England (in 1894) Dr. Paton was invited by the Bishop of Durham—the late Bishop Westcott—to visit him at Auckland Castle. Both of the men of God who then met are gone, and we can speak more freely of the event. The Bishop received his Presbyterian brother as whole-heartedly as if he had been one of his own clergy. The missionary on his part was profoundly moved by the visit, and told his friend subsequently how the Bishop had led him away to his study, and there discussed, with evident eagerness of soul, the progress and hopes of the evangelization of the heathen in the South Sea Islands and in the world. Then they knelt together before God—those two warriors who, in such different fields and circumstances, had fought their great fight and well-nigh finished their course. They recognized that they were one in heart and purpose, and each poured out his soul in fervent petition for the other, and for the bringing in of the Kingdom of God.1 [Note: John G. Paton, iii. 52. Painful as it is to witness the ineffectual yearnings after unity on all hands of which you speak, still it is hopeful also. We may hope that our good God has not put it into the hearts of religious men to raise a prayer for unity without intending in His own time to fulfil the prayer. And since the bar against unity is a conscientious feeling, and a reverence for which each party holds itself to be the truth, and a desire to maintain the faith, we may humbly hope that in our day, and till He discloses to the hearts of men what the true faith is, He will, where hearts are honest, take the will for the deed.2 [Note: Cardinal Newman, in Life of David Brown, 239. 2. The Greek words can grammatically mean only “every family” not “the whole family.” All such ideas, therefore, as that angels and men, or the blessed in heaven and the believing on earth, are in view as now making one great family, are excluded. The sense is “the Father, from whom all the related orders of intelligent beings, human and angelic, each by itself, get the significant name of family.” In the Epistle to the Ephesians, St. Paul lays open a vision of the spiritual origins and influences and issues of things temporal and confirms the truth which lies in the bold surmise of the poet that earth is in some sense a shadow of heaven. Now he sees in the future of the material Temple with its “wall of partition” a figure of the state of the world before the Advent, and then passes to the contemplation of its living antitype, built on the foundation of apostles and prophets with Christ for its head corner-stone. Now he traces in the organization of the natural body the pattern of a glorious society fitly framed together by the ministries of every part, and guided by the animating energy of a Divine Head. Now he shows how through the experience of the Church on earth the manifold wisdom of God is made known to the heavenly hierarchy. Now he declares that marriage, in which the distinctive gifts and graces of divided humanity are brought together in harmonious fellowship, is a sign, a sacrament, in his own language, of that perfect union in which the Incarnate Word takes to Himself His Bride, the first-fruits of creation. And so in the paragraph where the text occurs he touches with thankful exultation on the universality of the Gospel, by which the many races of men, Jews and Gentiles—the people and the nations—are reunited, and the purpose of God in the education of the world is at last made clear. Not in one line but in many; not through a calm, uninterrupted growth but in sorrow and tribulation men were trained in the past—this is his thought—to receive the crowning truth, and justified their training by their faith. By the help of that most signal example we can see how every ordered commonwealth, every bond of kinsmanship, owes its strength to a Divine presence. From the one Father, every fatherhood, every family through which the grace of fatherhood is embodied, derives its essential virtue.1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, The Incarnation and Common Life, 161. 3. Family relationship is therefore a very sacred thing, its root being not in the creation, but in God. And though we shall not find on earth any development worthy of its holy root, nevertheless the flower which fills the world with choicest fragrance is family affection. It is capable of becoming most heavenly, since the Eternal Father is Himself the spring of parental as His Eternal Son is of filial love. Therefore, also, family affections are capable of ceaseless cultivation. There is nothing to hinder family love from becoming evermore deeper, stronger, and lovelier. If it is so strong and so precious among fallen creatures, what must it be among the perfect? If family life on the earth gives rise, as it often does, to a very paradise of courtesies and tender sanctities, what must family life be in the immediate Presence, and under the direct influence, of the Infinite Father and His only begotten Son? Christian parents and their children should know, therefore, that in their families they have not a little world, but a little heaven, to cultivate. Their families derive their distinctions and peculiarities from relations in the Godhead. Their families have names not only in time, but in eternity. Every family in Christ is named according to its distinction, as a manifestation of a corresponding variety in the Divine Nature. (1) The family is a kingdom.—It is not of our design. It is not of our making. It is not of our choosing. It is not dependent on our pleasure for its continuance. When complete it includes each typical relation of society, the relation of command, of obedience, of fellowship. The members of a family in simple intercourse learn, however imperfectly, the duty of service. The feeling of the family conquers self. It is enough to appeal to the experience of home to refute the cynical assertion that personal interest is man’s single or strongest motive. In the family the tenderest affection, the most watchful care, the largest forethought, are lavished, not on the strongest or the most helpful, but rather on the most helpless and weak, who can make no measureable return to their comforters. In the family, need is taken as the measure of help, and a principle is spontaneously acknowledged which in its widest application would be adequate to deal with the sorrows of the world. On no subject has human thought more centred than upon the family. There is nothing more important in our entire social life. For a nation will not be better than its homes. Christianity did not invent the family or marriage, but it has been probably the greatest agency in giving ideals to the home. This is all the more remarkable when one recalls that Jesus was not married, and that so much of the New Testament literature was written by Paul who, like his Master, had no home. But how incomplete would the gospel be without the figures drawn from fatherhood, sonship, marriage, and childhood! The more one reads the New Testament the more does one feel how sacred the family is, because it so often serves as a symbol of the relations of the Church with Christ. When the New Testament writers wish to express the very closest and holiest union of believers with their Lord it is to the family that they turn for symbols.1 [Note: Shailer Mathews, The Social Gospel, 35. (2) The family is also a school, a school of character. The outer school cannot mould the whole of man’s nature. Character is shaped by action and not by words. What has been learnt by memory must be tested and embodied by experience. Under one aspect the outer school stimulates new and importunate wants, while the home is fitted to bring that social discipline which checks the selfish endeavour to satisfy them. At the same time the school offers new interests which may brighten home. Out of the home, too, must spring the spirit of purity. For home has its own proper warnings when the occasion comes. The knowledge of the elder may guard the innocent from falling; and the young have no better earthly safeguard than to carry with them the thought of mother or sister as the witness of all they do or say or think. In September I saw a tree bearing roses, whilst others of the same kind, round about it, were barren; demanding the cause of the gardener, why that tree was an exception from the rule of the rest, this reason was rendered: because that alone being clipped close in May, was then hindered to spring and sprout, and therefore took this advantage by itself to bud in autumn. Lord, if I were curbed and snipped in my younger years by fear of my parents, from those vicious excrescences to which that age was subject, give me to have a godly jealousy over my heart, suspecting an autumn-spring, lest corrupt nature (which without Thy restraining grace will have a vent) break forth in my reduced years into youthful vanities.1 [Note: Thomas Fuller, Good Thoughts in Worse Times.] Ah! not to be happy alone, Are men sent, or to be glad. Oft-times the sweetest music is made By the voices of the sad. The thinker oft is bent By a too-great load of thought; The discoverer’s soul grows sick With the secret vainly sought: Lonely may be the home, No breath of fame may come, Yet through their lives doth shine A purple light Divine, And a nobler pain they prove Than the bloom of lower pleasures, or the fleeting spell of love.2 [Note: Sir Lewis Morris, “Songs of Two Worlds” (Works, 68).] (3) The family becomes also a sanctuary.—The splendour of palaces does not secure innocence and holiness within their walls, but a sense of the presence of God does. Where God is welcomed as a guest there an atmosphere of sanctity is diffused around. A witness whose experience is unsurpassed writes: “I know numbers of the prettiest, happiest little homes which consist of a single room.” We ask then that His hallowing Presence should be habitually sought. We ask that “daily bread” should be received with some simple words of blessing; that work and rest should be consecrated by some simple words of prayer and praise. In these observances there is nothing forced or unnatural; nothing which is not possible under the commonest outward circumstances; nothing which does not answer to the promptings of the human heart. And for the fulfilment of this desire we claim woman’s help. There is a message even for the present age in the fact emphatically recorded by St. John, that a woman was divinely charged to be the first herald of the Resurrection, the herald of the new life. The need of England, the need of every land, is “good mothers.” If they fail, it is not for lack of womanly endowments in those who are called to fulfil the duty. Poor and desolate outcasts, whom we are tempted to place lowest, are capable of every sacrifice to shield their children from bodily suffering or loss. Let them only feel, and let mothers of every class feel, that there are sicknesses of the soul which require the ministries of wise and tender affection, spiritual perils which need to be guarded against by watchful forethought, desires of the heart which crave the fullness of more than human love, and we shall be brought near to the consummation of our daily prayer in the advent of the Kingdom of God.1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, The Incarnation and Common Life, 168. “Father Endeavour Clark,” as the founder of the Christian Endeavour movement is sometimes called, tells the story of a mother, whose family is as remarkable in its influence as that of the Crossleys of Halifax. This is the Murray family of Graaf Reinet, in South Africa. The father of the family, Andrew Murray the first, was a young Scotch missionary. He wooed and won a Dutch girl of Huguenot extraction, and carried her off, a bride of sixteen years, to his parsonage at Graaf Reinet. She became the mother of seventeen children, twelve of whom lived to grow up to bless the world. From them three hundred and four descendants have sprung (including those who have married into the family). The total number of ministers in the family, either directly or by marriage, is forty-two. Three are now studying for the ministry, six are missionaries in Central Africa, four others are in Mashonaland and the Transvaal, and three in Nyassaland. Three grandsons are in the South African Parliament. Of the original family, five sons were ministers, and the daughters wives of pastors and heads of educational establishments; the most well known, outside of South Africa, by his writings, being the beloved Andrew Murray, his father’s namesake. The influence of the whole family in South Africa is incalculable. Never, says Dr. Clark, were children more fortunate in their mother. Hers was one of those sweet, persuasive natures which mould and guide and bless, without seeming to know it themselves, certainly without conscious effort. When asked, “How did you bring up such a wonderful family?” she replied, “Oh, I do not know; I didn’t do anything.” But every one else knew if she did not. She just lived herself the life she wanted her boys and girls to live. Her life was hid with Christ in God; and they, through her, saw the beauty of holiness. “Her chief characteristic,” said one of her children, “was a happy contentment with her lot. She was always exactly where she wished to be, because she was where her Father in heaven had placed her.” She outlived her husband by many years. It was felt that her serenity and gentleness and loveliness of character came not a little from the hours of long communion when she looked into the Face of the Invisible, and thus learned to endure as seeing Him.1 [Note: H. S. Dyer, The Ideal Christian Home, 77. No clever, brilliant thinker she, With college record and degree; She has not known the paths of fame; The world has never heard her name; She walks in old long-trodden ways, The valleys of the yesterdays. Home is her kingdom, love her dower; She seeks no other wand of power To make home sweet, bring heaven near, To win a smile and wipe a tear And do her duty day by day, In her own quiet place and way. Around her childish hearts are twined, As round some reverend saint enshrined, And following hers the childish feet Are led to ideals true and sweet, And find all purity and good In her divinest motherhood. She keeps her faith unshadowed still; God rules the world in good and ill; Men in her creed are brave and true And women pure as pearls of dew, And life for her is high and grand By work and glad endeavour spanned. This sad old earth’s a brighter place All for the sunshine of her face; Her very smile a blessing throws, And hearts are happier where she goes; A gentle, clear-eyed messenger, To whisper love—thank God for her!1 [Note: L. M. Montgomery.] 4. What a solace to our hearts is the assurance that we shall never cease to be members of a family! The perfection of the great heavenly Household is that it is a Household of households. We are born into a family, we grow up in a family, we die in a family, and after death, we shall not simply go into the great heaven, but to our own family, in our Father’s House. “Abraham gave up the ghost, and was gathered to his people.” “Thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace,” God had said to him. All in heaven will not know us, but our own people will know us. We shall go to them. We are but babes in the household of God; and, moreover, we are in a very humble part of His House, rather in an adjoining house than in the very House. But we are loved as babes, by our numerous kindred; and quite as much by our own in heaven as by our own on earth. The sweet affections of our heavenly kindred are ever seeking to reveal themselves in our hearts. What are our family altars but means of communication between families on earth and families in heaven? They unite with us in saying, “Our Father.” And in the joy of our fellowship with Him, and with His Son Jesus Christ, they joy with us.2 [Note: J. Pulsford, Christ and His Seed, 110. The two communities of earth and heaven are united. They, as we, live by derivation of the one life; they, as we, are fed and Messed by the one Lord. The occupations and thoughts of Christian life on earth and of the perfect life of saints above are one. They look to Christ as we do, when we live as Christians, though the sun, which is the light of both regions, shows there a broader disc, and pours forth more fervid rays, and is never obscured by clouds, nor ever sets in night. Whether conscious of us or not, they are doing there, in perfect fashion, what we imperfectly attempt, and partially accomplish.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] 5. But the members of families on the earth should see to it that they are members of the Household of God. Let there be no doubt touching their union with Christ, the First-born Son. Let them have clear evidence that they are born again, and partakers of the Divine Nature. Members of Christian families who are not personally in Christ should lay it to heart that they are not as yet members of any heavenly household, and that they will be separated from their own families, unless they enter in at the door of grace, while they may. Has the door been opened in vain? We have been resting in the affections of our parents and enjoying the comforts of their house; but are we with them in Christ, and members with them of their eternal family? In one sense, and that a very important one, every family with all its members has God for its Father, for He made all and upholds all; and the thought should be a welcome one, that we share His love with all the world, and yet our own share in His love and His care is none the less, and that the family of God is made up of those who are loved by Him. But there is more than this—the admission into His family implies for us the recovery of a lost privilege. Sin separated and banished us, made us as though we were not God’s children, and unwilling to accept the love and the care and the will of God; we needed to be made the Sons of God again, and here came a provision of the Fatherly care which made the limits of the Family as wide as ever; the barrier of enmity was broken down by the great Sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Since He died, it is now, not indeed, every one upon earth, but “whosoever will”—every one who feels that he would be a child of God. “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.” That we might know Him, Thou didst come and live; That we might find Him, Thou didst come and die; The son-heart, Brother, Thy son-being give— We too would love the Father perfectly, And to His bosom go back with the cry, Father, into Thy hands I give the heart Which left Thee but to learn how good Thou art! There are but two in all the universe— The Father and His children—not a third; Nor, all the weary time, fell any curse! Not once dropped from its nest an unfledged bird But Thou wast with it! Never sorrow stirred But a love-pull it was upon the chain That draws the children to the Father again! O Jesus Christ, babe, man, eternal Son, Take pity! we are poor where Thou art rich: Our hearts are small; and yet there is not one In all Thy Father’s noisy nursery which, Merry, or mourning in its narrow niche, Needs not Thy Father’s heart, this very now, With all his being’s being, even as Thou!1 [Note: George MacDonald, Poetical Works, ii. 335. The Father and the Families Literature Baring-Gould (S.), Our Parish Church, 129. Boyd (A. K. H.), Sunday Afternoons in a University City, 279. Brown (J. B.), The Home, 217. Brown (J. B.), The Home Life, 288. Chadwick (W. E.), Social Relationships in the Light of Christianity, 173. Clarke (J. E.), Common-Life Sermons, 29, 52. Ewing (J. W.), The Undying Christ, 68. Harris (H.), Short Sermons, 268. Hull (E. L.), Sermons, i. 121. Laird (J.), Memorials, 167. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Epistle to the Ephesians, 128. Magee (W. C.), Sermons (Contemporary Pulpit Library), i. 73. Pulsford (J.), Christ and His Seed, 106. Ridgeway (C. J.), Social Life, 103. Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, iii. 181. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxii. No. 1309. Spurgeon (C. H.), My Sermon Notes, iv. 272. Vaughan (C. J.), Authorized or Revised? 315. Westcott (B. F.), Social Aspects of Christianity, 19. Westcott (B. F.), The Incarnation and Common Life, 161. Christian World Pulpit, xl. 233 (MacDonald); lviii. 19 (Fairbairn); lxxiv. 241 (Gore). Churchman’s Pulpit: Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, xii. 201 (Armstrong), 214 (Kempthorne), 216 (Heber). Power in the Inward Man I bow my knees unto the Father, … that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that ye may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man.—Ephesians 3:16. In every sphere of life to-day there is an urgent demand for strength or efficiency. The apostles of physical culture denounce, in large letters, the “crime” of not being strong. Their laudable endeavour is to persuade us to develop our powers by exercise; but they have no gospel for the weak. There are strong-minded men who agree with John Stuart Mill that, notwithstanding all the talk about brain-fag, it would do most people good to use their minds more than they do. And if worry be distinguished from work, it is probably true that increased mental effort would mean, for the majority of people, increased mental power. There is a corresponding truth in the spiritual life, as every Christian knows. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews refers to the harmful effects which are the inevitable result of neglecting to exercise the higher faculties of the soul (v. 11, 14). Though our ears have been opened and we have heard the whisper of His love, we shall become “dull of hearing” unless we listen often and listen long for the still and small and inward voice of His Spirit. Therefore, let us “exercise” ourselves “unto godliness” (1 Timothy 2:7), but withal let us remember that the central truth of the Christian gospel is not that we are to become strong merely by development of our own powers, by exercise of our own faculties, by conservation of our own energies; if we are to become strong, we must be strengthened by a “power that is not ourselves,” and St. Paul can name that power and bear witness to its energizing—it is the power of the Holy Spirit.1 [Note: J. G. Tasker.] I The Desire “That ye may be strengthened with power.” 1. What shall the universal Father be asked to give to His needy children upon earth? They have newly learnt His name; they are barely recovered from the malady of their sin, fearful of trial, weak to meet temptation. Strength is their first necessity: “I bow my knees unto the Father … that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that ye may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man.” The Apostle asked them in Ephesians 3:13, in view of the greatness of his own calling, to be of good courage on his account; now he entreats God so to reveal to them His glory and to pour into their hearts His Spirit, that no weakness or fear may remain in them. The strengthening of which he speaks is the opposite of the faintness of heart, the failure of courage deprecated in Ephesians 3:13. In Paul’s opinion a Christian had no right to be weak. To Timothy, his spiritual son, he wrote, “Thou therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus.” To the Colossians, “We desire that ye might be strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and long-suffering with joyfulness.” To the Corinthians, “Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.” And again, to the Ephesians, “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might.” To be strong is a duty; therefore to be weak is a sin. “Why art thou lean, being the king’s son?”1 [Note: D. J. Burrell, The Religion of the Future, 14. 2. “Strengthened with power.” The word for “power” is familiar to-day in the forms “dynamite,” electric “dynamos,” etc. It signifies force or energy in an intense degree. We have it in the 19th and 20th verses of the 1st chapter: “And what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead”; and then in the 20th verse of this third chapter: “Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us.” I confess that power, the possession of power, is one of the ideas I am trying to master. It seems to be greater every day I live; I am only just beginning to understand it, but Paul says that the power working in us is the power that raised Christ up from the dead. I cling to that thought, because I find that in my weakness and unworthiness I am like Christ in the tomb, and I pray that I may be raised up, out of weakness into strength, out of selfishness into sympathy, out of earth into Heaven. The power is the great power of God, the power of resurrection, the power of “endless life.”1 [Note: J. W. Ewing, The Undying Christ, 77. 3. It was when we were “without strength” that Christ died for the ungodly, and the work of new creation is to restore strength to our thoughts, to our volitions, to our speech, and to our action. He “worketh in us to will, and to do.” He kindles within us a flame of spiritual passion, a force of resolution, before which even bars of iron must give way, and which makes us “mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds.” One man in real earnest is a match for a thousand who do not know either their own minds or their Maker’s; and while others are putting it to the vote, or seeking authority for reform, or graciously holding that a balance of argument is in favour of the truth of Christianity, he who knows Almighty God, and with whom God dwells, knows the great secret of truth beyond all doubt, speaks not as the scribes, but pushes on the work of God as a soldier who sees victory before him and the Kingdom nigh at hand. There are important cases in which the difference between half a heart and a whole heart makes just the difference between signal defeat and a splendid victory.2 [Note: A. K. H. Boyd.] When Palmerston was trying to get Cobden into the Government, and meeting all his objections in a light and airy way, Cobden at length said: “But, my Lord, I am in earnest.” That closed the conversation. Palmerston, I should think, would look on earnestness in politics as the one unpardonable sin, as it is often looked upon now.3 [Note: G. W. E. Russell, Sir Wilfrid Lawson, 29. Take me out of the langour, the irritability, the sensitiveness, the incapability, the anarchy, in which my soul lies, and fill it with Thy fullness. Breathe on me, that the dead bones may live. Breathe on me with that Breath which infuses energy and kindles fervour. In asking for fervour, I ask for all that I can need, and all that Thou canst give; for it is the crown of all gifts and all virtues. It cannot really and fully be, except where all are present. It is the beauty and the glory, as it is also the continual safeguard and purifier of them all. In asking for fervour, I am asking for effectual strength, consistency, and perseverance; I am asking for deadness to every human motive and simplicity of intention to please Thee; I am asking for faith, hope, and charity in their most heavenly exercise. In asking for fervour, I am asking to be rid of the fear of man, and the desire of his praise; I am asking for the gift of prayer, because it will be so sweet; I am asking for that loyal perception of duty which follows on yearning affection; I am asking for sanctity, peace, and joy all at once. In asking for fervour, I am asking for the brightness of the Cherubim and the fire of the Seraphim, and the whiteness of all Saints. In asking for fervour I am asking for that which, while it implies all gifts, is that in which I signally fail. Nothing would be a trouble to me, nothing a difficulty, had I but fervour of soul. Lord, in asking for fervour, I am asking for Thyself, for nothing short of Thee, O my God, who hast given Thyself wholly to us. Enter my heart substantially and personally, and fill it with fervour by filling it with Thee. Thou alone canst fill the soul of man, and Thou hast promised to do so. Thou art the living Flame, and ever burnest with love of man: enter into me and set me on fire after Thy pattern and likeness.1 [Note: Newman’s Meditations and Devotions, in Ward’s Life of Cardinal Newman, ii. 367. II The Sphere “In the inward man.” 1. By the “inward man” is meant, not the new creation through faith in Jesus Christ which this Apostle calls “the new man,” but simply what Peter calls the “hidden man of the heart,” the “soul,” or unseen self, as distinguished from the visible material body, which it animates and informs. It is this inward self, then, in which the Spirit of God is to dwell, and into which it is to breathe strength. The leaven is hid deep in three measures of meal until the whole is leavened. And the point to note is that the whole inward region which makes up the true man is the field upon which this Divine Spirit is to work. It is not a bit of our inward life that is to be hallowed. It is not any one aspect of it that is to be strengthened; it is the whole intellect, affections, desires, tastes, powers of attention, conscience, imagination, memory, will. The whole inward man in all its corners is to be filled, and to come under the influence of this power, until there be “no part dark, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light.” The inward man, of which St. Paul speaks as delighting in the law of God, is the moral personality. When the inward man is regenerated, it becomes “the new man”; but before this renewal in the spirit of our mind (Ephesians 4:23), the inward man can recognize the goodness of Him whose holy law is the expression of an ideal, which wins the admiration of him whose failures compel him to cry, “It is high, it is high; I cannot attain unto it.” To be “strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man” means therefore the invigoration of our noblest powers, the enriching of the higher self, the imparting of new energy to our whole conscious personal being. The result of the Holy Spirit’s energizing is neither the gradual extinction of desire nor the enfeeblement of the will; on the contrary, the Spirit-filled personality desires more ardently and wills more strongly. The difference is that the inward man is no longer “infirm of purpose.” All, and more than all, that the wisest ethical teachers intend, when they extol the virtue of self-control, is a gift of grace to those who “walk in the flesh,” but “do not war according to the flesh.” Those who “walk in the Spirit” also war according to the Spirit, and in the Spirit’s strength they are enabled to “bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).1 [Note: J. G. Tasker.] The day came when Paul was led out along the road towards Ostia to his execution. There were priests and beggars and Arab merchants and sailors and camel-drivers who turned to look. What they saw was an armed guard with a Jewish culprit in chains; a man of “mean presence” outwardly, but destined to walk through history like a giant. The place was reached; there was the flash of a heavy sword; a head fell from the block. “There’s an end of this zealot,” said the executioner to his men. Little they knew! The real Paul cannot be slain. He is destined to be heard from. The “inner man” will walk up and down in Church councils, a participant in all great theological controversies, until the end of time. His death is but the widening of his parish. Out of sight sinks the stone In the deep sea of time, but the circles sweep on!1 [Note: D. J. Burrell, The Religion of the Future, 15. 2. Every one has an inward man, a better self, a potential perfection within him, which will awake and begin to flower when he feels in his soul the touch of God. There is laid down in the being of each man, or deposited there in germ, an ideal, a Divine ideal, which ought to become, under the nourishing powers of redemption and providence, the real. The man is not “himself” truly, until he has at least begun to translate the ideal into the real in his daily life. So we read that the prodigal “came to himself”; he had been beside himself until then, a kind of lunatic. For madness—so saith the Wise Man—is in the heart of the sons of men while they live; he means in sin, and away from God. When they come to God they come to sanity, to self. In fact, coming to one’s self in discovery, idea, desire, deep-grasping consciousness, is the first step in the way of return to God and happiness. That hour of full awakening is the supreme season of a man’s life. How very far some men seem to be from it! But there is this consolation—that they are not always so far from it as they seem. Mr. Macgregor’s nature presented a union, difficult for those who did not know him to understand, of feeling, of intellect, and strength of will. If feeling “overpowered” him for the moment, it was not suffered to carry him away. No impulse was allowed to master him for which he could not find intellectual justification; and then what he felt and experienced his resolute will turned into a force of life. That these days at Keswick were a turning-point in his life, there is not the smallest doubt. That they made his later ministry what it was, is equally certain. To say that he sometimes appeared to claim for this experience and its effects more than the facts altogether warranted, is only to say that, though remarkably enlightened and strengthened by God’s Spirit, he remained a fallible human being. But no one who knew George Macgregor, either as a man or a minister, before that crisis and after it, could question that he found then a new secret of strength both for his own life, and for his work.1 [Note: Life of George H. C. Macgregor, M.A., 110. Paul’s great solicitude is for the inner man; if he can only get that strengthened he feels that his work is done. And he is right. The inner man is the metropolis, the capital, the chief city; all the provinces take their tone from there. No man must begin with the provinces if he wants to make his fortune. In vain you adorn the body, in vain you amass the gold, in vain you seek the sights and sounds of beauty; the capital is the heart, and if the fashion of the heart be sombre, the whole is sad. But if the fashion of the heart be bright, I have no fear for the provinces; these will soon follow. The body may be meanly clad, the gold may be scarce and dim, the sights and sounds of beauty may be shut out by lane and alley, but if in the heart there be voices of laughter, they will fill all the land. If there be songs in the metropolis, I shall not be able to keep down my singing. I shall sing through all the provinces; I shall sing in the cold and in the snow; I shall sing in the dark and in the rain; I shall sing amid my struggles for daily bread. The life of joy is everywhere when there is gladness in the inner Man 1:2 [Note: G. Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 219. 3. How then is the discovery made? How does a man reach the centre and fountain of his own being? find himself? recover himself? bring himself home again to God? There are very great varieties of experience. But perhaps these things, or something like them, will be found in all. (1) First, there is what may be called a soul consciousness—a consciousness of having, or being, a soul; not merely an animated something, to be covered with dress and beautified with manners; not merely a thinking something, to be informed by knowledge and guided by morals; but a something spiritual, vast, deep, related to eternity, related to God. (2) The next thing is the conscious relation to God. No sooner does a man become conscious of his true self than he in that very act becomes cognizant and sensible of God. Some philosophic thinkers say that the deep and true self-consciousness is also, in a sense, consciousness of God—that we are so related to the Infinite that we cannot become conscious of our truest selves without touching and feeling it, without touching and feeling God. (3) The third thing, or the thing which goes along with this very often, is the consciousness of sin—“I will say unto him, Father, I have sinned.” When the inward man is found, sin is found in it, or cleaving to it very closely. Yes, real sin, deep, soul-humbling sin. Not merely infirmity, mistake, and misadventure; but sin, which makes the sinner guilty, which makes him unworthy of kindness, worthy of wrath. (4) Then, further, he becomes conscious of goodness as well as of sin. Not the old formal goodness; but goodness that is fresh and new and living; with love in the heart of it, gratitude lending it a glow and a lustre, faith building it up. This new life of goodness begins just with the other things we have named. Not after them, but with and in them. We are too apt to conceive of the religious life as consisting in a series of consecutive exercises, the beginning of the one waiting for the completion of the other. First repentance, then cleansing and forgiveness, then gratitude, then filial love, then active goodness. Not so. The moment a man comes to himself, all these things begin together, and go on together. Some trees in early spring are yet covered with last year’s leaves; all withered now and begrimed. What says the new vegetation to these? “I must wait until God sends winds strong enough to sweep them away; rains heavy enough to wash the tree clean in every branch”? Not at all. That new vegetation, that fresh leafage, comes out and pushes them off, and clothes the tree with virgin green, drawing food and beauty from the mould of the earth, from the wandering wind, from the passing cloud. So goodness throws off sin, and dresses and adorns the soul in the beauties of God’s holiness.1 [Note: A. Raleigh, The Way to the City, 9. III The Agent “Through his Spirit.” 1. In comparing the characters of Greek and Roman story described in Plutarch’s “Lives” with those depicted in unfading colours in the Old and New Testaments, one feels that both of these great picture galleries are filled with portraits of men of immense strength and resolution. But there is this difference, that in Plutarch’s heroes the human element of strength is supreme, while in the Scripture biographies there is added a Divine element of spiritual and moral power arising from vital contact with the Infinite and Eternal God—a spiritual power almost unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and producing types of men and women who seem to belong to another species through their union with the spiritual realms. This contrast is seen at a glance when we compare the heroes of Homer and of the Greek tragedians with those of the historical books of the Bible, or the poems of Greece and Rome with the remains of Hebrew song collected in the Book of Psalms. Aristotle himself says, when speaking of men’s relation to the gods, that all Greece would laugh if any man were to say that he loved Jupiter. How different the tone of David! “I will love thee, O Lord, my strength”; “I will sing praise to my God while I have any being.” The expression in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, chosen as the text of this sermon, describes the quality of such souls. They were “strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man.” It is by no merely natural decision or force of character that men and women are made conquerors of death and time. Such new force, exhibiting itself in unfashionable faith, in thought, in purpose, in action, in speech, in Suffering, in sacrifice, in love, is the work of that Almighty Spirit from which all forms of energy proceed, but whose chief work in the universe is the creation of inspired character. Every month seems to reveal to us more fully, in the progress of scientific discovery, the wonderful nature of the invisible energies which pervade and animate the material universe, until we look almost with speechless astonishment at the men whose experimental gifts, and mysterious insight, and mathematical grasp of thought, have unveiled the action of these interior energies of heat, and light, and electricity, and magnetism, and chemical affinity, and subdued them in practical forms to the service of man in the modern world. Hear the words of Dr. Crooke, spoken to his Company on opening the electric light for Ladbroke Square last week: “Before finishing I just want to draw your attention to a little bit of philosophy. We ought to have some philosophy in an electric light installation. Millions of years ago the sun shone upon the earth; plants grew; they died, and were converted in the course of time into coal. The light of the sun which was shining then was transformed into the latent energy of the coal. That coal has been dug up millions of years afterwards, and is forming the fire under the boiler. The heat of the coal is raising the steam, which, thus produced, passes through the engine and is being converted into motion. That motion is being communicated to the armature of the dynamo, which produces magnetism, and this, in its turn, produces electricity. The electricity is conducted into the secondary batteries and is there changed into chemical action. This chemical action is reconverted into electric current in the mains, and when human brains and energy are employed to direct the current in the right direction, the ultimate result is evident to you in the form of light. This light is the identical energy of the sun, bottled up in the coal measures countless ages ago, and now reproduced after having undergone more strange transformations than were ever dreamed of in fairyland.” But we live in the midst of still sublimer manifestations of one and the self-same Spirit, in His dealings, not with matter, but with souls—in the work of renewing them in the image of God, to an endless life, a life as indestructible as the Divine. For it is never to be forgotten that it is one and the self-same Spirit who has governed the geological and zoological development of this globe with its physical forces in the past eternities, in whose hand have been the deep places of the earth, and who has directed the gradual evolution of all living things. It is the same almighty Spirit who is now occupied in the work of saving men by “creating them anew” in the image of God for life everlasting; and whose far more mysterious and glorious energies are employed in “strengthening with might the inner man” for an endless life of power, obedience, and love. “Now if any man have not this Spirit of Christ he is none of his.”1 [Note: Edward White.] 2. Nothing is more familiar in Scripture than the conception of the indwelling Spirit of God as the source of moral strength. The special power that belongs to the gospel Christ ascribes altogether to this cause. “Ye shall receive power,” He said to His disciples, “after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you.” Hence is derived the vigour of a strong faith, the valour of the good soldier of Christ Jesus, the courage of the martyrs, the cheerful and indomitable patience of multitudes of obscure sufferers for righteousness’ sake. God will show him—if a man wishes to be like Christ, and to work like Christ, at doing good; God will teach him and guide him in all puzzling matters. And do not be afraid of being called cowards and milksops for bearing injuries patiently; those who call you so will be likely to be the greatest themselves. Patience is the truest sign of courage. Ask old soldiers who have seen real war, and they will tell you that the bravest men, the men who endured best, not in mere fighting, but in standing still for hours to be mowed down by cannon shot; who were most cheerful and patient in shipwreck, and starvation, and defeat—all things ten times worse than fighting—ask old soldiers, I say, and they will tell you that the men who showed best in such miseries, were generally the weakest men in the whole regiment; that is true fortitude; that is Christ’s image—the meekest of men, and the bravest too.1 [Note: Charles Kingsley.] There is a great truth expressed when we describe a brave and enterprising man as a man of spirit. All high and commanding qualities of soul come from this invisible source. They are inspirations. In the human will, with its vis vivida, its elasticity and buoyancy, its steadfastness and resolved purpose, is the highest type of force and the image of the almighty Will. When that will is animated and filled with “the Spirit,” the man so possessed is the embodiment of an inconceivable power. Firm principle, hope and constancy, self-mastery, superiority to pleasure and pain—all the elements of a noble courage are proper to the man of the Spirit. Such power is not neutralized by our infirmities; it asserts itself under their limiting conditions and makes them its contributories. “My grace is sufficient for thee,” said Christ to His disabled servant; “for power is perfected in weakness.”2 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Epistle to the Ephesians, 187. If we say that a man is remarkable for his intellectual energy, we think of him as having in the very centre of his intellectual life a free and inexhaustible fountain of force and activity. It is the same in the spiritual life. There is a certain imperfection in many of us which I do not know how to describe except by saying that, though at times particular spiritual faculties may appear to be vigorous, the central life is weak. There are men whose zeal for the evangelization of the world is often very real and very fervent, but who give us no impression of spiritual strength. There are others who are often inspired with a passion for Christian perfection, but in them too there appears to be no real vigour. There are others who seem spiritually weak, though their vision of spiritual truth is very keen and penetrating. There are others who seem capable of very lofty devotion,—of awe, of vehement religious emotion, of rapture in the Divine love and in the hope of glory, honour, and immortality—and who yet give us the impression that they are wanting in those elements of life which constitute spiritual energy. In every one of these cases, to use language which suggests rather than expresses the truth, the vigour is derived not from the central fountains of life, but from springs that are more or less distant from the centre. The man himself is wanting in force though there are spiritual forces at work in him. Those of us who are conscious that this is our condition should pray to God that we “may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man.”1 [Note: R. W. Dale, Lectures on the Ephesians, 246. Robertson Smith returned to Cambridge for the decisive consultation of his doctors, and the story of what passed may be given here in the words of the Master of Christ’s. “Half the members of the Conference [of Orientalists] had been invited to spend the Saturday and Sunday at Cambridge, and as usual Smith was the centre around which they all moved. From the bustle and confusion of tongues he withdrew to meet the doctors, and as usual he insisted on knowing the whole truth. When he left the room he turned to me and said, ‘I know what that means. My brother died of it.’ He then returned to his guests, and that evening presided at a banquet given in their honour in the Hall of Christ’s, but never by a word or a sign did he let any one suspect what he had learned but an hour or two before from the doctors, and it was with the same magnificent courage that he bore the ceaseless suffering and gradually increasing weakness of the next eighteen months.” What Smith had learned from the doctors was indeed sufficient to try his heroism. It was now ascertained with as much clearness as is possible in such matters that the real cause of the discomfort and illness which had crippled him for so long was deep-seated tuberculosis.2 [Note: The Life of William Robertson Smith, 543. 3. The very name of the Spirit is the “Spirit of might.” Christ spoke to us about being “endued with power from on high.” The last of His promises that dropped from His lips upon earth was the promise that His followers should receive the power of the Spirit coming upon them. Wheresoever in the early histories we read of a man that was full of the Holy Ghost, we read that he was “full of power.” According to the teaching of this Apostle, God hath given us the “spirit of power,” which is also the spirit “of love and of a sound mind.” So the strength that we must have, if we have strength at all, is the strength of a Divine Spirit, not our own, that dwells in us, and works through us. There is in the human heart an inextinguishable instinct, the love of power, which, rightly directed, maintains all the majesty of law and life, and misdirected, wrecks them. Deep rooted in the innermost life of the heart of man, and of the heart of woman, God set it there, and God keeps it there.—Vainly, as falsely, you blame or rebuke the desire of power!—For Heaven’s sake, and for man’s sake, desire it all you can. But what power? That is all the question. Power to destroy? the lion’s limb, and the dragon’s breath? Not so. Power to heal, to redeem, to guide and to guard. Power of the sceptre and shield; the power of the royal hand that heals in touching,—that binds the fiend, and looses the captive; the throne that is founded on the rock of Justice, and descended from only by steps of Mercy.1 [Note: Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, ii. §§ 86, 87 (Works, xviii. 137).] (1) That indwelling Spirit will be a power for suffering.—The parallel passage to this in the twin Epistle to the Colossians is—“strengthened with all might unto all patience and long-suffering with joyfulness.” Unless this Divine Spirit were a power for patience and endurance it were no power suited to us poor men. So dark at times is every life—so full at times of discouragements, of dreariness, of sadness, of loneliness, of bitter memories, and of fading hopes does the human heart become—that if we are to be strong we must have a strength that will manifest itself chiefly in this, that it teaches us how to bear, how to weep, how to submit. Ill-health was Stevenson’s always, but what he accomplished in the way of letters surpasses in amount and scope that which many a stronger man has done. It amounted to “nearly four hundred pages a year for twenty years,” and of the conditions under which most of it was done he wrote to Mr. George Meredith in 1893: “For fourteen years I have not had a day’s real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my day unflinchingly. I have written in bed and written out of it; written in hæmorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness; and for so long it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking, since first I came to the Pacific; and still few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on—ill or well is a trifle, so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle.”1 [Note: J. A. Hammerton, Stevensoniana, 313. (2) And it will be a power for conflict.—We have all of us, in the discharge of duty and the meeting of temptation, to face such tremendous antagonisms that unless we have grace given to us which will enable us to resist, we shall be overcome and swept away. God’s power from the Divine Spirit within us does not absolve us from, it fits us for, the fight. It is not given in order that holiness may be won without a struggle; it is given to us in order that in the struggle for holiness we may never lose “one jot of heart or hope,” but may be “able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.” The battle of life is a common phrase which, as generally used, means the struggle for bare existence in which the lives of so many are spent, or the effort to get on in the world by making money or attaining positions of eminence in society. The Apostle Paul’s idea of the life battle is very different, it is higher, nobler, in every way better; because it is no selfish conflict, it is a fighting for God and for the cause of God. The world’s battle of life is little better than a war of plunder, a fighting amongst beasts of prey, in which the strong endeavour to crush the weak, and the weak make desperate efforts against the strong—for the most part a mean and miserable contention on both sides, and one in which falsehood and trickery and cruelty and all other base stratagems are, without scruple, resorted to; so that, as a rule, those who win have more reason to be ashamed of themselves than those who lose. St. Paul’s battle of life is waged in the interests of humanity, the laws of the warfare being strictly honourable, and its aim the establishment throughout the world of that Kingdom which is “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.”2 [Note: Hugh Stowell Brown, in Life, by W. S. Caine, 305. (3) It is a power for service.—“Tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be endued with power from on high.” There is no such force for the spreading of Christ’s Kingdom, and the witness-bearing work of His Church, as the possession of this Divine Spirit. Plunged into that fiery baptism, the selfishness and the sloth which stand in the way of so many of us are all consumed and annihilated, and we are set free for service because the bonds that bound us are burnt up in the merciful furnace of His fiery power. If we allow the record of St. Paul’s experience in Christian service to cast light upon his prayer, we see that to be “strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man” means the supply of energy which enables us to toil for Christ without spiritual exhaustion, and to bear one another’s burdens, for His sake, without so soon becoming faint and weary. “Wherefore, we faint not,” exclaims St. Paul. Christian workers need, in hours of disappointment, to remember his secret. Discouragement in the Master’s service cannot always be cured by greater diligence. To labour hard, even for Him, is no guarantee of happiness. Indeed, the higher the service, the deeper will be our dejection if we fail to lay hold of the hope set before us in our glorious calling, because the task assigned proved to be beyond our strength. Happy we live, when God doth fill Our hands with work. If that were the only condition, most Christians could be happy every day and happy all the day. But our realization of the Beatitude depends, not upon the filling of our hands with work, but upon the filling of our hearts with zeal. Happy we live, when God doth fill Our hands with work, our hearts with zeal. Significantly we speak of being “disheartened” in our work for Christ; our use of the word should warn us against allowing the inward altar-fires to die down, or even to burn low. Without the Holy Spirit’s strengthening with power in the inward man, it is impossible for the heart to be always as full of zeal as the hands are full of work. The sum of all is—Yes, my duty is great: My faith’s still greater; then my faith’s enough.1 [Note: J. G. Tasker.] John MacNeil had always watched himself with considerable jealousy lest the fire within him should burn less brightly as he grew older. It distressed him to see many men, who in their youth had been ardent spirits, gradually cool off into a prudent moderatism. “Shall I ever get like that?” he would ask. “Is it necessary for a man’s ardour to decrease as his years increase?” and then, answering his own question, would reply emphatically—“No! by God’s grace, I will not alter if I live to be eighty; people will be as glad to come and hear me when I preach leaning on a staff, as they are now.” It was a great comfort to him to run over the long list of honourable names of white-haired old men who are serving God as enthusiastically now as when their blood ran faster in their veins. It was one great charm in John MacNeil that he never did alter. He was the same at forty as at twenty. In him “zeal” never “curdled into ambition,” nor did his enthusiasm ever abate. He was the same eager, hopeful, courageous soul from beginning to end.1 [Note: John MacNeil, Evangelist in Australia, 207. IV The Measure “According to the riches of his glory.” 1. “According to the riches of his glory”—that is the measure. There is no limit except the uncounted wealth of His own self-manifestation, the flashing light of revealed Divinity. Whatsoever there is of splendour in that, whatsoever there is of power there, in these and in nothing on this side of them lies the limit of the possibilities of a Christian life. “The riches of his glory”! How sublime a conception! We are not to ask according to the strength of our faith, the largeness of our hearts, or the breadth of our thoughts, but “according to the riches of his glory”! Paul wants us to take time and think of the glory, and of its inconceivable riches, and then in faith to expect that God will do nothing less to us than according to the riches of that glory. What is to be done in our inward man is to be in very deed the glory of God shining into our heart, and manifesting the riches of His power in what He does there within us. Our faith dare not expect the fulfilment of the prayer until it enters into and claims to the full that God will do in us “according to the riches of his glory.” Let us take time and see that nothing less than this is to be the measure of our faith. 2. And what are the riches of God’s glory? Who of us can conceive them? Think of the riches of God’s material glory. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof.” The gold mines and the forests, the gardens and the prairies, the mountains and the seas are all God’s. The stars in the heavens, the Milky Way, the Southern Cross, are a part of His glory, for the material universe reveals the wisdom of His handiwork. But that is only the threshold of God’s glory. Think of the glory of God’s providence, of God’s word, of God’s grace, of God’s Son! Who can conceive the power, and the majesty, and the love, and the compassion of God? And all these are included in “the riches of his glory.” I seem to stand beside a great sea, a sunlit sea, with wave upon wave, wave upon wave of glory rolling in upon my soul. The resources of God are infinite, and in Christ they are all open to us. Truly, when we pray we may say: We are coming to a King, Large petitions let us bring.1 [Note: J. W. Ewing, The Undying Christ, 75. 3. We may speak of the riches of God under three aspects—first, the riches of His power; second, the riches of His wisdom; and third, the riches of His goodness; and, as it is the blended and harmonious attributes of God that make up His highest glory, the view of His riches under these three aspects may enable us to see something of the riches of His glory. (1) His Power.—We see the riches of His power in creation. If a man could create in the highest sense of the word, how rich he would soon become! For his own wants he would have an immediate supply. When he was hungry he could create bread. When he was thirsty he could make the pure fountain spring up by his side. When he wanted money he could turn everything he touched into gold. It is in the ability to produce that the source of wealth is found. The riches of God are seen in the preservation of all things in existence as well as in their creation. The sublime act of creation did not exhaust or weary God. From day to day, from year to year, and from century to century, the whole universe is upheld in its primeval freshness and power. The sky is still the “unworn sky,” and time writes no wrinkles on the azure brow of the sea. The seasons revolve, and the earth teems every year with beauty and plenty. And the riches of the Divine power are seen not only in creation and preservation, but in re-creation. We are taught in Scripture that a wondrous transformation must pass over the present world—that forms of being now around us will be dissolved in a deluge of fire, and that from this second deluge will emerge a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. We are also taught that the bodies of men will be raised from the dust of the ground in a new and higher form. What marvellous exhibitions, then, has the future still in store of the riches of the power of God! I have read Carlyle’s “Reminiscences.” They remind me of an apple I have just been trying to eat—very sound on the one side, on the other bruised and black. What a pity Froude persisted in thrusting it in the public face, and that he did not help to let the dead bury its dead! Carlyle had certainly a morbid nature, partly, I suppose, from dyspepsia, and partly from having set himself to expose wrong as the exclusive business of his life, and weakness and incapacity were in his philosophy forms of wrong. We may be thankful that we have a better standard in the Infinite Strength that stooped to weakness to pity and to raise it. I should be far from saying that Carlyle had not the Christian in him, but he wanted one part of it, and it is proof of an entirely original and Divine Being, that the Reminiscences of the Fishermen of Galilee give us One who had the most perfect purity, with the most tender pity—an unbending strength that never despised weakness. One of the false things of the day is to exalt power (including intellect as a form of power) at the expense of the moral and spiritual. It belongs to materialism and in a degree to pantheism, and it is the direct opposite of Christianity, which makes Christ lay power aside, in order to make the centre of the universe self-sacrifice and love; and that then power should gravitate to this centre because it is the only safe one. “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power.” When we begin to see this, we feel in our deepest nature that it is Divine—that this must be true if the universe has any meaning, and the soul a worthy end. It gets obscured sometimes, but it will come out again.1 [Note: Letters of John Ker, 330. A ship was rounding Cape Horn, where, as you may know, on account of the fogs and storms, the sun may not appear in view for many days together. The ship of which I am speaking had encountered violent storms; the weather was intensely cold, so that icicles were hanging from the mast and yard-arms. A sailor boy was ordered out upon one of the yard-arms to reef a sail; but as he was out there, hanging over the dark and stormy sea, he raised a cry that his hands were getting benumbed and that he was about to fall. The captain, a relative of his own, shouted to him to hold on, and seizing a piece of rope lying on the deck ran up the rigging, went out on the yard and lashed the boy to it until he could be rescued. When the captain was tying the rope round the body of the lad, he said: “If you ever prayed in your life, pray now.” “I cannot pray,” said the boy, “but I can sing.” And there, over that wild sea, the boy sang this verse of the paraphrase— His voice commands the tempest forth, And stills the stormy wave; And though His arm be strong to smite, ’Tis also strong to save. That sea captain is a member of this congregation, and that sailor boy was taught in our own Sabbath school.1 [Note: Robertson of Irvine (by A. Guthrie), 90. A close, attentive study of Watts’s picture of “The All-pervading” will throw some light upon its meaning. All the immeasurable expanse of space is pervaded by a Divine Element, which Watts depicts as a figure with great encircling wings, seated and holding in its lap a globe, representing the stellar universe. Nothing could be more impressive and awe-inspiring than the sense of the overwhelming vastness and ubiquity of this Divine Element throughout the world which is given in this picture. It penetrates to the essence of everything; it holds everything from the largest to the smallest within its mighty grasp. It is a sublime conception that a Personality is seated on the throne of universal empire. We must postulate Spirit and not a thing as the first formative causation. The universe is not self-created and self-upheld. A thing cannot originate a thing. Law is a necessity of things, but law is an expression of will. It is not eternal, self-enacting, self-executing. The laws of the universe presuppose an agent, since they are only the modes in which the agent operates. They cannot be the cause of their own observance. The All-Pervading is Spirit which includes, but is not limited to Personality. The Creator and Upholder of all things is not a mere metaphor for force. And thus we are brought back to the magnificent generalization of the artist in his most original picture.1 [Note: Hugh Macmillan, G. F. Watts, 191. (2) His Wisdom.—How manifest are the traces of God’s wisdom in the way in which the earth has been fitted to develop and support man, and in the manifold provision made for man’s education and comfort! But what we have to notice more particularly here is, not merely the wisdom of God, but the riches of His wisdom; and these are seen not only in the original adaptation of means to ends, but in the way by which God can bring good out of evil. The mechanist would be wise who could invent and construct a machine which by the simplest movements could produce mighty results; but he would be rich in wisdom, who, out of that same machine, when marred and broken, could produce still mightier results. God’s wisdom is seen in making all things work together for good; and what a wealth of wisdom is implied in bringing out of the most contradictory and deleterious elements a vast, harmonious and unspeakably valuable result! We are broken on the wheel; torn by tribulation; beaten and shaken and purified by sorrow; emptied from vessel to vessel; passed from process to process;—the design of the whole being to bring us forth at last like the snowy sheet of paper; and not only so, but to impress upon us also the very thoughts of God, that we may thereafter circulate through the universe, “living epistles of Christ, known and read of all men.” “O the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” While the adaptations of natural life are comprehended under the term “Sophia,” or the wisdom of God, the adjustments of the spiritual life and its laws and development are what is called by the apostles the all-varied wisdom of God. I am sorry that I cannot translate the Greek word better—I know what it means, and what it does not mean. It does not mean that the manifestation of God which we call His wisdom is variegated like a Joseph’s coat of many colours, patched up out of many fabrics, both old and new, and often self-discordant, because the new agreeth not with the old. It does mean that there is an ever-changing diversity in the Divine wisdom and work which glows and gleams like a fine opal in the light, or like an ancient glass vessel from Cyprus or Phoenicia, when all the finer harmonies of the solar spectrum are unceasingly at play. And it is true of the Church as well as of the world that the Never-Changing One is to be sought in the Ever-Changing Many. That His wisdom should baffle our knowledge is what we have a right, a priori, to expect, and especially when we are contemplating it on the side where it seems to be many and not one.1 [Note: J. Rendel Harris, The Guiding Hand of God, 17. The God of Hegel is not the Big Man of the nursery imagination, making the Universe with His hands, as the child makes its mud-pies or its sand-castles. “We cannot suppose God making the world like a mason.” “God is spirit, and the life of spirit is thought. Creation, then, is thought also; it is the thought of God. God’s thought of the Creation is evidently the prius of the creation; but with God, to think must be to create, for He can require no wood-carpentry or stone-masonry for this purpose; or even should we suppose Him to use such, they must represent thought, and be disposed on thought.”2 [Note: James Hutchison Stirling, His Life and Work, 160. (3) His Goodness.—We may use the term goodness as a general expression to embrace the mercy, the compassion, the benignity, and the love of God. All the attributes of God culminate in love. God is first and last a God of love. The whole universe and the plan of redemption are summed up in love. It is the want of love, it is selfishness and hatred, that are the curse and woe of the world. God comes to fill up the sorrowful void with His own rich heart. Pre-eminently in the work of redemption do we see the riches of His goodness. There we behold God not only working and waiting, but making a great sacrifice for the salvation of man. We can never understand what it cost God to save the world. We read that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”; but how little do we know of all that lies in that declaration! How little do we know of the greatness of that gift and of the depth of that sacrifice! How little do we know of that mystery of sorrow which seems to enter into the very Godhead! “Despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance? but after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.” Salvation is not forgiveness of sin: it is not the remission of a penalty: it is not a safety. No, it is the blessed and holy purpose of God’s love accomplished in the poor fallen creature’s restoration to the Divine image. And to this end is the news of God’s love in this great work declared to men, that they hearing it may have confidence in Him who hath thus loved them, and so open their hearts to let in His Spirit. So we have no need now to go out of our nature to meet God, and to get the eternal life, for God is in our own flesh, and the eternal life is in our own flesh, and we have but to know this loving God, and the longings of His heart over us, and to give Him our confidence in order to receive His Spirit into us.1 [Note: Erskine of Linlathen.] O Slain for love of me, canst Thou be cold, Be cold and far away in my distress? Is Thy love also changed, growing less and less, That carried me through all the days of old? O Slain for love of me, O Love untold, See how I flag and fail through weariness: I flag, while sleepless foes dog me and press On me: behold, O Lord, O Love, behold! I am sick for home, the home of love indeed— I am sick for Love, that dearest name for Thee: Thou who hast bled, see how my heart doth bleed: Open thy bleeding Side and let me in: O hide me in Thy Heart from doubt and sin, O take me to Thyself and comfort me.2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.] Power in the Inward Man Literature Burrell (D. J.), The Religion of the Future, 13. Campbell (R. J.), Thursday Mornings at the City Temple, 210. Ewing (J. W.), The Undying Christ, 68. Ferguson (F.), Sermons, 190. Gibbon (J. M.), The Children’s Year, 230. Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, iii. 182. Maclaren (A.), Christ in the Heart, 1. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Ephesians, 132. Matheson (G.), Voices of the Spirit, 199. Murray (A.), The Full Blessing of Pentecost, 121. Murray (A.), Aids to Devotion, 62. Muspratt (W.), The Work and Power of the Holy Spirit, 24. Pulsford (J.), Christ and His Seed, 106. Raleigh (A.), The Way to the City, 1, 46. Ridding (G.), The Revel and the Battle, 151. Smith (H. A.), Things New and Old, 160. Spurgeon (C. H.), My Sermon-Notes, iv. 275. Tasker (J. G.), in Great Texts of the New Testament, 219. Vallings (J. F.), The Holy Spirit of Promise, 148. Winterbotham (R.), Sermons, 270. Christian World Pulpit, xiii. 88 (Gallaway); xxxii. 339 (White); xxxix. 379 (White). Church of England Pulpit, 1. 182 (Rainsford). Churchman’s Pulpit: Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, xii. 188 (Jobson), 192 (Cotton), 195 (Wright), 197 (Davies), 201 (Armstrong), 214 (Kempthorne), 216 (Heber). Keswick Week, 1905, p. 49 (Moore). The Love of Christ I bow my knees unto the Father … to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.—Ephesians 3:17-19. 1. These words, and the remarkable passage to which they belong, supply us with the keynote of the Apostle Paul’s life and letters and ministry. They show us how intensely he was permeated with and dominated by the love of Christ. It was not an idea that possessed him; neither was it a system. It was a Person, and that Person was Christ. It was not the life of Christ or the character of Christ that fascinated him; it was Christ Himself. Jesus Christ was the charm of his whole life: “To me to live is Christ.” St. Paul’s life was interpenetrated with Christ, so much so that he lost himself in Him: “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” I hardly know anything more disheartening than to read such a passage as this, and to feel while we read it how little our own hearts and thoughts answer to it. We see how St. Paul felt and thought. The words come glowing from his soul; he is lifted up above himself with the greatness, the inconceivable greatness, of the things he is talking of. His inward eye is fixed on the love of Christ to the world—on the wonderfulness of God’s counsels to men—on the height and depth, and length and breadth, which no one can measure, of what had just been made known of God’s feelings about them, and of His purposes towards them. And from the fullness of his heart his mouth speaks. We see that he is overflowing with the feelings produced by the contemplation of what Christ is and has done. His whole mind is alive to it. He speaks not by custom, or because it is right to magnify the Lord’s greatness, but because he cannot help it—he cannot restrain what he feels and thinks. And how differently do we read the words! There they are before us—words of fire and life, words which show that to him who spoke them the love of Christ was the most real, the nearest, the most absorbing thought in the world. Christ is not less to us than he was to St. Paul. But how often must we confess to ourselves that we have no feelings which answer to the Apostle’s manner of speaking; we cannot repeat them as the natural and unforced expression of our own feelings. There seems such a gulf between what we ought to feel and what we do fee, such a difference between the way in which the Gospel appeared to St. Paul and the way in which it appears to us. He found no difficulty in speaking worthily of his Master’s love; he passed from the outer scenes of ordinary life to the contemplation of Christ, and straightway his heart began to kindle and his tongue to speak. But we seem only able to touch, as it were, the outside shell of his words. We see, but do not feel, how excellent they are. They are such a contrast to the common thoughts of our life, they are so far above us, that we cannot enter into them.1 [Note: R. W. Church, Village Sermons, ii. 287. 2. This constitutes the third of the petitions in this great prayer of St. Paul’s, each of which rises above, and is a consequence of, the preceding, and leads on to, and is a cause or occasion of, the subsequent one. There are two thoughts in the petition: he prays that the Ephesians may be able to apprehend the love of Christ in its vast dimensions, and that they may have an experimental knowledge of it, though it passes knowledge. But the exposition of each clause by itself will be the best exposition of the whole text. I Rooted and Grounded in Love These two distinct conceptions “rooted” and “grounded” are frequently united in the Scriptures (as in Psalms 144:12, and 1 Corinthians 3:9). Two cognate conceptions—one borrowed from the processes of nature, and the other from human art—are employed to indicate at once the life, the growth, the strength, and the stability of a Christian’s hope. A tree and a tower are the material objects which are used here as alphabetic letters to express a spiritual thought. More particularly, as a tree depends for life and growth upon its roots being embedded in a genial soil, and a tower depends for strength and stability upon its foundation, the Apostle desires, by means of these conceptions, to express and illustrate the corresponding features of the Christian life. If disciples are compared to living trees, love is the soil they grow in; if they are compared to a building, love is the foundation on which it stands secure. The root is taken from the field of nature, the grounding or founding from the world of art. The root is laid in the soil to imbibe its virtues, the foundation is placed on its base to sustain the edifice. The root grows, and produces fruit, the foundation stands, and gives strength. The root needs continual supply, the foundation rests in its completeness, and abides always.1 [Note: J. Vaughan.] 1. Rooted.—We cast our affections down into the character and the Being of God; we wind them about His attributes; we strike them into His promises; we drive them deep into His faithfulness. There the roots of our affection lie. They take up, they drink in, the nature of the love they live in; they are always assimilating themselves to it, and they send up its sweet savour by little, silent threads, which are always running to the fountain of life. Our words, our actions, our whole outer being, cannot choose but mould itself to them, and take that love. Because of those secret processes of the roots which are in Christ, we love. We love simply because we are rooted in love. Most men, when they wish to be religious, begin by trying to give up certain things, and to do certain other actions. But there must be something that goes before that, else it is just as if you planted leaves without stems, or flowers without roots. The springs of life must be in their right places. The roots must be really in God. True religion does not consist so much in this thing, or that thing, as being always in a certain tone and atmosphere. The plant takes its character from the ground; the soul, from its inmost, deepest associations. There must be that behind whereby we are always making inspirations of love.2 [Note: Ibid.] In descending by one of the passes of the Alps into the lovely valley of the Saarnen, the traveller may notice on the right hand of the path a pine tree, growing in extraordinary circumstances. Enormous masses of hoary rock lie scattered in the bottom of the ravine. They have fallen from the crags which form its stupendous walls, and it is on the top of one of these, a bare, naked block, that the pine tree stands. No dwarf, misshapen thing, like the birch or mountain ash on an old castle wall, where the wind or passing bird had dropped the seed; it is a forest giant, with rugged trunk, and top that shoots a green pyramid to the skies. At first sight one wonders how a tree seated on the summit of a huge stone, raised above the soil, with no apparent means of living, could live at all, still more grow with such vigour as to defy the storms that sweep the pass, and the severe and long winters that reign over these solitudes. A nearer approach explains the mystery. Finding soil enough on the summit, where lichens had grown and decayed, to sustain its early age, it had thrown out roots which, while the top stretched itself to the light, lowered themselves down to the naked stone, feeling for earth and food. Touching the ground at length, they buried themselves in it to draw nourishment from its unseen but inexhaustible supplies, to feed the sapling into a giant tree.1 [Note: Thomas Guthrie.] 2. Grounded.—More than once in this Epistle to the Ephesians St. Paul uses the imagery of the foundations of a building to describe the foundations of a Christian life. Perhaps the reason was this. To any one entering Ephesus, the first object that would strike his eyes would be the splendid temple of Diana. There it stood, with its one hundred and seven pillars, each sixty feet high. All Asia had contributed to the building of it. Though its foundations were laid on marshy ground, years and years of patient labour had overcome all the natural difficulties of the place. So St. Paul, coming to Ephesus to supplant this false form of worship, felt that the Christian’s life must rest on a foundation as hidden, but as firm, as that of this heathen temple. That foundation-stone, he says, must be love. The grand foundation or ground of everything is love, God’s love. Because “God is love,” therefore His love goes forth to sinners. Because His love went forth to sinners, He provided a way by which He could restore sinners again to happiness and to Himself; and so Jesus died for them. And since Jesus died for sinners, therefore God chose us, drew us, pardoned us, spoke peace to us. And having loved us enough to do this, what will not the same love do, what prayer will He not hear, what good thing can He withhold, what undertaking will He not make for us, for time and for eternity? That is a foundation. It will support anything—any comfort, any work, any hope we ever choose to build upon it. It is like some mathematical proposition, which cannot be assailed, and the whole problem is actually contained within it, and only wants to be worked out. It stands to the soul like solid adamant to the whole temple—a foundation.1 [Note: J. Vaughan.] 3. In love.—The soil in which the living tree is planted is love. What is the love in which the trees of righteousness are rooted? Whether is it God’s love to man, or man’s love to God and to his brother? The question admits of an answer at once easily intelligible and demonstrably true. The love in which the roots of faith strike down for nourishment is not human but Divine. It is not even that grace which is sovereign and Divine in its origin but residing and acting in a renewed human heart; it is the attribute, and even the nature, of Deity, for “God is love.” The soil which bears and nourishes the new life of man is the love of God in the gift of His Son. It introduces an inextricable confusion of ideas to think of believers as trees rooted in their own love—an emotion that has its abode and its exercise within their own hearts. The roots of a man’s faith and hope must penetrate, not inward into the love he exercises, but outward into the love which is exercised towards him. The roots of a tree grow, not into the tree itself, but into an independent soil, which at once supports its weight and nourishes its life. In like manner a Christian’s faith does not lean and live upon anything within himself; it goes out and draws all its support from God’s love to sinners in the Gospel of His Son. According to the Catechism of the Westminster Assembly, “God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.” A very comprehensive and noble definition, no doubt! Yet did it never strike you as strange that there is no mention of love here? This appears a very remarkable omission—an omission as remarkable as if an orator who undertook to describe the firmament left out the sun; or an artist, in painting the human face, made it sightless, and gave no place on the canvas to those beaming eyes which impart to the countenance its life and expression. Why did an Assembly, for piety, learning, and talents, the greatest, perhaps, that ever met in England, or anywhere else, in that catalogue of the Divine attributes assign no place to love? Unless we are to understand the term “goodness” as comprehending love, the omission may be thus explained and illustrated: Take a globe and, observing their natural order, lay upon its surface the different hues of the rainbow; give it a rapid motion round its axis; and now the blue, red, yellow, and other colours vanish. As if by magic, the whirling sphere instantly changes into purest white, presenting to our eyes a visible, and to our understanding a palpable, proof that the sunbeam is not a simple but a compound body: thread spun of various rays, which, when blended into one, form what we call light. And may it not be that these divines make no distinct mention of love, just because they held that as all the separate colours blended together form light, so all the attributes acting together make love; and that thus, because God is just, wise, powerful, holy, good, and true, of necessity, therefore, and in the express words of John, “God is love”?1 [Note: Thomas Guthrie.] All vigorous life is a correspondence between organism and environment. If a tree is to be “rooted and grounded,” it must find, deep hidden in the soil, the materials it requires for its own substance. Otherwise, poverty in the soil will be reflected in its stunted branches, yellow leaves, and imperfect roots. Just so, if we are to be “rooted and grounded in love,” love must be the deepest ingredient in the soil in which our spiritual nature grows. The fact that men and women have become thus “rooted and grounded” that, by the exercise of faith, their characters have been “made perfect in love,” is thus the evidence of something more; it implies the presence of love in their spiritual environment.2 [Note: E. Grubb, The Personality of God, 124. It was manifest from her childhood, as almost invariably with those heroes and heroines of history who have been the lovers and leaders of mankind, that Florence Nightingale had special gifts and sympathies, and that she was inspired by a sacred ambition to use them for the alleviation of pain and sorrow. I remember a row of young palm-trees in Dr. Bennett’s garden at Mentone, and one of them was thrice the height of the rest. There was a tank of water five yards below, but the tree had reached it with its roots. So Florence, rooted and grounded in love, rose above her fellows.3 [Note: Dean Hole, Then and Now, 93. II Strong to Apprehend 1. It requires strength, says Paul, to lay hold of the love of God. Some of us might, perhaps, fancy that it would have been more appropriate had he said, “weak enough to lay hold.” For faith, we have come to imagine, is a characteristic of weak rather than of strong souls—a quality by which we forgo the strength of our reason, and passively accept that which mere authority lays upon us. But we shall look in vain for any sanction in St. Paul’s thoughts for the opposition we fancy to exist between faith and reason. Their operation he never brings into contrast. What he does contrast is faith and sight. The spiritual realities, he tells us, are those that “eye saw not, and ear heard not, and which entered not into the heart of man” (1 Corinthians 2:9). The exercise of faith is for him of similar quality to the vigorous use of the mind, when we are striving with all our force to master some difficult problem that confronts us. He recognizes that the love of God is hidden and elusive, that it can be “laid hold of” only by strenuous effort. 2. The word translated “ye may be strong” is found scarcely anywhere else; Paul found it hard to discover a word to express his meaning; it implies the putting forth of our best powers to do something that is extremely difficult, or almost impossible,—and doing it successfully. But, while Paul is as far as possible from suggesting that the love of God can be “laid hold of” by weak and passive acceptance of a dogma, he does, it is clear, maintain that the faith which “lays hold” is not simply identical with the use of our reasoning faculty. What is the condition of its effective exercise? He does not say, “that ye, being furnished with complete knowledge,” or “that ye, having your intelligence sharpened to the utmost,” may be strong enough to apprehend; but “that ye, being rooted and grounded in love.” The condition of the vigorous exercise of faith is, for him, not intellectual mainly, but ethical. He knew, like his Master before him, that it is the pure in heart who see; the eye that is single that is full of light; the doing of the will of God that yields knowledge about the teaching. If we are to know the love that is above us, it will be through the experience of love within us. 3. Thus there are certain conditions to be observed that we may be strong to apprehend the love of Christ in its vastness. (1) There must be the reception of Christ into the heart by faith.—He that is rooted and grounded in love because Christ dwells in his heart will be strengthened to know the love in which he is rooted. The Christ within us will know the love of Christ. We must first “taste,” and then we shall “see” that the Lord is good, as the Psalmist puts it with deep truth. First the appropriation and feeding upon God, then the clear perception by the mind of the sweetness in the taste. First the enjoyment; then the reflection on the enjoyment. First the love; then the consciousness of the love of Christ possessed and the love to Christ experienced. The heart must be grounded in love that the man may know the love which passeth knowledge. What is the beginning of everything? “That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.” There is the gate through which you and I may come, and by which we must come, if we are to come at all, into the possession and perception of Christ’s great love. Here is the path of knowledge. First of all there must be the simple historical knowledge of the facts of Christ’s life and death for us, with the Scripture teaching of their meaning and power. And then we must turn these truths from mere notions into life. It is not enough to know the love that God has to us, in that lower sense of the word “knowledge.” Many of you know that, who never got any blessing out of it all your days, and never will unless you change. Besides the “knowing” there must be the “believing” of the love. You must translate the notion into a living fact in your experience. You must pass from the simple work of understanding the Gospel to the higher act of faith. You must not be contented with knowing, you must trust. And if you have done that all the rest will follow, and the little, narrow, low doorway of humble self-distrusting faith, through which a man creeps on his knees, leaving outside all his sin and his burden, opens out into the temple palace: the large place in which Christ’s love is imparted to the soul.1 [Note: A. Maclaren, Christ in the Heart, 32. (2) There must be meditation on the love of Christ.—We have the same knowledge that St. Paul had of the love of Christ which passeth knowledge. And yet what a different thing was this love to him and to us. Is it possible for us ever to realize it as he did; ever to have the feelings towards it which in him stirred up the depths of his soul, and burst out as naturally from his lips as water does from a spring? And if it is possible—and who can doubt it?—why is it that St. Paul’s strong words seem to us so strange, so hopelessly above us? One reason is that we think so little about it. We hear, and read, and talk, but we do not think. When we hear of our Lord’s wonderful doings, we do not take the thought away with us and consider it, consider what it means and what it comes to. We never turn it about in our minds as we do the ways and doings of men among whom we live. Love is not a thing of enthusiastic emotion. It is a rich, strong, manly, vigorous expression of the whole round Christian character,—the Christlike nature in its fullest development. To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love for ever is to live for ever.1 [Note: Henry Drummond.] The joy of heaven is the joy of love. The key to it is in Christ, who for the joy that was set before Him endured all. Christ’s was the joy of self-sacrifice, of loving, of saving, of giving up His life to another. But this is no joy save to those who love.2 [Note: James Hinton.] (3) But above everything, if we would understand and feel our Master’s love, we must have something of His Spirit.—Most truly is it said that love is the key and interpreter of love. It is difficult to sympathize with and to enter into it if we are unlike it in our heart and mind. We may for a while be charmed and overcome by some great display of nobleness and unselfishness; we may for a moment be lifted up by the admiration of it, and the wish to be like it, when we read of a man clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, tending the sick, risking his life in pestilence or shipwreck for his fellow-men. But these feelings will pass away, unless we are in reality, and not only in the moment of excitement, like those we admire. They will pass away and leave us dull, and dry, and cold, to what calls upon our love. The story of Christ’s love is too old, and too well known, and too familiar, ever to make an impression on us now, unless we have it in our hearts to wish to have something of His love in us. If “Christ dwell in your hearts by faith,” you will be “rooted and grounded in love,” and as a consequence you will be able to comprehend spiritual things. A noble passage from the Philippians should be quoted here: “God is my witness, how greatly I long after you all in the [motherly] affections of Christ Jesus. And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in full knowledge and in all perception; that you may distinguish the things which transcend.” Love, then, according to the Apostle, is the ground and mother of the perceptive faculty. Without fire there can be no effulgence or radiance. As is the fire, will be the radiance. The source of mental illumination is the Son of God in the heart. It was surely inspiration which moved Paul to pray that his friends might be rooted and grounded in love in order that they might be able to comprehend the mysteries of their faith; but it was also pure philosophy. This I pray, that more and yet more you may abound in the spirit of love; that you may advance unto the full recognition and discernment of Heavenly things. “Love is the key which opens all the secrets of faith.”1 [Note: John Pulsford, Christ and His Seed, 117. When the American civil war was going on, a mother received the news that her boy had been wounded in the battle of the Wilderness. She took the first train, and started for her boy; although an order had gone forth from the War Department that no more women should be admitted within the lines. But a mother’s love knows nothing about orders; so she managed by tears and entreaties to get through the lines to the Wilderness. At last she found the hospital where her boy was. Then she went to the doctor and she said: “Will you let me go to the ward and nurse my boy?” The doctor said: “I have just got your boy to sleep: he is in a very critical state; and I am afraid if you wake him up the excitement will be so great that it will carry him off. You had better wait awhile, and remain without until I tell him that you have come, and break the news gradually to him.” The mother looked into the doctor’s face and said: “Doctor, supposing my boy does not wake up, and I should never see him alive! Let me go and sit down by his side: I won’t speak to him.” “If you will not speak to him you may do so.” She crept to the cot and looked into the face of her boy. How she had longed to look at him. How her eyes seemed to be feasting as she gazed upon his countenance! When she got near enough she could not keep her hand off; she laid that tender, loving hand upon his brow. The moment the hand touched the forehead of her boy, he, without opening his eyes, cried out: “Mother, you have come!” He knew the touch of that loving hand. There was love and sympathy in it.2 [Note: D. L. Moody, The Way to God, 19. III With All the Saints 1. The definition of a saint here implied is that it is one who has apprehended something, rather than one who has attained a great reputation for sanctity by asceticism or noble deeds; one whose mental conception, whose capacity for thought, has become so quickened and enlarged as to enable him to realize a great idea, which so possesses him that holiness follows naturally. And St. Paul’s prayer for his converts is that they too may in a measure possess this widened apprehension, which will link them to all saints. 2. Of what advantage is it to apprehend the extent of Christ’s love with all the saints? There are several advantages. (1) It encourages sanctity in us.—For our knowledge of the love of Jesus Christ depends largely on our sanctity. If we are pure we shall know. If we were wholly devoted to Him we should wholly know His love to us, and in the measure in which we are pure and holy we shall know it. This heart of ours is like a reflecting telescope, the least breath upon the mirror of which will cause all the starry sublimities that it should shadow forth to fade and become dim. The slightest moisture in the atmosphere, though it be quite imperceptible where we stand, will be dense enough to shut out the fair, shining, snowy summits that girdle the horizon and to leave nothing visible but the lowliness and commonplaces of the prosaic plain. Those who desire to walk with Christ must try to wear the white robes of a purity that goes down to the depths of the heart, must seek to bring into captivity every thought to His obedience. How can this be done? We aim at a perfect mark, and always fail to reach it. But God will not allow us to be satisfied with anything lower than perfect holiness, so we continue our efforts in spite of failure. The Word of God is severe in its demands; but, though it is a sharp sword, that cuts down and lays bare the deepest motives hidden in the heart, it is with the “merciless severity of merciful love.”1 [Note: Dora Farncomb, The Vision of His Face, 21. Personal holiness is the first and foremost tribute which we owe to the Holy Spirit, for the Master’s use, and we are to offer Him no other service until this be paid. Pharnaces, says the Roman historian, sent to Cζsar the present of a diadem, while he was yet rebelling against his throne. Cζsar returned it with this sententious and admonitory message, “First of all yield obedience, and then make presents.” The truth of this message is addressed by the Holy Spirit to every Christian and to every church.2 [Note: T. W. Jenkyn.] (2) It brings us the joy of fellowship.—In two ways does Christ give man his true place. He sets him alone beside God, as a son beside his Father, and shows him the indefeasible worth of his own soul, worth potential if not actual; for do not the angels of God sing for joy over even one sinner that repenteth? But He also sets him in a fellowship. For with cords of love He has been drawing after Him, throughout the long centuries, a great multitude which no man can number; and all who are drawn of Him should have fellowship one with another. As I am bound by the tenderest ties to the God who created me for His service, and the Saviour who redeemed me, so I am bound by bonds as strong as they are invisible to all who have ever loved the Lord and shared the redemption which He wrought. It is not good, it is not possible, for man to be alone. To be alone is to die. We are born for fellowship; and our religion satisfies this deep need of our nature by bringing us into a society, a kingdom, a church. We look into the friendly faces of those who worship with us, and we are strong. In the highest utterances of each man’s faith, or in the best moments of his life, Stanley rejoiced to find the common ground of religious feeling or spiritual aspiration. He delighted to collect instances of such expressions from the most varied quarters. It was a Spanish Roman Catholic who said, “Many are the roads by which God carries His own to heaven.” It was the venerable patriarch of German Catholic theology, Dr. Dφllinger, who said that theology must “transform her mission from a mission of polemics into a mission of irenics; which, if it be worthy of the name, must become a science, not, as heretofore, for making war, but for making peace, and thus bring about that reconciliation of Churches for which the whole civilized world is longing.” In their loftiest moods of inspiration, the Catholic Thomas ΰ Kempis, the Puritan Milton, the Anglican Keble, rose above their peculiar tenets, and “above the limits that divide denominations, into the higher regions of a common Christianity.” It was the Baptist Bunyan who taught the world that there was “a common ground of communion, which no difference of external rites could efface.” It was the Moravian Gambold who wrote: The man That could surround the sum of things, and spy The heart of God and secrets of His empire, Would speak but love. With love the bright result Would change the hue of intermediate things, And make one thing of all theology. It was “the Bloody Advocate, Mackenzie,” who, whatever his illiberality of action, rose to true liberality of thought when he said, “I am none of those who acknowledge no temples but in their own heads. To chalk out the bordering lines of the Church militant is beyond the geography of my religion.” It was Dr. Chalmers who, in the very heat of the great Disruption of the Scottish Church in 1843, asked the question, “Who cares about any Church, but as an instrument of Christian good?” It was the Scotch Episcopalian, Archbishop Leighton, who declared that “the mode of Church government is unconstrained; but peace and concord, kindness and good-will, are indispensable.” It was the founder of Irish Presbyterianism (Edward Bryce) who insisted most on “the life of Christ in the heart, and the light of His Word and Spirit on the mind.” It was Zwinglius who loved to dwell on “the meeting in the presence of God of every blessed spirit, every holy character, every faithful soul that has existed from the beginning of the world even to the consummation thereof.” It was the “main, fundamental, overpowering principle” of Wesley’s life, not to promote particular doctrines, but to “elevate the whole Christian world in the great principles of Christian holiness and morality.” It was the solemn proclamation of a message of “unity and comprehension”—“in necessary things unity, in doubtful things liberty, in all things charity”—which Richard Baxter carried to “a stormy and divided age,” that gave the great Non-conformist leader his pre-eminence. This was the spirit in which Stanley delighted to see men rise above the spirit of parties.1 [Note: R. E. Prothero, The Life of Dean Stanley, ii. 242. (3) It secures completeness of apprehension.—St. Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians is that they may apprehend the whole extent of the love of Christ. Individually they might see one or more aspects of that love: what they needed, what he wanted, was to see Christ as all the saints saw Him. He wanted to see with this saint the righteousness of Christ, with that saint His mercy. He wanted to see with this other saint the crucified Christ, with that other the glorified Christ. Here was a saint who saw Christ as the reformer of social things—Paul wanted to know that Christ; here was another who saw Him as the King of Glory and the Lord of heaven—Paul wished to see Christ as this. His desire for these Ephesians was that they should not have a partial Christ, but the whole Christ, What Paul seems to say is that no individual saint has apprehended the whole Christ. No single individual has been large enough to apprehend Him: else were that saint greater than Christ. No; to know what Christ is we must seek to apprehend what all the saints have known. This saint has seen this in Him, that saint has seen another aspect. To apprehend Him we must strive to know what all the saints know. The richest individual life is poor in comparison with the manifold experience of “all the saints.” Of the Churches which call themselves catholic, what can compare in catholicity with that which includes all the saints, and places at the disposal of every struggling soul, for its guidance and inspiration, all the wise thoughts with which they have ever been visited, all the heroic endurance, even unto death, with which they have sealed their testimony, all their love, hope, faith, joy, triumph, all their vision of eternal things unseen?1 [Note: J. E. McFadyen, The Divine Pursuit, 123. One mighty intellect of Newton may sketch the plan of the solar system; one Laplace may demonstrate its permanent equilibrium; one Herschel map out the nebulζ of the southern sky; one Dalton unfold the laws of atomic combination; one Darwin assign the clue to the partial unfolding of the mystery of successive lives in nature. But no single soul is capable of comprehending the love of Christ, for the vision and experience of each is limited, and in morals we are members one of another. God has gifts which He bestows on the solitary students of Divine truth, and gifts which He bestows on His solitary petitioners in the closet or under the fig-tree. But, in general, the law of understanding the love of Christ is united study, united work, united conference, united prayer.2 [Note: Edward White.] In considering Christ, His character and work, men in various ways grasp special aspects of it. They are fascinated by Him in various fashions; and when they see Christ, they often see Him in one particular way. We cannot discuss fully these various ways; all we can do is just to notify a few of them; you can add to their number. One man looks at Jesus Christ and what he especially sees is His tenderness, the sympathy He extends to sinners; his neighbour looks at Christ and what he especially sees is His righteousness; but another looks at Jesus Christ and he sees Him as a social reformer; thousands to-day see Christ especially as the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world. Christians meet at the Cross; it is the centre of the Church. Christ dying for men that they might be free from the thraldom of sin and be reconciled to God fascinates them. Then there are others who, while seeing the Cross and glorying in it, pass beyond Golgotha and Olivet to the throne of God, and see Christ as the reigning Lord of heaven and earth under the Father, who has subjected all things to Him, and they see Him especially as the King who shall come again to rule the earth. They say: “You must not look alone upon Calvary. The Christ who hung there has ascended on high and will come again; you must see the coming as well as the dying Christ.” The future to them explains the past; and they are wondrously drawn by the vision of the returning Christ. So do men in various ways fix and fasten their attention on various aspects of Jesus Christ, of what He was and is; and to the superficial they may seem to contradict and deny each other. The one may seem to believe in a different Christ from the Christ the other believes in; but, nevertheless, it is one Christ in whom they believe.1 [Note: J. A. Davies, Seven Words of Love, 141. IV The Breadth and Length and Height and Depth 1. “The breadth and length and height and depth”—of what? Paul does not say; but the words that follow make it practically certain that what he is thinking of is the Divine personality, the Divine character, the Divine love. His thought seems to run parallel with that in the Fourth Gospel: “This is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ” (John 17:3). 2. The Apostle, then, in his prayer not only seeks that the spiritual building may be strong, divinely possessed and firmly grounded; but in his enlarged vision of what the believer may have, he teaches us to pray for an all-comprehending and experimental knowledge of the love of Christ, that ye “may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth; and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” The temple is made strong by the almighty power of the Spirit; Christ dwells in it; the foundation is settled and sure, and now he proceeds to its geometrical proportions of breadth and length, height and depth. 3. It has been said that Paul’s thought was something like this. From that old captivity of his in Rome, his mind went away, carried him to the Ζgean Sea, whose blue waters lay in beauty about the yellow sands of the Ephesian shore; and, looking in thought upon the land, he seemed to see a mighty castle, a splendid fortress. It stood out above the landscape as if with conscious pride, as if it knew it was the master of the coast and country. There it was, beautiful, strong, capacious, majestic. But would all men look at it alike? Paul thought that every one looking upon it would not give the same judgment about it; not that they would disagree about any part of it, but each would be so struck by one part of it as almost to neglect the rest. Let us imagine ourselves on board of a ship on that Ζgean Sea; then, as we mix with those on board, let us go to some of them and ask them: “What do you see in that castle? What is your vision of it?” It is true that it is one castle, but, yet, what do men see in it? We go to one and we look at his mind, and we ask: “What do you see in that castle?” And he in reply says: “What magnificent breadth it has! Just look what a grand space of soil it covers! I cannot loose my mind from thinking how vast it is.” We go to another and he says: “See the length of it! Look at the front it presents to this sea! What magnificent shelter and defence against inroad from the sea!” And we go to another and he says: “See the height of its walls! Who can scale those? The houses of yonder city, compared with it, are as pigmies beside a giant!” And if you go to another, he sees the unseen. He feels the majesty of the height, but if those walls are high, they must also be deep, he thinks. Ere that castle could stand, he knows there must be firm foundations; the walls must be going down deep. It is the mystery of their depth that he is thinking of.1 [Note: J. A. Davies, Seven Words of Love, 138. How many men and women have sung about this temple, and have revelled in its strength and glory. Let us listen to one or two:— O love how deep, how broad, how high! It fills the heart with ecstasy That Christ, the Son of God, should take Our mortal form, for mortals’ sake. And here is another singer:— Jesus, Thy love unbounded, So full, so sweet, so free, Leaves all our thoughts confounded Whene’er we think of Thee. And here is a word of Samuel Rutherford which he wrote to Matthew Mowat when Mowat was in great distress: “I would not wish a better stock, while salvation be my stock, than to live upon credit at Christ’s hands, daily borrowing. Surely running-over love—that vast, huge, boundless love of Christ which will try the skill of men and angels to tell—is the only thing I most fain would be in hands with. He knoweth that I have little of love beyond that love; and that I shall be happy, suppose I never get another heaven but only an eternal lasting feast on that love. Christ, all the seasons of the year, is dropping sweetness. If I had vessels I might fill them; but my old, riven and running-out dish, even when I am at the well, can bring little away.… How little of the sea can a child carry in his hand! As little do I take away of my great sea, my boundless and running-over Christ Jesus.”1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in The British Congregationalist, Jan. 28, 1909. (1) The Breadth.—Think of the love of Christ in its breadth. It is broad as the necessities of the world and as the expanse of the nations of the earth. It embraces all men—both Jews and Gentiles, the inhabitants of the Old World and those of the New, and men of all ages and generations. The Lord Jesus Christ, “by the grace of God, tasted death for every man,” and His gospel is to be preached to “every creature.” The great salvation is free as the air or the sunlight. Jesus unfolded the breadth and comprehensiveness of His love when He told His townsmen in His first sermon at Nazareth what He had come into the world to do. He came to pity and help the poor, and they are the world’s sad majority in every age; He came to succour the broken-hearted, the captives, the blind, the bruised, and such-like. And does not every Gospel invitation bear upon the face of it the evidence of the boundless breadth of Jesus’ love? “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else.” “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” “Let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” The conception of Christ by the Church is larger than that of any specific Church. He is in each, but is fuller and finer than any one of them represents Him to be. It is the Church universal which bodies forth the Christ, which reincarnates Him. Churches have their “family-likeness.” We mean by family-likeness, that each face in a family has much in common with the others, yet its own individual character. Galton made interesting experiments with the portraits of the members of a family who had family-likeness, and found that when the portraits were cast one upon the other, so as to get a kind of “composite photograph,” the result was not a blur and a blotch, but a new face, which was like each, but different from all. Churches have their family-likeness; put them all together and you get a new face, the face of Christ, which is like each, yet finer and grander than any one of them shows Him to be. I must know what all the saints see Him to be ere I know Him.1 [Note: J. A. Davies, Seven Words of Love, 144. So long as I have a good conscience towards God, and have His sun to shine on me, and can hear the birds singing, I can walk across the earth with a joyful and free heart. Let them call me “broad.” I desire to be broad as the charity of Almighty God, who maketh His sun to shine on the evil and the good; who hateth no man, and who loveth the poorest Hindoo more than all their committees or all their Churches. But while I long for that breadth of charity, I desire to be narrow—narrow as God’s righteousness, which as a sharp sword can separate between eternal right and eternal wrong.2 [Note: Norman MacLeod, D.D., ii. 373. At Pretoria the town council has passed regulations forbidding the natives riding with white people on the trams; they must confine themselves to the occasional car which runs for coloured people only. They must not walk in the general park, or buy stamps in the general hall of the post office, or walk on the side pavements of the streets. So, you see, ordinary love has very severe limitations, and is apt to be very exclusive. Racial barriers impede it. Social barriers can check its flow. Ecclesiastical barriers can imprison it. But not so with the love of the Lord. It is not a little barricaded pool, but is like a tide, rolling in and obliterating the petty bulwarks of isolation built along the shore.3 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in The British Congregationalist, Jan. 28, 1909. There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, Like the wideness of the sea; There’s a kindness in His justice, Which is more than liberty. There is no place where earth’s sorrows Are more felt than up in heaven; There is no place where earth’s failings Have such kindly judgment given.… For the love of God is broader Than the measures of man’s mind; And the Heart of the Eternal Is most wonderfully kind. If our love were but more simple, We should take Him at His word; And our lives would be all sunshine In the sweetness of our Lord.1 [Note: F. W. Faber.] (2) The Length.—To what length will the love of Christ go? There is many a runner who is good for a hundred yards, but who fails at the mile. There is many a soldier who is good at a battle, but who fails at the campaign. There is many an oarsman who is fine at a spurt, but faints at the long spin. “Ye did run well; what did hinder you?” They failed at the length. To what length can we go in our loving? When we begin to help a man, how far can we go with him? If we take up a bit of hard social service what is our staying power? It is well to ask questions like these before we turn to the Lord. For here is the way in which “the length” is described in the Word of God: “Having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.” “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” “Having begun a good work in you, he will perfect it.” Whenever the love of the Lord Jesus begins a ministry He never lays it down until He can say “It is finished.” “Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?—I say not unto thee, Until seven times; but, Until seventy times seven.”—So said the Christ, multiplying perfection into itself twice—two sevens and a ten—in order to express the idea of boundlessness. And the law that He laid down for His servant is the law that binds Himself. What is the length of the love of Christ? Here is one measure of it,—howsoever long drawn out my sin may be, this is longer; and the white line of His love runs out into infinity, far beyond the point where the black line of my sin stops.2 [Note: A. Maclaren, Christ in the Heart, 45. The strength of affection is a proof not of the worthiness of the object, but of the largeness of the soul which loves. Love descends, not ascends. The might of a river depends not on the quality of the soil through which it passes, but on the inexhaustibleness and depth of the spring from which it proceeds. The greater mind cleaves to the smaller with more force than the other to it. A parent loves the child more than the child loves the parent; and partly because the parent’s heart is larger, not because the child is worthier. The Saviour loved His disciples infinitely more than His disciples loved Him, because His heart was infinitely larger.1 [Note: F. W. Robertson.] (3) The Height.—What is the height of His love? For love can have very small ambitions. A mother’s love for her boy may soar no higher than wealth, or power, or distinction. And her love for her girl may be nothing but a desire that she be graceful, beautiful, admired, and that she may marry well and get a comfortable home. Love’s aim always determines its height. You remember that word of Macaulay’s mother: “I must have the wisdom of my child acknowledged by the angels before an assembled world.” There is height. But turn to the height of the Lord’s love: “I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am.” It was the goal of His love that we should share His glory, and become “heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.” It is the supreme quest of His love that we should sit with Him “in heavenly places,” and partake with Him in all the fullness of grace. What we here can know or conceive of the heights of God may be to us like an infinite mountain-peak, eternally ascending above the highest-winged flight of created holiness and power—so that angel and archangel to Him are but like eagle or bright-winged insect which behold the snowy heights, still fixedly soaring, where their pinions and their very atmosphere fail. And yet if such a parable must be dwarfed into nothingness when once our parted spirits have caught one glimpse of God as He is; then, again, St. Paul may well pray that even here we may be able to grasp something for ourselves of what that height of God is, lest we should never exclaim—“He is beyond my utmost conception; and so I ever can know Him, never can love what is so separate from me. He is to me unknowable, unthinkable. He is to me as if He were not.” Lest height should thus separate our souls from Him, He makes us know that His high Eternity is summed up, and shortly rendered in His love; and that love, though it be only ours, has a right to know love, though it be God’s; a right to appropriate it, a right to dwell in Him, and in Him to advance for ever.1 [Note: E. W. Benson, Living Theology, 7. (4) The Depth.—The love of Christ is profound as the uttermost abyss of human sin and wretchedness. We begin to see “the depth of the riches” of it when we reflect on the marvel that the Lord should have loved us at all. His love was not caused by anything in us, otherwise He could never have loved us. The natural condition of His people is unlovely and even loathsome in His sight. We recognize this when we look unto the rock whence we are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence we are digged. But that vast, measureless love of His has gone away down far deeper than the lowest depths of human sin, “and underneath are the everlasting arms.” Our love is so often only a narrow sentiment; we can so easily touch the bottom. It shines and shimmers like a white shore, but we can sail nothing in it. It is wanting in depth and therefore is lacking in deepness of ministry. Now turn to the Lord: O love of God how deep and great, Far deeper than man’s deepest hate. Let us lay hold of that most tremendous line. Let us grip it, or, better still, let it grip us. Take our own deepest hate, or the hate of any fiercely hating man whom we have known—deep, black, secretive and malignant as hell! And God’s love is deeper than that! “He descended into hell.” Yes, and He is still doing it! Some of us would never have been found unless He had found us there. We sometimes say of a man who has lost his heritage, and who would fain fill himself with the husks that the swine do eat, “He’s got very low!” Yes, but the love of the Lord can go lower and deeper still. The vilest wretch who crawls the earth to-day may have the everlasting arms beneath him. He came from on high to suffer and die, To save a poor sinner like me.2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in The British Congregationalist, Jan. 28, 1909. The puzzle which baffles faith is, How can Christ understand and sympathize with man when He has never sinned? The monumental pile of righteousness that pillars the church and maintains social respectability may tell me what I ought to be. He may quote all the maxims and mottoes of virtue, and repeat the commandments and denounce the “exceeding sinfulness of sin,” and thank God that he is “not as other men are,” but what does he know about my conflict? His ravings about virtue do not help me; they depress and discourage and enrage me. ’Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for! My flesh, that I seek In the Godhead! I seek a Saviour who knows my road, not from His study of geography, but because He has travelled it. How can Christ do this when He has never sinned? He does it by the power of love. This is the miracle love works. It enables us to enter fully into all the struggles and aspirations of those we love. It so thoroughly puts our life into accord with another’s that we are not only able to sympathize with what he suffers and enjoys, but we find it impossible not to do so. Love cannot escape this vicarious participation.1 [Note: J. I. Vance, Tendency, 71. V To Know the Love of Christ 1. The true man desires to know, to understand, to apprehend. He is one who feels that the world is full of an attraction to his mind, to which he must yield, or forfeit his name of man. And there is nowhere a sweeter, more charming picture than that of a man who is a humble, eager student, filled with high thoughts and earnest ambitions; a man who can live “laborious days” and despise the common pleasures of the crowd; he is one who has kinship with the skies, and lives on the high places of the world. Browning, in one of his poems, “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” gives us a wonderful picture of a man eager and heroic in his quest after knowledge, and determined to strive to the last hour of his earthly life. They are now going to bury him—where? The appropriate country for such a man is not the “unlettered plain,” but “a tall mountain, citied to the top, crowded with culture!” He belonged to the morning: his body must rest near the stars. And as the funeral cortege winds up the heights, we are given the picture of the man and his majestic quest. Men did not know him for a long time: “long he lived nameless.” We leave work for play, but he was a man who “left play for work, and grappled with the world, bent on escaping,” and when he was pitied, he “stepped on with pride over men’s pity.” Many of us begin a book, but do not read it from cover to cover; but when this man got the scroll of a bard or sage, he “straight got by heart that book to its last page.” But some one would be ready to say: “Why trouble thus over books? Why burden the soul? This is the time to taste life! Up with the curtain!” “No,” he would say; “even though I have read the crabbed text, still there is the comment. Most or least, painful or easy, these are not to be thought of by me. I must know all that books can give me.” But men said: “Time passes! Live now or never!” And yet this was his grand intent— That before living he’d learn how to live— No end to learning; Earn the means first—God surely will contrive Use for our earning. But is not life passing? Is it not very brief? No, “Man has Forever.” And so he laboured lovingly on, his mind dragging the body after it, and in that dragging the body suffered. He was fierce as a dragon for knowledge, and believed great undertakings have slow profits. Life is too brief to see them. As the poet says:— That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it; This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. And this man struggled on, was struggling at the last. When the rattle was in his throat,— So, with the throttling hands of death at strife, Ground he at grammar; Still, thro’ the rattle, parts of speech were rife: While he could stammer. He was struggling with the unsolved problems of grammar, even though, as Browning vividly tells us, he was Dead from the waist down. What a zeal for knowledge had that man! What an unquenchable thirst! What an imperious hunger for knowledge! Where ought such a man to be buried? Why, on the top of the mountain; the top peak! And so Browning sings, “Here”—on the mountain top— Here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, Lightnings are loosened, Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm, Peace let the dew send! Lofty designs must close in like effects: Loftily lying, Leave him—still loftier than the world suspects, Living and dying.1 [Note: J. A. Davies, Seven Words of Love, 134. 2. Paul was a man who wanted to know—to know the highest things. His soul was athirst for the highest, purest knowledge, even the knowledge of Christ and His love. And, like the true scholar, he wanted others to know and to know from others. He made it his business in life, next to knowing for himself, to make others know, to be their teacher, Some years ago—it is a good many years now—there was a lady, with a little girl of some three summers, travelling by coach in England from one town to another, and a young man got into the coach who was exceedingly clever; in fact, he thought himself so clever that he might dispense with all belief in the Bible and in God; and young as he was, he was the head of an infidel club in a certain city, whither he was then going to preside over their annual dinner that night. As the coach rolled on, the little girl became talkative, and soon she climbed up on the young man’s knee, when to amuse her he showed her his penknife, and she liked that, and became quite at home. A few minutes before the coach stopped, she looked up in his face, and in a loud, clear voice she said to him, so that every one in the coach heard it, “Does ’oo love God? Does ‘oo?” She was only three years old, remember. “Does ’oo love God?”2 [Note: G. C. Grubb, The Light of His Countenance, 32. 3. What is this love of Christ? (1) It is a forgiving love.—St. Paul in all his Epistles evinces extreme sensitiveness with regard to sin, and his own personal sin. He had felt its galling bondage, its crushing burden, its withering curse. He had been “a blasphemer, a persecutor, and injurious.” He had felt himself to be “carnal, sold under sin.” He calls himself the “chief” of sinners. But now for a long time Christ had been revealed to him as his personal Saviour. His faith rested upon the “obedience unto death” of the Son of God in his stead. His conscience reposed on the righteousness of Christ, and his heart was drawn by the magnet of Christ’s love. St. Paul’s attachment to Christ was enthusiasm for a personal Redeemer. It was a sense of redemption that made the Apostle what he now was. He never forgot that he was a poor sinner saved by Divine grace, and the thought bound his heart to his Saviour. He felt that it was a wonderful love that had redeemed him, and all the currents of his soul kept flowing with tremendous energy towards his Redeemer. I am reminded of the incident of a boy who had been tried by court-martial and ordered to be shot. The hearts of the father and mother were broken when they heard the news. In that home was a little girl. She had read the life of Abraham Lincoln, and she said: “Now, if Abraham Lincoln knew how my father and mother loved their boy, he would not let my brother be shot.” She wanted her father to go to Washington to plead for his boy. But the father said: “No; there is no use; the law must take its course. They have refused to pardon one or two who have been sentenced by that court-martial, and an order has gone forth that the President is not going to interfere again; if a man has been sentenced by court-martial he must suffer the consequences.” That father and mother had not faith to believe that their boy might be pardoned. But the little girl was strong in hope; she got on the train away up in Vermont, and started off to Washington. When she reached the White House the soldiers refused to let her in; but she told her pitiful story, and they allowed her to pass. When she got to the Secretary’s room, where the President’s private secretary was, he refused to allow her to enter the room where the President was. But the little girl told her story, and it touched the heart of the private secretary; so he passed her in. As she went into Abraham Lincoln’s room, there were United States senators, generals, governors, and leading politicians, who were there upon important business about the war; but the President happened to see that child standing at the door. He wanted to know what she wanted, and she went right to him and told her story in her own language. He was a father, and the great tears trickled down Abraham Lincoln’s cheeks. He wrote a dispatch and sent it to the army to have that boy sent to Washington at once. When he arrived, the President pardoned him, gave him thirty days’ furlough, and sent him home with the little girl to cheer the hearts of the father and mother.1 [Note: D. L. Moody, The Way to God, 20. (2) It is a transforming love.—It is a love that makes all things new, for St. Paul says, “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. And all things are of God.” God wants to transform us. Transformation gives a man a new character, a new life, a new nature, and the Gospel is a gospel of transformation, not a gospel of reformation. At one of the missions last December there was a young man with whom the Spirit of God had been striving. Three times in one day he came up to the rectory drunk, and then we had prayer with him, and he gave himself to the Lord Jesus Christ. The next day he came up to the house in order to get a Bible, and one of the ladies who had seen him the day before came up to me and said, “Mr. Grubb, are you quite sure that that is the same man who was here yesterday?” And I said, “Yes, the same man, only he is a new creature in Christ Jesus to-day.”2 [Note: G. C. Grubb, The Light of His Countenance, 27. (3) It is a restoring love.—The most sorrowful condition of soul in the world is that of a backslider, for a backslider can be satisfied with nothing; he cannot be satisfied with the world; he cannot be satisfied with sin; and he is not satisfied with Jesus. He knows what Christ was once to him; he knows that at one time in his life he used to love to pray; he knows that at one time in his life the society of Jesus was a reality to him; he knows that at one time in his life the Word of God used to speak to his heart; but all that has passed; Christ is a misty shadow to him now, if, indeed, there be such a person at all. Yet God is near, watching all the while over His wayward one, yearning for his return and using means to bring him back. Love for all! and can it be? Can I hope it is for me? I, who strayed so long ago, Strayed so far, and fell so low? I, the disobedient child, Wayward, passionate, and wild; I, who left my Father’s home In forbidden ways to roam! I, who spurned His loving hold; I, who would not be controlled; I, who would not hear His call; I, the wilful prodigal. To my Father can I go?— At His feet myself I’ll throw: In His house there yet may be Place, a servant’s place, for me. See, my Father waiting stands; See, He reaches out His hands: God is love! I know, I see, There is love for me,—even me1 [Note: Samuel Longfellow,] VI A Love that Passes Knowledge 1. What is it that so raises the Apostle’s soul and gives him a tongue of fire? It is nothing that is beyond the feelings and sympathy of man. It is no mystery which only a few can penetrate, and which is not for the many. It is the “love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” We can understand what love means. All can understand being touched and melted by love. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/greattexts/ Our High Calling I bow my knees unto the Father … that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God.—Ephesians 3:19. 1. In no part of St. Paul’s letters does he rise to a higher level than in his prayers, and none of his prayers is fuller of fervour than this wonderful series of petitions. They open out one into the other like some majestic suite of apartments in a great palace-temple, each leading into a loftier and more spacious hall, each drawing nearer the presence-chamber, until at last we stand there. Meditating on this prayer is something like ascending an Alpine peak. The first hour or so is comparatively easy work. The giant flanks of the mountain are steep, but still their ascent is not over difficult; but, the higher you go, the steeper it becomes, until at last there is just that one glittering pinnacle towering above your head, and it seems to say, “Thus far, but no farther! Scale me if you can.” But with the aid of a trusty guide, who cuts steps in the very ice for us, and who lends us the strength of his arm, we are able to gain the summit, and drink in with our eyes the grandeur of the scene.1 [Note: A. G. Brown.] 2. There can be nothing above or beyond this wonderful petition. Rather, it might seem as if it were too much to ask, and as if, in the ecstasy of prayer, Paul had forgotten the limits that separate the creature from the Creator, as well as the experience of sinful and imperfect men, and had sought to “wind himself too high for mortal life beneath the sky.” And yet Paul’s prayers are God’s promises; and we are justified in taking these rapturous petitions as being distinct declarations of God’s desire and purpose for each of us; as being the end which He had in view in the unspeakable gift of His Son; and as being the certain outcome of His gracious working on all believing hearts. Filled unto all the fulness of God: who shall ever unfold the meaning of this expression to us? How shall we ever reach any definite idea of what it signifies? God has made provision for our enlightenment. In Christ Jesus we see a Man full of God, a man who was perfected by suffering and obedience, filled unto all the fulness of God: yea, a Man who, in the solitariness and poverty of an ordinary human life, with all its needs and infirmities, has nevertheless let us see on earth the life enjoyed by the inhabitants of heaven, as they are there filled unto all the fulness of God.1 [Note: A. Murray, The Full Blessing of Pentecost, 132. The main theme common to both the Colossian and Ephesian Epistles is the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the relation of believers to Him. Isolated from the bustling activities of life, debarred from aggressive missionary work, limited to the few friends that visited him in his hired room, the Apostle is driven to contemplate the innermost realities of life, and to dwell upon the cardinal truths of revealed religion. His thoughts at such a time found centre in one truth—the Person of Christ, as the one mediating agent in both the natural and the spiritual world (Colossians 1:13-23, Ephesians 1:7-14). It was this that he came to feel was the rock on which alone his own feet could safely rest; it was this that he could boldly put forward as the antidote to the erroneous teaching at Colossæ; it was this alone that could enable those to whom he wrote in the Churches of Asia to become “full-grown men,” and to attain to “the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” The two Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians must therefore be studied side by side. The central truth is the same in both; the point of view, and therefore the range of vision, is slightly different. Dealing with the Colossian danger, the Apostle meets it with the great doctrine of the fulness of Christ. That was the answer to all their questionings as to the relation between God and man, and between God and this material world. “In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” In the Epistle to the Ephesians this fact is presupposed, and the Apostle goes on to argue from it the Church’s fulness in Christ. “He put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the Church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” Mark, again, the climax of his prayer—“that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God.” And thus the lessons of the two letters seem to be summed up in the simple but fully reasoned argument of Col 2:9; Colossians 2:19 : “In Christ is all the fulness: ye are in Him: in Him—complete—made full.”2 [Note: T. W. Drury, The Prison-Ministry of St. Paul, 154. I Filled “That ye may be filled.” That is to say, Paul’s prayer and God’s purpose and desire concerning us is, that our whole being may be so saturated and charged with an indwelling Divinity that there shall be no room in our present stature and capacity for more, and no sense of want or aching emptiness. 1. What is it to be filled with God? It is to have as much of God within us as our nature can contain. How this truth is overlooked. There is a natural tendency on the part of us all to dwell with exquisite delight on the other side of the question, namely, how we are accepted in the Beloved—how we are in Christ; and, perhaps, we dwell on that thought to the exclusion of this, that not only are we in God, but God is in us; that, whilst we are accepted in the Beloved, He is pleased to make our heart His abiding rest, His chamber, and His temple. Not only can the believer shout,” Emmanuel, God, with us,” he can also say, “Christ, the Lord, within us.” We think that a low experience spiritually is a necessity. If you talk to them, there are many who will say, “Well, but is it not rather utopian to expect, whilst we are on earth, to be full of joy, and to be full of peace, and to be full of triumph? Do not we carry about with us this body of sin and death, and ought we not to expect much darkness and sorrow of soul, and be very thankful if occasionally we get a few gleams of light?” This is not in the Word. The teaching of this Book is for us to expect to walk in the light, and when we are not in the light to ask the reason why. We see the river Nile flowing through Egypt in the times of drought, a river indeed, but the bed is not covered or the banks reached, nor is there fertilizing richness deposited in the fields. But later we see the Nile, when the sources are sending abundant supply, and the stream is spreading over all the channel, and the water is even with the banks, and the fields are rejoicing on every side. The Nile is “filled.” A heart “filled”; not merely having here and there a few experiences of the richness of God’s grace, but filled, every part of it, with that grace!1 [Note: J. G. K. McClure, Loyalty the Soul of Religion, 232. In his address to Cornelius and his household Peter tells us that “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth” “with the Holy Ghost and with power,” that is, with the power of the Holy Ghost. And what next? What would we expect to follow such a statement but the words we find?—“Who went about doing good.” Filled with this fulness, we cannot do other, it is then our very nature, our very life to go about doing good.1 [Note: T. Waugh, Twenty-Three Years a Missioner, 109. My Father, can it be That Thou hast willed Such an inheritance for me? That I with all Thy fulness should be filled— That Thine own Life with all its glorious light, And love, and purity, and wondrous might, And depth of grace, In me should find a dwelling-place? Is this the hidden thing— The mystery which long hath slept, In Thine eternal counsels kept— That from the source, the everlasting spring, Thyself, should flow, Through Thine own Son, To me, the Life which makes the Head and Body One? Yea, Thou hast said it, and I know It is Thy will Thy temple thus to fill— To give no less Than all! I may possess The fulness! I may be Complete in Him by whom I live— Who comes again to give Himself—the Life that fills my soul with Thee!2 [Note: Edith Hickman Divall, A Believer’s Songs, 108. 2. To be filled with God we must first be emptied. Such emptying we fear. What will God wish of us if He has entire occupancy of our desires and purposes? It may be that He will ask us to change our desires, to give up present ambitions, to enter upon entirely new courses of business, and study, and pleasure. Perfect surrender to the infilling of God may mean a sacrifice as great on our part as was Abraham’s when he was called to go out he knew not where; it may necessitate the subversion of all our past and the adoption of a wholly new standard of procedure. Many a man is unwilling to face such a situation. We wish some standing ground, some reservation somewhere, for ourselves. We are ready to let God have a portion of our heart, that portion where honesty, gentlemanly conduct, purity, and even benevolence are; but we dare not let Him “fill” us, for then not one inch would be left for anything of our own. Yet it is absurd for any of us to think of being filled with God’s fulness so long as we are under the dominion of any purely earthly or temporal wishes, or desires, or ambitions, or passions, or tastes. The words imply a totality of self-surrender to God. In praying to be filled with God the Father’s fulness, we pray that all our powers and faculties and desires and energies and likes and dislikes may be just what they would be if all our merely earthly desires were taken out of us, all that is selfish and mean and bad were emptied out of us, and the vacant space filled up by a pouring in of the character of God our Father. It is the same as praying that we may be just what God would be if we could imagine God to be put in our place. If we say that religion is the absolute surrender of the soul to God, the surrender derives its meaning and value from this, that it is a conscious self-surrender—that it is not the meaningless rapture of the mystic striving after an impossible self-annihilation, but the “joy in God” of the spirit which, in the inmost depths of its being, thrills with the consciousness of unimpeded union with the life of the Infinite.1 [Note: John Caird.] The evil seed sown in me when a child—a relative having thoughtlessly taken me to the pantomime in London—grew into an overshadowing passion for the theatre. The good seed of my godly old schoolmaster was not altogether expelled by it, sometimes I experienced searching heart questionings on this matter which would not be silenced, and gradually so worked within me that, as a young man, I have sat in the pit, seeing not, hearing not, save the stirring Spirit of God bringing me into condemnation for refusing to yield up my darling pleasure, whilst I trembled with fear for disobedience. At last I yielded partially, making a compromise that I would cease regular attendance, and be present only on those occasions when Helen Faucit, that supremely gifted actress, came to Manchester. But the voice would not be silenced, and at last I utterly broke from the toils, and resolved to visit the theatre no more, no matter what temptation it held out. Then peace flowed into my soul. Few of this age will read this with any understanding, but I know this passion for theatrical entertainments was gradually eating away all spiritual desires, and that, “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him,” and that indulgence in it would have made me unfit for the labour God purposed for His servant eventually.1 [Note: The Life and Letters of Frederic Shields, 30. This is the supreme necessity—a definite self-surrender. You remember the story of John Newton’s conversion. In early manhood he was a profligate sailor on board an African slaver. “I was,” he says, “a wild beast on the coast of Africa, but the Lord caught and tamed me.” The Holy Spirit had long dealings with him, and one night he had a dream. He dreamed that he was handling a rope on deck and a ring which he prized slipped off his finger and sank in the sea. He was greatly distressed, when he felt a hand on his shoulder, and, turning round, he saw a stranger with the ring in his hand. “You have lost it,” said the stranger, “and you will lose it again. Let me keep it for you.” He understood the parable when he awoke, and gave his precious soul into the keeping of Jesus and left it with Him. This is the way of peace: Commit yourself to Christ, and keep on renewing the deposit day by day.2 [Note: David Smith.] 3. But we must remember how St. Paul leads up to these words. We shall then better understand their meaning. The Apostle prays God for his disciples at Ephesus that they may be “strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man; that Christ may dwell in their hearts by faith”; and that they, “being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge”; that they may “be filled unto all the fulness of God.” Now the whole of this prayer helps to explain these last words. (1) First, the Apostle prays that the Ephesians may be “strengthened with power through “God’s “Spirit in the inward man.” And how can we be “filled unto all the fulness of God” except by His Spirit filling us? We believe, with the whole Church, that the Holy Spirit is God. If then the Holy Spirit dwells in the inward man, God dwells there. “To be filled with the Spirit” is to be filled with God. The Spirit is the Spirit of power—“strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man.” This means that the whole moral nature must be in touch with God, and so strengthened by that contact as to be the expression of God’s power.1 [Note: E. Trumbull Lee.] (2) But if God’s Holy Spirit does dwell within us, then we shall have faith; then Christ will dwell in our hearts by faith. This is the second blessing asked for in the Apostle’s prayer. Faith, like every other grace, is the fruit of the Spirit. It is not of ourselves, “it is the gift of God.” And behold then how by faith we are “filled unto all the fulness of God.” For Christ, who is God, dwells in our hearts by faith. Faith is the faculty within us which receives the Saviour. He cannot come where there is no faith. The door is, as it were, shut against Him. And the greater our faith, the more fully and constantly will Christ abide with us. True faith sets the door wide open for the Saviour to pass in. But how do we speak of Christ dwelling in our hearts by faith? In two ways: Both because He really visits and abides in the heart which has faith to receive Him, and because that faith feels and realizes His presence. Perhaps we are venturing where God means us not to enter, when we seek to understand the manner of Christ’s indwelling presence. It is a Divine mystery; and we believe it, because it is revealed to us. Yet we may perhaps say this much, that, when in one place we read of Christ dwelling in our hearts, and in another place of having the Spirit of Christ, these two expressions declare the same thing, and that to have Christ dwelling in us is, in truth, to be filled with the Spirit of Christ. It is this that St. John speaks of when he says, “Of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.” Yet to have Christ dwelling in us must mean, after all, something more than to be filled with the Holy Ghost,—the Spirit, which proceedeth from the Father and the Son. It must at least mean to be so filled with that Holy Spirit as to be fashioned like unto Christ,—to have Christ formed in us,—to have in us that mind which was also in Christ Jesus. And I think it must also mean to possess the priceless blessing of Christ’s special love and favouring presence. And this we both possess and know by faith. Faith receives the Saviour. And Faith realizes the Saviour’s presence. By Faith we feel His love, His nearness, His ever-present help. By Faith we contemplate His purity, and holiness, and perfect example. By Faith we trust in His merits, His sacrifice, His prevailing intercessions. And thus Christ dwells in our hearts by Faith; and we are “filled unto all the fulness of God.”1 [Note: W. W. How, Plain Words, ii. 214. (3) There is a third way in which we may be “filled with all the fulness of God.” It is by being “rooted and grounded in love.” Surely we can see that unless we are filled with love we can in no wise think that we are filled with God. For “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” Faith receives the fulness of God. Love is the fulness of God. Strange as it may seem, it is undeniably true that the sovereign method for the deepest, fullest spiritual life is constant and appreciative remembrance of the love of God—its length, its breadth, its height, its depth. There is nothing a soul is to do but try to comprehend that love, in all its features and in all its expressions, and then make it the permanent, continuous, and controlling power of all its thought and feeling. To study God’s love, to get the fact of it, the greatness of it, the sweetness of it, the constancy of it, the comfort of it into one’s heart is to feel the nearness, dearness, and blessedness of God Himself. The mind that with each opportunity for leisure turns to the consideration of God’s love, that believes in that love for itself, that sees life in the light of that love, and that lets that love flow in upon it with ocean-fulness, will have such a sense of the presence, beauty, and power of God as will make that heart a holy of holies; God Himself will be in it, and His glory will fill it. The love of God is as various as the world which God hath made, and there is no state of mind and no circumstances of life to which that love will not fit its gift. The Christian, the longer he lives, the more sure he becomes that God has loved him from the very first; that not even his own many sins have quenched that unquenchable fire; that not even when his own heart was coldest and his thoughts most far from heaven, did God forget the creature that He had made; that even into grievous sin and even into strange hardness of heart did God’s unwearied love pursue him and will pursue him yet. And so, when the Christian thinks of himself, he knows that he may fall; but when he thinks of God it seems impossible that God should let him. And in this thought he lives a more heavenly life, he cherishes a surer hope, he is more cheerful, he is more joyous every day. For he knows that God loves him, and while this is present to his mind, he cannot go wilfully away. He is God’s son; how can he quit his own Father? Our human sight is short and dim. We cannot always look on beyond the present to God’s sure purpose to give us His blessing. But all the more ought we to write it down as with a pen of iron on our own souls, that whatever else we read in the life of Christ, we read first of all, and above all, and through all, the assurance of the all-searching love of God. If the life be careless, bring back the mind to that; if the heart be unhappy or discontented, compel the thoughts to that; if the habits of our daily walk cause us many a conflict between conscience and inclination, anchor the will on that. For most certainly it cannot fail. God’s love never can, and never did, and never will.1 [Note: Archbishop Temple.] II The Fulness of God 1. “Filled unto (R.V., not with, as in A.V.) all the fulness of God.” This suggests the idea not of a completed work but of a process, and of a growing process, as if more and more of that great fulness might pass into a man. Suppose a number of vessels, according to the old illustration about degrees of glory in Heaven; they are each full, but the quantity that one contains is much less than that which the other may hold. Add to the illustration that the vessels can grow, and that filling makes them grow; as a shrunken bladder when you pass gas into it will expand and round itself out, and all the creases will be smoothed away. So the Apostle’s idea here is that a process of filling goes on which may satisfy the desires of the moment, because it fills us up to the then capacities of our spirits, but which, in the very process of so filling and satisfying, makes those spirits capable of containing larger measures of His fulness, which therefore flow into it. Is this wide world not large enough to fill thee, Nor Nature, nor that deep man’s Nature, Art? Are they too thin, too weak and poor to still thee, Thou little heart? Dust art thou, and to dust again returnest, A spark of fire within a beating clod, Should that be infinite for which thou burnest? Must it be God?1 [Note: Mary E. Coleridge.] There are plants which we sometimes see in our northern latitudes, but which are native to the more generous soil and the warmer skies of southern lands. In their true home they grow to a greater height, their leaves are larger, their blossoms more luxuriant and of a colour more intense; the power of the life of the plant is more fully expressed. And as the visible plant is the more or less adequate translation into stem and leaf and flower of its invisible life, so the whole created universe is the more or less adequate translation of the invisible thought and power and goodness of God. He stands apart from it. His personal life is not involved in its immense processes of development; but the forces by which it moves through pain and conflict and tempest towards its consummate perfection are a revelation of His “eternal power and Godhead.” For the Divine idea to reach its complete expression, an expression adequate to the energy of the Divine life, we ourselves must reach a large and harmonious perfection. As yet we are like plants growing in an alien soil and under alien skies. And the measures of strength and grace which are possible to us even in this mortal life are not attained. The Divine power which is working in us is obstructed. But a larger knowledge of the love of Christ will increase the fervour of every devout and generous affection; it will exalt every form of spiritual energy; it will deepen our spiritual joy; it will add strength to every element of righteousness; and will thus advance us towards that ideal perfection which will be the complete expression of the Divine power and grace, and which Paul describes as the “fulness of God.”2 [Note: R. W. Dale, Lectures on the Ephesians, 257. 2. We have, then, as the promise that gleams from these great words, this wonderful prospect, that the Divine love, truth, holiness, joy, in all their rich plenitude of all-sufficient abundance, may be showered upon us. The whole Godhead is our possession. For the fulness of God is no far-off remote treasure that lies beyond human grasp and outside of human experience. Do not we believe that, to use the words of this Apostle in another letter, “it pleased the Father that in him should all the fulness dwell”? Do we not believe that, to use the words of the same Epistle, “In Christ dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”? Is not that abundance of the resources of the whole Deity insphered and incarnated in Jesus Christ our Lord, that it may be near us, and that we may put out our hand and touch it? This may be a paradox for the understanding, full of metaphysical puzzles and cobwebs, but, for the heart that knows Christ, most true and precious. God is gathered into Jesus Christ, and all the fulness of God, whatever that may mean, is embodied in the Man Christ Jesus, that from Him it may be communicated to every one that is willing. For, to quote words of another of the New Testament teachers, “Of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.” And to quote words in another part of this Epistle, we may all come “unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” High above us, then, and inaccessible though that awful thought, “the fulness of God,” may seem, as the zenith of the unscaleable heavens seems to us poor creatures creeping here upon the flat earth, it comes near, near, near, ever nearer, and at last tabernacles among us, when we think that in Him all the fulness dwells; and it comes nearer yet and enters into our heart when we think that “of his fulness have all we received.” The doubting question of all time is, “Will God dwell with men?” That God will actually enter a human heart and fill it with His fulness seems too good to be true. As a reviewer of Drummond’s Ascent of Man puts it, “And so the author’s purpose is to prove scientifically that God is love, a teaching that seems to many too good to be true.” But it is not too good to be true. The God who makes the cup to overflow, who scatters flowers over prairies in profusion, who sets not twenty, nor hundreds, but thousands upon thousands of stars in the heavens—that God can and will enter the soul with His spiritual fulness.1 [Note: J. G. K. McClure, Loyalty the Soul of Religion, 235. (1) The constitution of man admits this fulness. “God created man in his own image; in the image of God created he him.” Fulness and God are inseparable, and equally united are fulness and the image of God. There is a natural capacity for “fulness” in man, which has not been destroyed by the entrance of the foreign element of sin. (2) The redemption that is in Christ Jesus specially provides for this fulness. It restores lost truths and lost objects of hope and love and joy, and directly aims at filling us with all possible good. The experience of every Christian is that of having supplied to him, by the Saviour, that which, being essential, has nevertheless been lacking. The Saviour of men appears to those who come to Him, as the morning star and the rising sun after the darkest of winter nights. He appears as a rock of foundation to a builder who has utterly despaired of finding any foundation better than sand. He appears as bread to one dying of hunger, and as water to one perishing of thirst. He appears as a robe of righteousness to one whose attire is filthy rags. He appears as the friend that sticketh closer than a brother to one who is outcast and desolate. He comes as wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, and those who receive Him are complete in Him. (3) The exceeding great and precious promises of God show that those who lack fulness or completeness are straitened, not in God, but through themselves. All that is needful for a true Christian they can have. “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” I think there is something implanted in man’s heart, fallen creature as he is, which defies him to be content with anything but God alone. It is a trace of original majesty, which leaves a mark of what he was before the fall. He is always panting for something fresh; and that is no sooner attained than it palls upon his taste. And this strong necessity of loving something makes a man form idols for himself, which he invests with fancied perfections, and when all these fade away in his grasp, and he finds their unsubstantiality, he must either become a misanthrope or a Christian. When a man has learned to know the infinite love of God in Christ to him, then he discovers something which will not elude his hold, and an affection which will not grow cold; for the comparison of God’s long-suffering and repeated pardon with his own heartless ingratitude convinces him that it is an unchangeable love.1 [Note: Lift and Letters of F. W. Robertson, 57. When all the over-work of life Is finished once, and fast asleep We swerve no more beneath the knife But taste that silence cool and deep; Forgetful of the highways rough, Forgetful of the thorny scourge, Forgetful of the tossing surge, Then shall we find it is enough? How can we say “enough” on earth— “Enough” with such a craving heart? I have not found it since my birth, But still have bartered part for part. I have not held and hugged the whole, But paid the old to gain the new: Much have I paid, yet much is due, Till I am beggared sense and soul. Not in this world of hope deferred, This world of perishable stuff:— Eye hath not seen nor ear hath heard Nor heart conceived that full “enough”: Here moans the separating sea, Here harvests fail, here breaks the heart: There God shall join and no man part, I full of Christ and Christ of me.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poems, 192. III All the Fulness of God When he asks for “all the fulness,” St. Paul thinks of other elements of revelation in which we are to participate. God’s wisdom, His truth, His righteousness, along with His love in its manifold forms—all the qualities that, in one word, go to make up His holiness—are communicable and belong to the image stamped by the Holy Spirit on the nature of God’s children. “Ye shall be holy, for I am holy” is God’s standing command to His sons. So Jesus bids His disciples, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” While the holiness of God gathers up into one stream of white radiance the revelation of His character, “the fulness of God” spreads it abroad in its many-coloured richness and variety. The term accords with the affluence of thought that marks this supplication. The might of the Spirit that strengthens weak human hearts, the greatness of the Christ who is the guest of our faith, His wide-spreading Kingdom and the vast interests it embraces and His own love surpassing all—these objects of the soul’s desire issue from the fulness of God; and they lead us in pursuing them, like streams pouring into the ocean, back to the eternal Godhead. The mediatorial kingdom has its end: Christ, when He has “put down all rule and authority,” will at last “yield it up to his God and Father”: and “the Son himself will be subjected to him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:24-28). This is the crown of the Redeemer’s mission, the end which His love to the Father seeks. But when that end is reached, and the soul with immediate vision beholds the Father’s glory, the plenitude will be still new and unexhausted; the soul will then begin its deepest lessons in the knowledge of God which is life eternal.1 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Epistle to the Ephesians, 202. (1) To have all the fulness of God is to be full of joy.—“These things have I spoken unto you that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full” (John 15:11). In the following chapter and the 24th verse, “Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name; ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.” And in the following chapter and the 13th verse, our Lord prays, “And now I come to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves,” or, in other words, “that they may be filled full with my joy.” Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.2 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 296. She really cared for nothing but the life of the spirit. The sources of joy were very far removed from the surface of things for her. They were in the inner recesses and not subject to sudden changes of weather like a brawling mountain torrent. To some extent this belief that God was in all creation made her a little self-centred. She was like one who sits at a warm fireside in the winter time heedless of storms and tempests outside. She did what her own heart asked her to do. She liked to quote: “I must be filled with joy if my feet are on the right road and my face set towards ‘the gate that is called Beautiful,’ though I may fall many times in the mire and often in the mist go astray.”3 [Note: J. Ramsay MacDonald, Margaret Ethel MacDonald, 60. (2) It is to be full of peace.—“Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope.” Joy is peace singing; peace is joy reposing. If peace means satisfaction, acceptance of the whole of an experience as good, and if even we, in our weakness, can frequently find rest in the very presence of conflict and of tension, in the very endurance of ill in a good cause, in the hero’s triumph over temptation, or in the mourner’s tearless refusal to accept the lower comforts of forgetfulness, or to wish that the lost one’s preciousness had been less painfully revealed by death—well, if even we know our little share of this harmony in the midst of the wrecks and disorders of life, what limit shall we set to the Divine power to face this world of His own sorrows, and to find peace in the victory over all its ills?1 [Note: Josiah Royce.] Take a water-bottle, and if that water-bottle be only half full, every time you move the bottle, the water in it washes to and fro. Why? How is it that it feels every motion? Because it is not full. But if you fill that water-bottle right up till it cannot hold another drop, and then cork it in, you may turn the bottle which way you like, and the water within it will not move. There is no movement, no washing about. Why? Because it is too full to be agitated. The reason why you and I live such poor restless lives is that we are not filled up with the fulness of God.2 [Note: A. G. Brown.] When she knew that she was close by the opening gateway of death, I asked her if she desired to see any one who would speak to her of what was to come. “That would be but a waste of time,” she replied, “I have always been ready. Let us praise God together for what has been. He has been very good to me in giving me my work, my friends, and my faith. At the end of the day I go gladly to Him for rest and shelter.” She was convinced that life and time were not the sum and substance of experience, and went away as though but starting upon a journey which, beginning in darkness, would proceed through light. She would hold my hand, she said, till those who had gone before gave her greetings.3 [Note: J. Ramsay MacDonald, Margaret Ethel MacDonald, 62. (3) It is to be full of righteousness.—In Philippians 1:11 we read, “Pilled with the fruits of righteousness”—not just a stray fruit here and there upon our boughs, but all our boughs filled with fruit until, through the very weight of their load, they bend down and kiss the ground. The more fruitful the branch the lower it will hang. The more fruit there is upon a believer, the less conceit and pride there will be about him. The branch, heavily laden, bends beneath the weight of its own fruitfulness. What an aspiration for a band of fishermen, peasants, slaves! It was an aspiration after more than Roman dominion, after more than Judaic empire. The proudest dreams of Pantheism never dared to soar so high. The Brahman had aspired to be lost in God, to have the little spark of his individual being absorbed in the mighty fire of the universe; that was rather humility than pride. Here was a company of men aspiring to reach God yet not to be lost in God, aiming to touch the brightness of the Infinite Glory without losing the spark of their own individual being. Was not this presumption, was not this impiety, was not this fitted to destroy all the tender graces of the Christian life—the poverty of spirit which had been promised the Kingdom, the meekness of heart which was to inherit the earth? Nay, but who was this God with whose fulness they desired to be filled? His name was Love. If His name had been aught else than Love the desire of these men would have been indeed presumption. But to be filled with the fulness of love is not pride; it is the deepest, the most intense humility. He that is filled with love is thereby made the servant of all; he repeats the life of the Divine Man, and becomes heir to His burden. To him belong sorrows not his own. He labours in the labour of humanity, he suffers in the tears of affliction, he is wounded in the battle of the weak. His glory is his pain. That which fills him with God is that which fills him with sadness, which bows him down with the sense of nothingness; the love that makes him great is the power that makes him gentle.1 [Note: George Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 129. They speak of ideals. But they cannot separate man’s ideals from the Man Christ Jesus. They speak of truth. Questions about truth involve the question, What about Christ? They speak to us of goodness. And—more faintly or more vividly, more lightly or more seriously—does there not rise on their memory a Face, marred more than any man’s, that carries an image and message of goodness, leaving all else of goodness behind it and below it?2 [Note: The Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 174. Our High Calling Literature Brown (A. G.), Sermons from the Penny Pulpit, No. 63. Drury (T. W.), The Prison-Ministry of St. Paul, 139. How (W. W.), Plain Words, ii. 213. Maclaren (A.), Christ in the Heart, 53. McClure (J. G. K.), Loyalty the Soul of Religion, 229. Martin (S.), Rain upon the Mown Grass, 304. Matheson (G.), Moments on the Mount, 129. Matheson (G.), Times of Retirement, 155. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxix. (1883), No. 1755. De Teissier (G. F.), Village Sermons, iv. 30. Williams (I.), Sermons on the Epistles and Gospels, ii. 241. Wilmot-Buxton (H. J.), The Life of Duty, ii. 137. Cambridge Review, xiii. Supplement, No. 327. Christian World Pulpit, xxxii. 339 (White). Church Pulpit Year-Book, vii. (1910), 223. Examiner, Feb. 18, 1904 (Jowett). Keswick Week, 1900, p. 183 (Inwood). Grieving the Spirit And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, in whom ye were sealed unto the day of redemption.—Ephesians 4:30. St. Paul is charging the Ephesians to be careful not to forget or to despise some of the common duties of everyday life. He is telling them to speak the truth, to beware of foolish talking, to be industrious and honest, kind and charitable, to put away bitterness and evil-speaking, to be slow to take offence, and ready to forgive. And in the midst of these separate exhortations we find words of a very different kind, the words of the text, words which are so placed as to be the very centre and kernel of the whole, summing up in themselves the substance of all that has gone before and of all that comes after. For he speaks in them, not of any one particular duty, but of a rule of life from which all duties must most surely spring. He gives no new commandment, but he tells of a glorious guide. He speaks of a tender love which is watching us anxiously as we go up and down in the business or the pleasures of the day, of a Friend who has marked us out for the “day of redemption,” and is disappointed in us, grieved, distressed when we turn our backs upon Him and treat Him lightly. For such seems to be the meaning of the text—“Do not give pain to One who so loves you. He has come to your rescue, He has sealed you for a blessing; therefore, I beseech you, grieve Him not.” Milton wrote his great poem, actuated by the strong desire that men might remember him and think of him long after he was dead: you remember the touching words in which he himself tells us so. And the little boy at the village school works his hardest to gain his prize, because he thinks how it will please his mother. You would not care much for any distinction you might get, or any success, if there were no one but yourself to know of it or to care for it. And you know whether, coming next after God’s grace, there be anything that does more to keep a youth, cast alone amid the temptations of a great city, in the right path, than the keeping up of the old home-feeling; and whether there be a safeguard more effectual than the ready suggestion of the great motive that grows out of it. What greater stimulus to duty than this?—“Now, you will be industrious, and honest, and good; and make them all happy at home!” And what healthier consideration in an hour of temptation to do wrong than that which comes first and most natural: “Oh, you will not do that, and break your mother’s heart!” It hath pleased God, in the words of the text, to appeal to us with just that homely consideration. “Grieve not”—the words are spoken to all of us—“the Holy Spirit of God.”1 [Note: A. K. H. Boyd, The Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson, 2nd Ser., 55. I The Personality of the Holy Spirit 1. This is a classical passage in proof of the personality of the Spirit of God. The very fact that we may grieve Him implies His personality. He is more than an abstraction. Our mental attitude towards an attribute, an emanation, an influence, or an abstraction of any kind, would be very different from that which we instinctively assume towards the third Person of the blessed Trinity. Scripture does not shrink from speaking of God as being capable of feelings which for us can be represented only under human forms of emotion; God is represented as “being pleased,” as “joying,” as “delighting” in the love and obedience of His people, and He is also represented as “grieved,” “offended,” “angry,” “alienated,” by their sin; and we need not hesitate to follow where the Bible leads us. Indeed, it may be questioned whether God would be all that He is in His adorable and infinite nature if He were incapable of feeling both pleasure and pain; perfect love must mean the possibility of both. An old writer has said of the nature of God, “In the outer chambers may be sadness, but in the inner ones is unmixed joy.” There is a gap, not only in our Christian creed, but also in our Christian experiences and joys and power, unless we have risen to this thought, that the Divine Spirit is not only an influence, a wind, a fire, an oil, a dove, a dew, but a Divine Person. We have to go back to the old creed—“I believe in God the Father Almighty … and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord … I believe in the Holy Ghost.”1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] 2. The Holy Spirit is always with us, a constant companion, and nothing is hid from Him. In this He witnesses to us the omnipresence of God; He makes God’s existence real to us, wherever we happen to be. However vast the numbers of the human race, the Holy Spirit is with every individual and knows every individual’s life. Do we speak a word? It falls upon the Spirit’s ear, as well as upon the ear of the person to whom we speak. Do we perform any action, good or bad? The Holy Spirit sees it and records it. Do we even think a thought? That thought is mirrored in the multitudinous mind of the Divine Spirit. We cannot escape from His presence. Over the door of a church in Hamburg is a piece of statuary. In a marble chair sits a man upon whose knee rests a parchment. On this parchment his eyes are fixed, and in his right hand he holds a pen with which he seems to be writing. It is John the Evangelist. He thinks himself alone, yet he is not. An angel stands behind him gazing intently over his shoulder upon the parchment, and with his right hand he guides the pen. So the Holy Spirit is ever present with us, seeking to direct us. 3. Though more than an emanation or an influence, and though continually witnessing our character and our ways, the Holy Spirit is so gentle and sensitive that you never read of His wrath. You read of the wrath of God the Father; you read even of the wrath of the Lamb. But you never read of the wrath of the Spirit: and the imagery employed to describe Him and His influence on mankind is of the gentlest possible character. We have, for instance, the dew that descends silently from heaven, the rain that comes down upon the mown grass, the wind that rustles the leaves of the trees, or that sweeps away the clouds from the fair face of the sky; and if, as is once the case, the coming of this supernatural guest is symbolized by the fire and the tornado, the fire is that which gleams in harmless flame over the thoughtful brows of the first Christian disciples gathered together in the rough upper room; and the tornado is that which overthrows and destroys nothing, but only announces, by an over-powering sound, the presence of God, and bids the people assemble together to listen to His overtures of mercy. The Holy Ghost, then, is emphatically gentle and tender and kind. He excites no emotions of alarm, and yet we feel that, if He is a Being capable of entering into personal relations with us, our belief of this capability will necessarily influence in a marked degree the sentiments which we entertain towards Him, and the trust which we are inclined to repose in His help. And when we know the gentleness of the Spirit in His dealing with us, surely we shall deal gently with others. It was indeed a gift of his nature to find out excellences, and to avoid seeing failure; although the gift was not needed in this case, where the real genius had existed and been attested. But its possession was well known to his friend “Ned Jones,” who once said, “Signor admires paintings that would make very good soles for his boots!” I remember repeating to my husband a remark of Mr. Du Maurier’s on the lenient view he always took of the foibles and faults of human nature; alas, I cannot now recall the humorous saying, at which Signor laughed heartily, and said, “Any affection that has been given to me, I am sure is due to the fact that it is difficult for me not to see the best in people. I think I am not deceived, but their good qualities are uppermost to me.”1 [Note: Mrs. Watts, George Frederic Watts, i. 171. II How we may Grieve the Spirit 1. The Apostle has been referring to certain sins, such as falsehood, anger, bitterness, corrupt speech, and after warning his readers against them, he adds, “Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God.” It is sin, then, that grieves Him, sin that pains Him; and this is exactly the answer we should have expected, for He is the “Holy Spirit of God,” and all, therefore, that is evil and sinful He hates with a perfect hatred, and is “grieved” by it. The character of a man is always revealed as much by his deepest sorrows as by his highest joys. And the character of God is revealed in all its purity and holiness by the fact that the only thing in human life that grieves Him is sin. A great difficulty with many is that they want power without purity and happiness without holiness; hence, when God puts His finger upon unclean and unlawful things, they shrink from the cost of renouncing them, and thus make it impossible for their prayer to be answered. There are in most lives mountains to be levelled, valleys to be exalted, crooked things to be made straight, and rough places to be made plain before the glory of the Lord can be revealed, and it is just here that so many fail. It often means a very serious matter this renunciation of what is revealed as iniquity, involving changes in many realms of life, possibly touching the sphere of the affections or the possessions, the inner habits of life or the outward details of conduct; but it is a much more serious thing to continue a controversy with God and thus prevent the Holy Spirit possessing His own temple. It is an actual impossibility to receive the Holy Spirit while grasping anything that God has condemned. The hand of faith must be empty in order to receive.1 [Note: J. S. Holden, The Spirit of Life, 62. The thinnest sheet of paper placed under the trolly of an electric car will stop the car, provided it is not punctured by the mechanical pressure. Cut a copper wire carrying an electric current, file the ends square, place a piece of writing paper between the ends and press them together: the current which was transmitting thousands of horse-power is stopped; it is incapable of passing through the insulating substance of the paper. No other agency for transmitting power can be stopped by such slight obstacles as electricity. A sheet of writing paper placed across a tube conveying compressed air would be instantly ruptured. It would take a wall of steel at least an inch thick to stand the pressure which is driving a 10,000 horse-power engine. A thin layer of dirt beneath the wheels of an electric ear can prevent the current which propels the car from passing to the rails, and thus back to the power house. So sensitive is the Holy Spirit to sin in the heart of a believer that its presence there is a complete obstacle to the manifestation of His love and power.2 [Note: C. H. Tyndall, Electricity and its Similitudes, 78. (1) He is grieved by insincerity and falsehood, for He is the Spirit of truth.—All that is against truth, all that is against justice and honesty, is hateful to Him. He is grieved at all falsehood, in word or in deed. How much is He grieved then at the insincerity of Christians towards one another, when we change our words towards our neighbours to their face and behind their back; when we speak them fair as long as they are before us, but have quite a different story when they are gone and cannot hear our opinion of them; when we make a show of friendship as long as we think they may be useful to us and do us good, but speak roughly as soon as we have nothing more to get from them. Surely there can be few greater griefs to the Spirit of truth and faithfulness than to see those whom He is striving to bring into the ways of truth so hollow in heart, so full of false professions, and unmeaning, untrue words. Among her many virtues, one thinks first of her sincerity. She gave to everybody an immediate sense of truth, such as we have when a sum comes right. She could not be disloyal or disingenuous; she had no use for any sort of trick or artifice; it was not in her to act or pose or rehearse effects.1 [Note: Said of Mrs. Paget, in Francis Paget, Bishop of Oxford, 75. “More and more,” he said once, “I see that nothing is so necessary for the religious condition of the mind as absolute simplicity. We know what we have got to do, and the only thing is to ask ourselves whether we are doing it as well as we can.”2 [Note: George Frederic Watts, ii. 224. (2) He is grieved by malice and unkindness, for He is the Spirit of love.—How must it grieve Him to see how love is set at nought among Christian people. How must it grieve Him to see how little some people seem to think of cherishing malice and ill-will in their hearts, to see how hard a matter it is to get them to give up a quarrel and really forgive what they suppose is an injury. How must it grieve Him as He accompanies us through the day, watching our dangers, ever anxious to help our weakness, to hear the words of unkindness, of peevishness, of jealousy, which drop from our mouths as the hours wear on, and which we take no care to stop. How must He grieve at the uncharitable suspicions and surmises, at the obstinacy with which we try to put the worst appearance on things, and stretch them from the truth to make them seem as bad as possible. We have read of the old teacher Pythagoras, who had a school of rhetoric, dialectic, and general disputation. All the scholars in the school, we read, used to spring at one another, so to say, and in hot dispute chase the hours of the day; but their habit was, when the shadows gathered and the school was done, to fall upon each other and with a kiss of peace and brotherhood to close the intellectual fray.3 [Note: J. Parker, The Epistle to the Ephesians, 126. 2. The great instrumentality of the Holy Ghost is conscience. There is a natural conscience in every heathen man, according to which he will be judged at the last day. In the Christian the conscience is more—it is the vehicle of the voice of the Holy Ghost. It needs, of course, to be instructed, or else it will be a morbid or false conscience. But the Spirit’s seal is on the conscience. And to silence conscience is to grieve the Spirit. By resisting His warnings and whisperings in our consciences, by going contrary to what He puts into our hearts and makes us see to be right, by refusing to be led by Him when He shows us what we ought to do, we may show more and more that we do not belong to Him, that we do not wish for His help and guidance, that we prefer to walk alone, till at last, wearied out by our provocations and hardness of heart, He lets us have our way, and gives us up to the imaginations of our own hearts. That is what we are always in danger of whenever we grieve Him. That is what we must come to if we grieve Him too long, and presume too far on His patience. Dean Stanley recalls a well-known German picture representing a young man playing at chess with the Tempter of his soul. There he sits, intent upon the game; he sees only the moves of the pieces immediately before him; he thinks he will still win the game. Opposite to him sits the Fiend, exulting over an easy prey. Already piece after piece has been taken; here a good deed gone, there a prayer removed; a few more successful moves on the Tempter’s part, and the game is won—and the soul is lost. But there is yet another figure in the picture, which gives to the scene at once a deeper pathos and also a ray of hope. Behind the young man, unseen by him, unnoticed by the Tempter, stands the Guardian Angel of his soul. The wings are already spread for flight: the face is already turning away. “It is a face not of anger, not of disappointment, not of despair, not of resistance, but of profound compassion and grief.” III The Great Motive for not Grieving the Spirit We stand in a high relationship to Him. We have been sealed in Him unto the day of redemption. 1. In what does this sealing consist?—The Apostle explains elsewhere. “Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his. And, Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.” From which we learn that it is a “seal” which has, if one may so speak, two sides, which make two impressions, which together complete the spiritual “sealing.” The one, God’s electing grace—“The Lord knoweth them that are his “; and the other, our own personal progress in holiness—“Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.” And God’s election, and our sanctification, the consequence of election, make the “seal.” That this is the “seal” of which the Apostle is speaking to the Ephesians is confirmed by the words that he adds—“unto the day of redemption”—implying that it then ceases. For, as soon as the redeemed soul takes its redeemed body, the danger will be all over; the Proprietor will be come back, and He will unseal the casket, and take out the jewel, because He wants it for His own crown. If we can learn aright how Christ was sealed, we shall learn how we are sealed. The sealing of Christ by the Father is the communication of the Holy Spirit in fulness to Him, authorizing Him unto and acting His Divine power in all the acts and duties of His office, so as to evidence the presence of God with Him and approbation of Him. God’s sealing of believers then is His gracious communication of the Holy Spirit unto them so to act His divine power in them as to enable them unto all the duties of their holy calling, evidencing them to be accepted with Him both for themselves and others, and asserting their preservation unto eternal life.1 [Note: John Owen, Discourse Concerning the Spirit.] 2. The seal is the mark of ownership.—When men put their mark upon an article, it is to show that it is their own. The farmer brands his tools that they may not be stolen. They are his. The shepherd marks his sheep that they may be recognized as belonging to his flock. So the Holy Spirit puts His mark of ownership upon the hearts of all His people. He seals us. “They shall be mine,” saith the Lord of Hosts, “in the day that I make up my jewels.” And then the Spirit puts God’s seal upon us to signify that we are God’s reserved inheritance—His peculiar people, the portion in which His soul delights. What, is said here to be sealed is not any external promise or assurance, however rich, however infallible: it is the Christian himself, his own actual personality, that is the recipient of the sealing. And here, perhaps, we may be reminded that in the great discourse in the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, our Lord, having to prove that He can give to His followers the food that endureth to eternal life, affirms that He Himself was “sealed” by the Father, that is, was solemnly declared by the Father to be the true Christ. Yet we may discern the idea of ownership as recurring, though less distinctly, in this passage also; for in the context our Lord asserts a special Sonship as inhering in Himself, “My Father giveth you the true bread from heaven,” as if the fundamental thought, in regard to the sealing connected with His Incarnate Person, were just this, that He was attested as God’s own Son. “How hot it is!” cried a stick of sealing-wax. “It’s positively exhausting. I can’t stand much more of this!” And thereupon the poor thing began to bend and twist under the heat. But it grew hotter and hotter still, as a cruel hand kept it remorselessly in the flame of a candle. Then the wax began to melt, and portions dropped off on to a sheet of paper placed to receive them; and these were moulded into shape under pressure of a signet. “Really,” said the sealing-wax, “I didn’t know I could look so splendid. Just see this crest!” Adversity tends to the development of character. Fire makes the Divine crest beautiful. The marble of the Christian character gleams the whiter, the gold and silver and precious stones flash the brighter, the colours glow the more beautiful, because of the fierce lights of time. Reserved by Divine love and grace unto the day of redemption, The ills we see, The mysteries of sorrow deep and long, The dark enigmas of permitted wrong, Have all one key! This strange, sad world is but our Father’s school, All chance and change His love shall grandly overrule.1 [Note: W. Burrows.] In Eastern countries clay is sometimes used instead of wax for the purpose of sealing. The wax may melt, while the clay hardens by reason of the heat of the climate. In the Book of Job it is said, “It is turned as clay to the seal; and they stand as a garment.” Any impression made upon the clay will become more distinct as the sun’s rays pour down and become fiercer. Some retire into monasteries and convents to find shelter; some retire into themselves. Let us be as well-seasoned clay, to derive shape and comeliness even from the world’s fierce light, which beats upon the throne of our natures. Be as clay, and the writing upon the seal will come out the more clearly the more glaringly the world’s suns and fires may shine and burn.1 [Note: W. Burrows.] 3. The seal indicates guardianship.—A seal is used for preserving as well as for attesting. The Eastern seals up his money-bags to secure the gold within, and we seal our letters to guard the enclosure. A seal is Set for security. Now, as the only way by which we can be known to be Christians is by really possessing the supernatural power of the Holy Ghost, so, also, the only way by which we can be kept as Christians, and preserved from going back to the world, is by still possessing that same Holy Spirit. What are we if the Spirit of God be gone? Salt that has lost its savour, wherewith can we be salted? “Trees twice dead, plucked up by the roots … wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.” The Holy Spirit is to us not a luxury, but a necessity: we must have Him, or we die. Eastern locks could be opened with ease. Solomon has an allusion to this when he says, “My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my heart was moved for him” (Son 5:4, R.V.). A seal was placed over the door of the house where property was deposited. The Pharisees caused a watch to be set, and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone. When Daniel was cast into the lions’ den, “a stone was brought, and laid upon the mouth of the den; and the king sealed it with his own signet, and with the signet of his lords; that the purpose might not be changed concerning Daniel” (Daniel 6:17). Christians are sealed with God’s own signet, that the Divine purposes of love and mercy may be fully established. As the blood was sprinkled upon the doorposts of the children of Israel to save from the destroying angel, so God marks His own with His own signet for security.2 [Note: Ibid.] You have some valuable property—it may be gold or jewels—and you are going abroad for a season. Anxious for your precious things, you gather them carefully up, and you put on them your “seal,” your name to the seal. The “seal” marks them yours while you are away, and secures them from being lost or stolen. So long as they are under the “seal,” they cannot be removed or hurt; and you look to find them, in their sure keeping, when you come back. And your great Proprietor, who has spent so much on you, is gone away for a time. He has gone to a far country. But He is to return; and when He returns, His longing desire is to find you unharmed and beautiful, and still His own.1 [Note: James Vaughan.] You watch a ship as it is being loaded for a voyage, and amongst other cargo you notice a number of boxes bearing a significant seal. These are not stowed away in the hold like consignments of common goods, but are taken to some place where they will be constantly watched by the responsible officers of the ship. The chests are chests of sealed treasure. Should the ship spring a leak and be endangered, after the safety of the passengers has been provided for, these sealed chests will be the first things to be put into the lifeboats. If pirates should succeed in boarding the vessel, the great fight will be round these sealed chests. Should the ship go down into the depths, these sealed chests will be the first things the divers will seek to bring back to the surface. The seal marks them out for special care and defence, and whatever human vigilance, foresight, and valour can do will be done to deliver them to the consignees. And so with that sealing of the Spirit affixed to sincere believers in Jesus Christ. They are subject to the same risks, vicissitudes, and temptations as other men; but all that God’s power can do to help and deliver them shall be done, and when the final catastrophe of death shall come into the horizon and bury all things in a common desolation, these shall be the first to be brought back again from the depths of earth. This special sealing marks out body and soul alike for God’s special possession and guardianship. His sealed servants shall never perish.2 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Holy Spirit, 98. 4. The seal lasts until the day of redemption.—The term “redemption” is one of the broadest and most elastic in the New Testament vocabulary. A cursory glance will show us that it does not merely denote the ransom Christ once offered for our salvation, or even our experimental deliverance from the power of sin in the present life. The word covers the rescue of God’s people from the last trace of sin’s dominion in death and their elevation to share the glory of Jesus Christ on high. A similar comprehensiveness in the use of the word is to be found in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, where St. Paul speaks in an ascending series of “wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.” If redemption points chiefly to Christ’s work on the cross, we should expect it to be put before righteousness and sanctification; but because it is the wider term, Paul puts it last, and makes it include not only rescue from the moral perversity bred into human character by sin, but from every pain, abasement, and physical debility that has followed in its train. The seal is not to be broken until the proper authorities and witnesses are present, and all the purpose of such sealing has been answered. Christians are sealed unto the day of redemption, unto that day when redemption shall be perfected in glory. This sealing is both retrospective and prospective. It looks back to Calvary and onward to heaven. The day when the terms of our spiritual purchase were agreed to, when the Divine compact was settled, when the seal was affixed, was the day when the Saviour said, “It is finished.” We come into part enjoyment of this redemption on earth. In heaven all the terms of the agreement will be fully manifested and enjoyed. “Ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.” Whatever may be the trials and difficulties through which we have to pass, however much we may be tossed on the heaving ocean of life, let us not abate our courage or lose our heart, for we are reserved unto the day of redemption. Let us not think that we are the children of fate, the mere toys of blind circumstances, the playthings of tyrannical and unreasoning force; for we are reserved unto the day of redemption. Yes, God, the loving and all-wise God, has mysterious methods of reservation. He may reserve in poverty, in trial, in sickness drear, in sore bereavement, in heart anguish, in soul throbbings of fearful measure, when waves and billows toss and groan and sweep with fury. Still God reserves; and sometimes thus reserves that the crest on the seal may be all the brighter. When Daguerre was working at his sun pictures his great difficulty was to make them permanent. The light came and imprinted the image, but when the tablet was drawn from the camera, the image had vanished. He discovered, however, the chemical power which turned the evanescent into the permanent. And the day is coming when the image of Christ will be stamped so indelibly by the Spirit upon the mind of man that it can never fade. What is the one decisive sign by which we may know whether we have received the Holy Ghost? Is it to be a mere sentiment, an impression upon the mind, a religious hope; or is it to be something more decisive, emphatic, and incontrovertible? Do you ask a question? I am prepared with a reply. What is the one decisive sign that a man has received the Holy Ghost? Let me approach that question through two others. Have you received the poetic spirit? How do you prove it? Not by prose, but by poetry. Have you received the heroic spirit? How do you prove it? Not by cowardice, not by craven-heartedness, but by adventure, by freely encountering peril in all its thousand forms and possibilities of visitation. Have you received the Holy Spirit? The decisive sign is love of holiness—not power of theological debate, not only contending for the faith once delivered to the saints, not only outwardly irreproachable character, but love of holiness—not reputation, but reality; a heart that pants after the holiness of God—life concentrated into one burning prayer to be sanctified, body, soul, and spirit—life a sacrifice on God’s altar—that is what I mean by saying that holiness is the one decisive test of our having received the Holy Ghost.1 [Note: Joseph Parker.] Ah Lord, we all have pierced Thee: wilt Thou be Wroth with us all to slay us all? Nay, Lord, be this thing far from Thee and me: By whom should we arise, for we are small, By whom if not by Thee? Lord, if of us who pierced Thee Thou spare one, Spare yet one more to love Thy Face, And yet another of poor souls undone, Another, and another—God of grace, Let mercy overrun.2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poems, 137. Grieving the Spirit Literature Atkin (J. W.), The Paraklete, 62. Barrett (G. S.), Musings for Quiet Hours, 40. Boyd (A. K. H.), The Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson, ii. 54. Bright (W.), Morality in Doctrine, 88. Burrows (H. W.), Lenten and other Sermons, 120. Calthrop (G.) In Christ, 128. Chapman (J. W.), The Power of a Surrendered Life, 81. Church (R. W.), Village Sermons, ii. 307. Lowry (S. C.), The Work of the Holy Spirit, 87. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: The Epistle to the Ephesians, 262. Moore (E. W.), The Spirit’s Seal, 45. Selby (T. G.), The Holy Spirit and Christian Privilege, 91. Spurgeon (C. H.), New Park Street Pulpit, v. 425. De Teissier (G. F.), Village Sermons, iv. 254. Vallings (J. F.), The Holy Spirit of Promise, 154. Vaughan (C. J.), The Presence of God in His Temple, 228. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), iv. No. 493; ix. No. 790. Christian World Pulpit, xii. 74 (Beecher). Churchman’s Pulpit, Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, xii. 488 (Moberly). Clergyman’s Magazine, 3rd Ser., 219 (Burrows). Literary Churchman, xx. (1874) 237; xxiv. (1878) 420. Preacher’s Magazine, vi. (1895) 217 (Gordon). The Fruit of the Light For the fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth.—Ephesians 5:9. This is one of the cases in which the Revised Version has done service by giving currency to an unmistakably accurate and improved reading. That which stands in our Authorized Version, “the fruit of the Spirit,” seems to have been a correction made by some one who took offence at the violent metaphor, as he conceived it, that “light” should bear “fruit,” and desired to tinker the text so as to bring it into verbal correspondence with another passage in the Epistle to the Galatians, where “the fruits of the Spirit” are enumerated. But the reading “the fruit of the light” has not only the preponderance of manuscript authority in its favour, but is also preferable because it preserves a striking image, and is in harmony with the whole context. The Apostle has just been exhorting his Ephesian friends to walk as “children of light,” and before he goes on to expand and explain that injunction he interjects this parenthetical remark, as if he would say, To be true to the light that is in you is the sum of duty, and the condition of perfectness, “for the fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth.” That connexion is entirely destroyed by the substitution of “Spirit.” The whole context, both before and after the text, is full of references to the light as working in the life; and two verses after it we read about “the unfruitful works of darkness,” an expression which evidently looks back to the text. Calvin showed his judgment and independence in preferring this reading to that of the received Greek text; similarly Bengel, and most of the later critics. The sentence is parenthetical, and contains a singular and instructive figure. It is one of those sparks from the anvil in which great writers not infrequently give us their finest utterances—sentences that get a peculiar point from the eagerness with which they are struck off in the heat and clash of thought, as the mind reaches forward to some thought lying beyond. The clause is an epitome, in five words, of Christian virtue, whose qualities, origin and method are all defined. It sums up exquisitely the moral teaching of the Epistle. Galatians 5:22-23 (“the fruit of the Spirit”) and Philippians 4:8 (“Whatsoever things are true,” etc.) are parallel to this passage, as Pauline definitions, equally perfect, of the virtues of a Christian man. This has the advantage of the others in brevity and epigrammatic point. Great Christian teachers have spoken of the virtues of the heathen as “splendid sins.” But Christ and His Apostles never said so. He said: “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold.” And they said: “In every nation he that feareth God, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.” The Christian creed has no jealousy in regard to human excellence. Whatsoever things are true and honourable and just and pure, wherever and in whomsoever they are found, our faith honours and delights in them, and accepts them to the utmost of their worth. But then it claims them all for its own—as the fruit of the one “true light which lighteth every man.” Wherever this fruit appears, we know that that light has been, though its ways are past finding out. Through secret crevices, by subtle refractions and multiplied reflections, the true light reaches many a life lying far outside its visible course.1 [Note: G. G. Findlay, The Epistle to the Ephesians, 324. I The Fruit-producing Light 1. In the context the Apostle has been speaking of “light”; here he boldly says, “the light,” and the change of expression is not accidental. He wishes to point to some specific source from which all light flows. And this is quite clear from the expression “Now are ye light in the Lord”—a phrase which implies that the light which he has in view is not natural to men, but is the result of the entrance into their darkness of a new element. The words evidently imply that the light which blesses and hallows humanity is no diffused glow, but is all gathered and concentrated into one blazing centre, from which it floods the hearts of men. Or, to put away the metaphor, he is here asserting that the only way by which any man can cease to be, in the doleful depths of his nature, darkness in its saddest sense, is by opening his heart through faith, that into it there may rush, as the light ever does where an opening—be it only a single tiny cranny—is made, the light which is Christ, and without whom is darkness. How terrible is the thought of blind darkness, and most of all to a painter, who truly sees; whereas most men are purblind, while they think they see the glories of this marvellous world. But worse infinitely is the blindness of man’s spirit, often wilfully barring out every avenue by which Light might enter. That word I know by experience is true. “The entrance of Thy Word giveth Light”; and those who glory in their acquaintance with the discoveries of modern Science, and in Literature, Art, Music, and every sensuous pleasure, are feeding on husks, like the Prodigal, if their souls are estranged from God our Father and from the True Light of man, Jesus Christ.1 [Note: Life and Letters of Frederic Shields, 344. Jesus was the Light of the world, the Revealer of the Father, and, as the Revealer, the Giver of life to men. As the Light, He imparts new possibilities of life to those who otherwise were hopelessly dead in trespasses and sins. The Light of Christ enters the heart; and what is the result? Productiveness of a high and spiritual order in the life that is thus begotten and sustained: all that such a life brings forth is the fruit of that light. No man can keep that light to himself. The ordinary figure of the lamp placed upon the lampstand is a striking one. You do not put it under a bushel but on a lampstand. But that is not the only way in which light shows itself; you light a candle and it shines forth. But God lights a grain of corn and it grows up into a stalk, and develops an ear, and full corn in the ear; it is the light He has given to that grain of corn that results in its growth and in its development, and the ear of corn is the outshining of that light with which God’s sunshine has permeated that grain. As God causes His sun to shine upon every field which bears in it the seed that has been sown by the farmer, He is sowing light into that field so that the seed itself shall manifest that light which it has received in the development and multiplication of its own life, and in the warm glow which imparts wealth and glory to every harvest field. And so in the human heart, when the light of God through Jesus Christ enters it, there is a growth. You cannot conceal that light, it will show itself in fruits of light.2 [Note: D. Davies, Talks with Men, Women and Children, vi. 378. When Christ enters any human heart, he bears with Him a twofold light: first, the light of conscience, which displays past sin, and afterwards the light of peace, the hope of salvation. In Holman Hunt’s picture, “The Light of the World,” the lantern, carried in Christ’s left hand, is this light of conscience. Its fire is red and fierce; it falls only on the closed door, on the weeds which encumber it, and on an apple shaken from one of the trees of the orchard, thus marking that the entire awakening of the conscience is not merely to committed but to hereditary guilt. The light is suspended by a chain, wrapt about the wrist of the figure, showing that the light which reveals sin appears to the sinner also to chain the hand of Christ. The light which proceeds from the head of the figure, on the contrary, is that of the hope of salvation; it springs from the crown of thorns, and, though itself sad, subdued, and full of softness, is yet so powerful that it entirely melts into the glow of it, the forms of the leaves and boughs, which it crosses, showing that every earthly object must be hidden by this light, where its sphere extends.1 [Note: Ruskin, “Arrows of the Chace” (Works, xii. 329).] 2. The light is antecedent to the fruit. Christ first, conduct second. To begin with what should be second is an anachronism in morals, and will be sure to result in failure in practice. He is not a wise man who tries to build a house from the chimneys downwards. And to talk about making a man’s doings good before you have secured a radical change in the doer, by the infusion into him of the very life of Jesus Christ Himself, is to begin at the top story, instead of at the foundation. Many of us are trying to put the cart before the horse in that fashion. The people who, apart from Jesus Christ, and the entrance into their souls by faith of His quickening power, are seeking, some of them nobly, some of them sadly, and all of them vainly, to cure their faults of character, will never attain anything but a superficial and fragmentary goodness, because they have begun at the wrong end. Light is the most essential condition of fruitfulness. Without light no vegetable or animal growth reaches perfection of colour or development. Rob the plant of its light, and you blanch it; rob any creature of the light, and you take out of him all colour and stamina. Any gardener will tell you that he may have all the heat that is necessary for an aromatic plant, and that shall enable it to blossom and put on a beautiful garment, so that it shall resemble the luxuriance with which it grows in its natural soil and under its native skies; but that when he has done all, when he has got his thermometer up into any temperature he chooses, there is little or no aromatic secretion. That in which the plant excels, that in which it finds its final meaning, is absent. To all appearance it is very much the same plant as in its native soil and light, and yet there is an all-important difference. Under these conditions it is not the fruit of light. It has heat, but light is something more than heat; and that is what is often wanting under this leaden sky of ours. As it is to be found in tropical regions, it is wanting in the most beautiful and perfect conservatory or hot-house that has ever been erected here. If men could only make a sun that should shine brightly through all our gloom—or, rather, if men could only rid themselves of the clouds that intercept the light of the sun that shines in fairer skies in the distant East—it would be all very well; but they cannot, and thus sunlight is wanting in sufficient quantities to ripen aromatic shrubs here, and nothing can compensate for that lack. All the artificial warmth that you can get fails to produce the same results.1 [Note: D. Davies, Talks with Men, Women and Children, vi. 376. Our definitions of a good man are as varied as the standpoints from which we look at him. We judge his goodness by his kindness, or honesty or veracity or purity or sobriety or some other minor morality for which he may be distinguished. And in our generous moods and magnanimous moments, when we want to exemplify the fine breadth of spirit by which all our thoughts are animated, we say, “He is not a Christian, but he is a good man!” Is he? If, as is the case, “God” and “good” come from the same root, should not the test go a step further back? Is he a God-man? God-man and good man should mean one and the same. And in so far as the virtues which the man possesses and exercises are God-like and God-inspired, every good man is a God-man—a man in whom God strives and struggles.2 [Note: R. Cynon Lewis, in Sermons by Welshmen, 298. The good man is not alone. Touch him, and you touch God. Help him, and your help is taken as if it were rendered to God Himself. This may give us an idea of the sublime life to which we are called—we live, and move, and have our being in God; we are temples, our life is an expression of Divine influence; in our voice there is an undertone of Divinity.3 [Note: Joseph Parker.] 3. Light has a wonderful vivifying power. It gives life and vigour. In the Arctic regions there are whole months during which the sun never rises, and if you want to know how valuable light is, you have just to think of the great difference between what you would see if you were there, and what you see around you in this land. If you go far enough north you find constant ice and snow; there are no beautiful flowers and fruits, no green grass to please the eye, no colours of any kind to gaze upon, but only an endless white winding sheet that seems to wrap up the dead earth. You have a barren wilderness in which, if you sought to dwell, you would be sure to die of cold and starvation. Contrast with all this the fields and the trees, and the hedges amongst which you live here, the bright blossoms that are in some of our gardens, and the sweet fruits that come in the autumn, and the sheaves that are gathered in the harvest time. What is the reason of this great difference? It is light. We get the light every day of the year, and it comes down to us in a more direct way than that in which it falls in the Arctic circle, so that we get more of its benefits.1 [Note: J. Aitchison, A Bag with Holes, 105. You may remember the beautiful lines in which Oliver Goldsmith depicts the heavenly spirit which the village pastor was able to maintain— As some tall cliff that lifts its awful form Swells from the vale and midway leaves the storm, Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head. So is it with the Christian disciple who through all the checkered scenes of his daily life walks in the light with God. The light of heaven in his heart shines out in his face, and surrounds him with a glory which is not the less real that earthly eyes cannot see it, as earthly trials cannot cause it for one moment to pale.2 [Note: J. P. Lilley, The Pathway of Light, 63. Birds are very fond of catching the last evening rays of a winter’s sun, and are always to be found in the afternoon on banks facing the west, or swinging, if there is no wind, on the topmost branch of the small fir-tree. On the mountains, too, all birds, as the sun gets low, take to the slopes that face the west; whilst in the morning they betake themselves to the eastern banks and slopes that meet his rays. No bird is to be found in the shade during winter, unless it has flown there for shelter from some imminent danger. This is very remarkable in the case of the golden plovers, who in the evening ascend from slope to slope, as each becomes shaded by the intervening heights, until they are all collected on the very last ridge which the sun shines upon.1 [Note: J. A. St. John, A Tour in Sutherlandshire.] Grant us Thy light, that we may learn How dead is life from Thee apart; How sure is joy for all who turn To Thee an undivided heart. Grant us Thy light, when, soon or late, All earthly scenes shall pass away, In Thee to find the open gate To deathless home and endless day.2 [Note: L. Tuttiett.] 4. We must welcome the light and bask in it. “You are light in the Lord,” the Apostle said; “walk as children of the light.” But his readers might ask: “What does this mean? It is poetry: let us have it translated into plain prose. How shall we walk as children of the light? Show us the path.” “I will tell you,” the Apostle answers—“the fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth. Walk in these ways; let your life bear this fruit; and you will be true children of the light of God. So living, you will find out what it is that pleases God, and how joyful a thing it is to please Him (Ephesians 5:10). Your life will then be free from all complicity with the works of darkness. It will shine with a brightness, clear and penetrating, that will put to shame the works of darkness and transform the darkness itself. It will speak with a voice that all must hear, bidding them awake from the sleep of sin to see in Christ their light of life.” How eagerly the sunflower turns to the sun! When the sun sets, and night falls, it folds up its leaves. But when the morning light comes once more, it opens up its bosom to its sweet, soft touch. Nor is this all; it keeps inclining towards the sun all day, following its course through the sky. Florence Nightingale tells, in her Notes on Nursing, how the patients in the hospitals turn towards the light. The light is life-giving, health-giving. It seems to draw the sufferers to itself.3 [Note: A. G. Fleming, Silver Wings, 77. My purpose in writing to-day is to narrate a little and homely incident which occurred last night, and which touched me not a little, leaving you to draw the moral. Taking a “constitutional” before dinner in a drenching rain, I came up with a humble working man to whom I wished a “good evening.” The man walked alongside of me and began to talk, telling me the landlady of the house where he lived had died some little time ago. “That, my friend,” I said, “is a road we must all go.” “Yes,” he said, “all but those who shall be alive on the earth when He comes again.” The word interested me, and I replied, “I am glad to hear you speaking in that way.” We talked a little amid the pelting rain about Christ’s second coming, when he remarked, “Blessed are they who hear the joyful sound; they shall walk, O Lord, in the light of thy countenance!” I noticed a strange, bright, happy light about the man’s homely face, which struck me; and I said, “You seem to be rejoicing in that joyful sound of the Gospel?” “Yes,” he said, “I am very happy, for I am trusting in my Saviour and humbly trying to serve Him. But some time ago,” he went on to say, “it was very different. For months and months I was in the most dreadful misery, believing myself a lost man for whom there was no mercy. I could get no peace night nor day. But one Sunday I happened to go into Saltcoats Parish Church, and something that the minister said—it was nothing very particular—came home as true. ‘That’s true,’ I said, ‘that’s true. I see that Christ is a Saviour.’ From that moment I trusted Him. I am trusting Him still, and with His grace I will to the end. Life is now all changed to me, and I am the very happiest of men. No doubt many a temptation came to me to go back to the old life. But He kept by me and brought me out of a horrible pit, and from the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock. And there I hope to remain for ever.” He then went on to say that no sooner had he found this new joy than he said to himself: “I must try to do something for Him who has done so much for me.” And casting about for something to do, he remembered an old friend who had gone very far astray through drink, and was then lying on a sick-bed, and hinting about ending himself. He said he stuck to that man for days and nights till God honoured him in being the instrument of effecting a great change, and, like himself, he is now a humble and earnest Christian. I asked him how he had dealt with him. “I just tell’t him,” he said, with a happy smile, “to look to Christ, to follow Christ, to trust in Christ.” We shook hands together as we parted, mutually commending each other to God, and I ate my dinner with a happy heart. God be with you, dear Lady Frances, and give you all joy and peace in believing.1 [Note: Life of Dr. MacGregor of St. Cuthberts, 289. As the branch abides in the vine, Through seasons delayed or long, Till its clusters of purple shine And the vintage echoes with song; As tendril and leaf and flower Partake the life of the tree, And further its use and power, In bondage of growth made free— So, Lord, till life’s ultimate hour, My soul would abide in Thee! As the ripples move with the tide, Far over the world-wide deep, And, in union naught may divide, One rhythm and purpose keep; As the lightest eddies of foam Are held in that vast decree, And never a wave may roam— So, Maker of shore and sea, Desiring no lovelier home, My spirit would move in Thee! As fragrance grows in the rose, Of petal and bloom a part, A mystery no man knows Enwrought in its innermost heart— So, through unsearchable love, A wave at one with Thy sea, A branch Thine hand can approve, A sweetness enshrined yet free, My God, I would live and move And have my being in Thee!1 [Note: Mary R. Jarvis.] II The Varieties of Fruit which the Light Produces “In all goodness and righteousness and truth.” In Christ’s garden there forms in clustered beauty and perfectness the ripe growth of virtue, which in the sunshine of His love and under the freshening breath of His Spirit sends forth its spices and “yieldeth its fruit every month.” In it there abide goodness, righteousness, truth—these three; and who shall say which of them is greatest? In St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians the fruit is divided into nine varieties, whereas in his letter to the Ephesians it is divided into three only. In the former the varieties are, “love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance”; in the latter they are “goodness, righteousness, and truth.” The former are more or less specific, the latter generic. In the Galatian list he is thinking of several Christian graces in detail; in the Ephesian list he brings out a few great outstanding graces which are inclusive of many more. But the geometrical axiom that the whole is greater than its parts and includes them does not cover the ground. We dare not limit the elements that go to the making of a Christian character to nine or nineteen, for the sweetest graces referred to elsewhere by the Apostle are omitted from both lists. Faith and love are in the chorus, but hope is not; peace and joy are in, but patience is not; and no spiritual chorus can be complete, or is destined to create the most perfect harmony by the due proportion of parts, which leaves out such seraphic songsters as Hope and Patience, to say nothing of other graces omitted, whose presence always makes music. St. Paul formed his chorus of graces on the Galatian scale some years before he wrote to the Ephesians, and so to omit none now, he writes “for the fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth.” No grace is left out here, for the fruit grows and ripens in every garden of goodness—the melody of the Spirit is heard in every righteous ring of the honest heart, and the harmony is like the harmony of heaven without a single discord when truth is added. The different kinds of fruit are not to be separated, but should grow on the one stem, should blend in the one character. So many of us are good on one side and not on another. One side of our life is sweet, while another side is sour. Or we have pity, but no hope; we have tears, but no laughter. We are one-sided, lopsided, and acceptable fruit cannot be found on every branch. When we live clear out in the light of Christ, the genial heat and radiance will make every part fruitful, and on every side men will see the bounties of the Spirit. Goodness is the adjustment of our relations to God, righteousness the adjustment of our relations to man, truth the adjustment of our relations to self. Goodness makes me worship, righteousness makes me act, truth makes me think. Goodness makes me look up, righteousness makes me look out, truth makes me look in. Goodness makes me see God, righteousness makes me see others, truth makes me see self. Goodness gives me a vision of the world above me, righteousness gives me a vision of the world without me, truth gives me a vision of the world within me. Truth is thus the man at the wheel, directing the ship, and bringing it safely to its haven. As seen through the prism on which the rays of the sun fall, the “fruit of the light” is in all red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. These are loosely the primary colours, but strictly they are only three—red, yellow, and blue. These are the principal colours that we see tremble on the rainbow across the sky, but these primary colours are split up into many more as we watch them in their infinite variety in foliage and flower. And so the fruit of the inward light which is the result of a Spirit-filled soul, is in all goodness and righteousness and truth—the primary colours of the Kingdom, which divide themselves again into all the graces of the Christian life.1 [Note: R. Cynon Lewis, in Sermons by Welshmen, 297. For as a stone, so Sufi legends run, Wooed by unwearied patience of the sun Piercing its dense opacity, has grown From a mere pebble to a precious stone, Its flintiness impermeable and crass Turned crystalline to let the sunlight pass; So hearts long years impassive and opaque, Whom terror could not crush nor sorrow break, Yielding at last to love’s refining ray Transforming and transmuting, day by day, From dull grown clear, from earthly grown divine, Flash back to God the light that made them shine.2 [Note: Jalaluddin Rumi, in A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom, 57. 1. In all goodness.—Goodness seems to be used here in its narrower sense, just as the same Apostle uses it in the Epistle to the Romans in contrast with “righteousness,” where he says, “for a good man some would even dare to die.” There he means by “good,” as he does here by “goodness,” not the general expression for all forms of virtue and gracious conduct, but the specific excellence of kindliness, amiability, or the like. “Righteousness,” again, is that which rigidly adheres to the strict law of duty, and carefully desires to give every man what belongs to him, and to every relation of life what it requires. And “truth” is rather the truth of sincerity as opposed to hypocrisy and lies and shams than the intellectual truth as opposed to error. (1) Christian goodness is the sanctification of the heart and its affections, renewed and governed by the love of God in Christ. It is, notwithstanding, seldom inculcated in the New Testament; because it is referred to its spring and principle in love. Goodness is love embodied. Now love, as the Christian knows it, is of God. “We love,” says the Apostle John, “because he first loved us … He loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” This is the faith that makes good men—the best the world has ever known, the best that it holds now. Vanity, selfishness, evil temper and desire are shamed and burnt out of the soul by the holy fire of the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. In the warm, tender light of the cross the heart is softened and cleansed, and expanded to the widest charity. It becomes the home of all generous instincts and pure affections. So “the fruit of the light is in all goodness.” Mr. Watts painted his Miltonic Satan with the face averted from the light of the Creator with whom he talked.1 [Note: M. S. Watts, George Frederic Watts, i. 97. The soul of goodness is love; for it is out of love that goodness issues, and it is in love that goodness culminates. There are other motives which incite to goodness, but they aid and foster, they do not create it. Without love there may be good actions, but there cannot be goodness; as a quality, goodness must be rooted in love. Most men are still so far from a true conception of love that they suspect it of certain inherent possibilities of weakness, and strive to steady and invigorate it by bringing to its aid the ideas of law and duty; not discerning that love carries in its heart a law far more searching and inexorable than any that was ever graven on tables of stone or written in statute-books, and that duty, in the sense of obligation to serve, is its daily life. The severity of Christ, the teacher of love, is more terrible than that of the sternest Old Testament lawgiver, because the test He applies not only tries conduct but searches motive. The law is satisfied when restoration is made or the penalty paid; it cannot go further. But to love, which searches the heart as with a lighted torch, these are only the external signs of repentance; it cannot rest short of a complete cleansing of the spirit. With a severity born of a passionate determination to make the best in every man supreme, it will accept nothing less than final and lasting purification. No quality of the infinite love is more Divine than its ability to bear and to impose suffering; it would rather the loved one were slain than dishonoured; rather he were tortured than stained. In Mr. Watts’s beautiful picture of “Love and Life” Love is leading Life up the steep pathway, over the stones that bruise and pierce, with infinite gentleness but with inexorable purpose. For love can lead where law cannot drive, and love can win where law is powerless to force obedience. For love has resources with which law is not armed; it has the fellowship of burden-bearing and suffering. It asks no one to go where it is not ready to go itself. By its very nature it takes in the experience of one whom it strives to reclaim or correct, and in the anguish of the repentance which it compels it often sweats great drops of blood. Law declares the guilt of the world and imposes its penalty; love carries the consciousness of that guilt home to the deepest nature, compels not only the forsaking of the sin, but the re-birth, with all its pangs, of the soul of the sinner, and walks step by step through the humiliation and bitterness of repentance, restitution, and recovery. It shares the shame and anguish long after the law has run its course and is satisfied. It compels the guilty to confess and restore with an inexorableness more terrible than that of law itself; but it does not leave the offender in the dark; it goes to prison with him, wears the garb and does the work of punishment with him; and when he has cleansed himself, welcomes him back to life and duty when all faces are turned away.1 [Note: H. W. Mabie, The Life of the Spirit, 133. It is the blending of purity with gentleness that makes “goodness.” A good man is something more than a strictly righteous man or a strictly just man. There is a gentleness and grace to add a charm to what might otherwise be repellent in the strength and vigour of his convictions and life. A good man is a man who has strong convictions, and who, having them, has also graces that impart a beauty to them. The earth has a backbone of granite rock, but it does not project its granite rock in every spot of charming landscape. There, as a rule, it shows its gentleness and grace; and even when by mighty upheavals or convulsions it shows here and there its rocky ribs, it clothes them with some “half tone” of moss or lichen or foliage. So that, associated with the most rugged force, there is a gentle grace and beauty. It is only when we try the strength of the earth that we find the strength of backbone it has. And so in the case of the typical good man. Such are his gentleness and grace that it is only when men try the strength of his principles that they find the granite rock under all. The good man is the gentle man—gentle in the gentleness, and strong in the strength, of Christ.1 [Note: D. Davies, Talks with Men, Women and Children, vi. 379. I must, from time to time, remind you of what I have often recommended to you, and of what you cannot attend to too much: sacrifice to the Graces. The different effects of the same things, said or done, when accompanied or abandoned by them, is almost inconceivable. They prepare the way to the heart; and the heart has such an influence over the understanding that it is worth while to engage it in our interest. It is the whole of women, who are guided by nothing else; and it has so much to say even with men, and the ablest men too, that it commonly triumphs in every struggle with the understanding.2 [Note: Lord Chesterfield, Letters to his Son, i. 326. (2) “In all goodness”—goodness of every variety. The piety of one man is deep and silent like the broad winding river which carries peace and plenty to the country through which it passes; the piety of another is strong and demonstrative like the wind which drives the ship from one continent to the other with its weight of wealth and commerce; the piety of the third is modest and retiring like the violet which flourishes best in the shade, but whose fragrance is never hidden. And yet they are all the fruit of the light. The piety of Peter is the piety which is active, energetic, impulsive, impetuous, rushing down the hill like an Alpine torrent, or over the precipice like a mighty cataract. The piety of John and Mary is the piety of the meditative mystics, who lay the head on the Master’s breast to listen to the pulsations of His heart, or who sit at His feet to drink in His message and to catch every breeze that blows from the throne. The piety of the publican is the piety that dares not look up to heaven, and yet grows one of the sweetest fruits in the garden of God—humility. “The fruit of the light is in all goodness”—in the type that says nothing, and in the type that says everything, in the type that works, and in the type that waits. A great many mistakes are made about amiability. A man may be amiable simply through mere want of interest or force; he may be so constituted that he really does not much care who is who or what is what. He may have a senile grin—call it a smile if you please—for anybody and for all persons alike,—a nice old man who never says a cross word, and never has a frown upon his face. That is not amiability. Here is a man who is naturally unamiable; he looks with a discriminating eye upon man and things; he is very passionate, fiery, self-asserting. Yet, by the grace of God, he is kept back; at times he shakes in the leash; he often seems as if he would break it and be away! Yet God’s hold upon him is such that he speaks gentle words, restrains terms of indignation and wrath, moderates his rising passion. There—though he cannot look very amiable, though he may have a grim face—is the amiable Man 1:1 [Note: Joseph Parker.] “He went about doing good.” So we might say in our own age of two or three who have been personally known to us, “He or she went about doing good.” They are the living witnesses to us of His work. If we observe them we shall see that they did good because they were good—because they lived for others and not for themselves, because they had a higher standard of truth, and therefore men could trust them, because their love was deeper, and therefore they drew others after them. These are they of whom we read in Scripture that they bear the image of Christ until His coming again, and of a few of them that they have borne the image of His sufferings, and to us they are the best interpreters of His life. They too have a hidden strength which is derived from communion with the Unseen; they pass their lives in the service of God, and yet only desire to be thought unprofitable servants. Their way of life has been simple—they have not had much to do with the world. They may have been scarcely known, or not known until after their death; they may have had their trials too—failing health, declining years, the ingratitude of men—but they have endured as seeing Him who is invisible.2 [Note: Benjamin Jowett.] 2. This fruit is in all righteousness.—The principle of righteousness, fully understood, includes everything in moral worth, and is often used to denote in one word the entire fruit of God’s grace in man. For righteousness is the sanctification of the conscience. It is loyalty to God’s holy and perfect law. It is no mere outward keeping of formal rules, such as the legal righteousness of Judaism, no submission to necessity or calculation of advantages; it is a love of the law in a man’s inmost spirit; it is the quality of a heart one with that law, reconciled to it as it is reconciled to God Himself in Jesus Christ. At the bottom, therefore, righteousness and goodness are one. Each is the counterface and complement of the other. Righteousness is to goodness as the strong backbone of principle, the firm hand and the vigorous grasp of duty, the steadfast foot that plants itself on the eternal ground of the right and true and stands against a world’s assault. Goodness without righteousness is a weak and fitful sentiment: righteousness without goodness is a dead formality. He cannot love God or his neighbour truly who does not love God’s law; and he knows nothing aright of that law who does not know that it is the law of love. There is nothing so terrible as the insistence of love on perfect righteousness. It cannot compromise; it is powerless to accept anything less, because it has a consuming desire to bring out the final touch of nobleness in the soul it loves. They have not known the divinest secret of love who have not suffered from its inflexible idealism, its inexorable determination to get the best and the most out of the loved one. Many a husband has rebelled in feeling against his wife’s faithful loyalty to his own noblest nature, and has come at last, in the clearer vision of his own growth, to reverence that insistence upon the best in aim, conduct, and habit as the very highest form of tenderness. It is not easy to live under the same roof with the ideal of what one ought to be and to do; but there comes a time, in such companionship, when the very roof is sacred because it has sheltered it. One must be good indeed before one can live at ease with a great love. For this reason Calvary is more awful than Sinai, and the patient sufferings of Christ more appalling than all the thunderings of the lawgivers. For love is not only all tenderness, forgiveness, and service; it is also all severity, sanity, duty, righteousness. It is far stronger and safer than law, because it is far more searching and inexorable.1 [Note: H. W. Mabie, The Life of the Spirit, 136. The rule of right, the symmetries of character, the requirements of perfection, are no provincialisms of this planet; they are known among the stars; they reign beyond Orion and the Southern Cross; they are wherever the universal Spirit is; and no subject mind, though it fly on one track for ever, can escape beyond their bounds. Just as the arrival of light from deeps that extinguish parallax bears witness to the same ether there that vibrates here, and its spectrum reports that one chemistry spans the interval, so does the law of righteousness spring from its earthly base and embrace the empire of the heavens the moment it becomes a communion between the heart of man and the life of God.1 [Note: J. Martineau, A Study of Religion, i. 26. One morning I walked with a friend out of the city of Geneva to where the waters of the lake flow with swift rush into the Rhone. And we were both greatly interested in the strange sight which has impressed so many travellers. There are two rivers whose waters come together here, the Rhone and the Arve, the Arve flowing into the Rhone. The waters of the Rhone are beautifully clear and sparkling. The waters of the Arve come through a clayey soil and are muddy, grey, and dull. And for a long distance the two waters are wholly distinct. Two rivers of water are in one river-bed, on one side the sparkling blue Rhone water, on the other the dull grey Arve water, and the line between the two is sharply defined. And so it continues for a long distance. Then gradually they blend and the grey begins to tinge all through the blue. I went to the guide-book and maps to find out something about this river that kept on its way undefiled by its neighbour for so long. Its source is in a glacier that is between ten thousand and eleven thousand feet high, descending “from the gates of eternal night, at the foot of the pillar of the sun.” It is fed continually by the melting glacier which, in turn, is being kept up by the snows and cold. Rising at this great height, ever being renewed steadily by the glacier, it comes rushing down the swift descent of the Swiss Alps through the lake of Geneva and on. There is the secret of purity, side by side with its dirty neighbour. Our lives must have their source high up in the mountains of God, fed by a ceaseless supply. Only so can there be the purity and the momentum that shall keep us pure, and keep us moving down in contact with men of the earth. And we must keep closer to the source than is the Rhone at Geneva, else the streams flowing alongside will unduly influence us. Constant personal contact with Jesus is the beginning ever new of service.2 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Service, 30. King of mercy, King of love, In whom I live, in whom I move, Perfect what Thou hast begun, Let no night put out this sun; Grant I may, my chief desire, Long for Thee, to Thee aspire! Let my youth, my bloom of days Buy my comfort, and Thy praise; That hereafter, when I look O’er the sullied, sinful book, I may find Thy hand therein Wiping out my shame and sin! O it is Thy only art To reduce a stubborn heart; And since Thine is victory, Strongholds should belong to Thee; Lord, then take it, leave it not Unto my dispose or lot; But since I would not have it mine, O my God, let it be Thine.1 [Note: Henry Vaughan.] 3. In all truth.—Truth comes last, for it signifies the inward reality and depth of the other two. Truth does not mean veracity alone, the mere truth of the lips. Heathen honesty goes as far as this. Men of the world expect as much from each other, and brand the liar with their contempt. Truth of words requires a reality behind itself. The acted falsehood is excluded, the hinted and intended lie no less than that expressly uttered. Beyond all this, it is the truth of the man that God requires—speech, action, thought, all consistent, harmonious and transparent, with the light of God’s truth shining through them. Truth is the harmony of the inward and the outward—the correspondence of what the man is in himself with that which he appears and wishes to appear to be. Like you, I am most interested in the progress of art, and believe it can only be great by being true; but I am inclined to give truth a wider range, and I cannot help fearing you may become near-sighted. That I feel with you with regard to earnestness and truth in painting must be evident from my agreeing with you in admiration of certain productions; but I do not agree with you in your estimation of truth, or rather your view of truth. It appears to me that you confound it too much with detail, and overlook properties; and that in your appreciation of an endeavour to imitate exactly, you prefer the introduction of what is extraneous, to the leaving out of anything that may be in existence. Beauty is truth, but it is not always reality. In perceiving and appreciating with wonderful acuteness quality and truth of accident, you run some risk of overlooking larger truth of fundamental properties. In fact you are rather inclined to consider truth as a bundle of parts, than truth as a great whole.1 [Note: George Frederic Watts, i. 92. Imagination has pictured to itself a domain in which every one who enters should be compelled to speak only what he thought, and pleased itself by calling such domain the Palace of Truth. A palace of veracity, if you will; but no temple of the truth. A place where each one would be at liberty to utter his own crude unrealities, to bring forth his delusions, mistakes, half-formed, hasty judgments; where the depraved ear would reckon discord harmony, and the depraved eye mistake colour; the depraved moral taste take Herod or Tiberius for a king, and shout beneath the Redeemer’s cross, “Himself he cannot save!” A temple of the truth? Nay, only a palace echoing with veracious falsehoods, a Babel of confused sounds, in which egotism would rival egotism, and truth would be each man’s own lie.2 [Note: F. W. Robertson.] The part of public agitation which she least liked was its unfairness. She could detest a thing wholeheartedly, but she never could misrepresent it, and partisanship—including Labour partisanship—she would not even excuse. Sentiment of the gushing type she mistrusted, and it found no place in her appeals. Rigidity in truthfulness was one of her fundamental characteristics. “Error is the only fruit of error,” she once said when some one urged that in dealing with the crowd one had to practise some deceptions. “If the road ahead is difficult, say so; if the pilgrimage is drudgery, discipline your people so that they may be able to go through it.” Consequently, if she held to her views with unbending decision she was always tolerant and always anxious to meet the other side.3 [Note: J. Ramsay MacDonald, Margaret Ethel MacDonald, 198. Let me find thy road whilst my strength holds out. Thy rest when my strength has failed, First the weary search, and the misty doubt, Then Truth with her face unveiled. In the dim pine-woods I have known her near By the flash of her dear white feet Down the quiet glades, where the soul can hear A song that is passing sweet. For the ears that hear and the hearts that dare Her ageless song she sings; For her listening ones she has filled the air With the tumult of her wings.4 [Note: P. C. Ainsworth, Poems and Sonnets, 51. The Fruit of the Light Literature Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, vi. 376. Findlay (G. G.), The Epistle to the Ephesians (Expositor’s Bible), 321. Fleming (A. G.), Silver Wings, 70. Garbett (E.), Experiences of the Inner Life, 127. Holland (H. S.), Logic and Life, 163. Jones (J. D.), The Unfettered Word, 260. Kenrick (C. W. H.), in Sermons for the People, iii. 80. Lewis (R. C.), in Sermons by Welshmen, 296. Llewellyn (D.), The Forgotten Sheaf, 45. Maclaren (A.), Christ’s Musts, 239. Mortimer (A. G.), Lenten Preaching, 26. Newman (J. H.), Oxford University Sermons, 37. Pulsford (J.), Christ and His Seed, 178. Trench (R. C.), Sermons in Ireland, 133. Children’s Pulpit: First Sunday in Advent, i. 6 (Shore). Christian World Puplit, lxviii. 161 (Waggett). Clergyman’s Magazine, New Ser., i. 155 (Tillotson). Literary Churchman, xxxviii. (1892) 105. The Purchase of Opportunity Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.—Ephesians 5:16. 1. These words stand at the end of a series of moral counsels and warnings, of which it is difficult to exaggerate the urgency and solemnity. St. Paul has painted in vivid colours the contrast between the corruptions of society and the holy living of genuine discipleship; he has implored the Ephesians to remember that such holy living is the condition of any inheritance in the Kingdom of Christ and God; he has proved the necessity of carefulness in the religious life, and now he proceeds yet one step further. Carefulness must be directed by wisdom, lest the fears of conscience and the discipline of conduct be wrongly directed, and therefore wasted. “Take heed therefore how ye walk exactly,” for this is the true sense of the original. The Ephesians are to be wise in their self-discipline, taking heed that the strictness of their walk is directed by right motives to right ends. “Take heed therefore how ye walk exactly, not as unwise, but as wise, redeeming the time,” or rather, “buying up the opportunity, because the days are evil.” The expression is found in Daniel 2:8, and is perhaps borrowed from the Old Testament by St. Paul. Nebuchadnezzar complains that the astrologers are buying the time for themselves with a view to wasting it in vain delays: St. Paul bids Christians buy the time for themselves, at whatever cost, in order to use it in wise action. Seneca has a similar saying: “Gather up and preserve the time.” 2. The picture or parable suggested by the text is this. Standing in the market-place is a wise and wary merchantman, keen for spiritual traffic and gain. Like Milton, he has fallen on evil times—on bad times, as men of business would say. The days drag slowly by, bringing him few means of moral culture, rare occasions on which he can trade with his talents and make them more. But, at last, as the caravan of Time moves tardily by, among the captives in its train he espies an opportunity such as his heart has long craved. He leaps at it, seizes it, redeems it, i.e., pays a price for it and makes it his own. It is exactly the modern notion of “making a corner,” with this important distinction, that, whereas the modern “trust” or “combine” is purely selfish in its calculations, the intensity and astuteness recommended by the Apostle aim chiefly at the salvation and spiritual enrichment of others. Be alert, politic, ready to make sacrifices, so that you improve every opening to possess yourself of the best things and make your neighbours sharers of the riches of Christ. Ephesus was the great trading city of Proconsular Asia, where the merchants of both the east and west assembled for commerce, watching for opportunities to buy and sell and get gain. The Asian Christians were well acquainted with these things, and the words of St. Paul would come to them with great power, fitness and cogency. As merchantmen watched and seized every opportunity for buying or selling their commodities, so must Christians seize and buy up every opportunity for manifesting their true Christian character, and making known “the truth as it is in Jesus.” Hostile circumstances and the powers of darkness beset us on every hand: therefore let us lose no opportunities, but, with promptness and full purpose of heart, let us “walk as children of the light.” Gifts are given to trade withal for God. Opportunities are the market-days for that trade. To napkin up the one and to let slip the other will end in trouble and disconsolation. Disquietments and perplexities of heart are worms that will certainly breed in the rust of unexercised gifts. God loseth a revenue of glory and honour by such slothful souls: and He will make them sensible of it. I know some at this day whom omissions of opportunities for service are ready to sink into the grave.1 [Note: J. Moffatt, The Golden Book of John Owen, 209. The text leads us to trace three ideas in the Apostle’s mind: first, he thinks of opportunity as an article in the market; second, he feels that there are circumstances which increase the value of the article; and third, he sees the different types of traders, some neglecting opportunity, others eagerly buying it up. I An Article in the Market 1. What is this commodity which we are asked to purchase? The text says it is “time.” But the term used signifies more than the mere duration of anything or the measure of motion; it may be taken for opportunity, or the favourable moment for doing anything, which, if lost, can never be recovered. This is well brought out in Ecclesiastes (Ecclesiastes 8:5). “A wise man’s heart discerneth both time and judgment”—that is, he knows both what he ought to do and the fittest season in which to do it. So, then, we understand that time is redeemed when we diligently embrace and improve all the opportunities which God places in our way, not only for His honour and glory, but also for the good of ourselves and others, not allowing these golden opportunities to be forestalled or stolen from us and irretrievably lost by our own negligence. The exhortation of the Apostle implies that the Ephesians had lost and misimproved opportunities, and that being so they were not to be depressed, but were to double their diligence and do the more good in time to come. We speak of life as bringing many duties. Life, says some one, is duty; and this is a true way of looking at it. We are hedged all round by duty. We speak of life again as a probation. We are here on trial, to show what we are and what we can do. We are being tested, and the Master is watching us to see what we are good for, and what He can do with us when this life is over. We speak of life, again, as for education. God wants to train us here for another life, and for greater service than our present. All these views of life are true; they set forth some real aspect of our life. But we may speak of our life in another way. It is a succession of opportunities. Life is always bringing opportunities to us, which we may seize and handle and turn to our profit, or which we may neglect to our loss. Christina Rossetti tells us how in one of her country walks, being then entirely ignorant of its rarity, she lighted upon a four-leaved trefoil. She goes on to say: “Perhaps I plucked and so destroyed it: I certainly left it, for most certainly I have it not. Now I would give something to recover that wonder: then, when I might have had it for the carrying, I left it. Once missed, one may peer about in vain all the rest of one’s days for a second four-leaved trefoil. No one expects to find whole fields of such: even one, for once, is an extra allowance. Life has, so to say, its four-leaved trefoils for a favoured few: and how many of us overlook once and finally our rare chance!”1 [Note: Mackenzie Bell, Christina Rossetti, 26. If thou hadst known in those far-distant days, Which now lie buried with the long-dead past; If thou hadst known how wistful was the gaze Love turn’d on thee, oh! wouldst thou then have cast One swift responsive glance, and thus have seen Life’s possibility?—It might have been! If thou hadst known in those long-vanish’d hours How one heart beat in sympathy with thine, Wouldst thou have turn’d and cull’d the fragrant flowers Love offered thee, a garland to entwine For days to come? Ah! silence lay between Thy heart and mine; and yet,—It might have been! If thou hadst known how, through the long, long years, One aching heart would yearn for thee in vain, Wouldst thou in that far time have dried the tears With tender answering touch, had all been plain? Ah, who can tell! Thy lonely grave is green; Thy memory still lives on. It might have been!2 [Note: Una, In Life’s Garden, 68. There is a story told of General Havelock, the father of Sir Henry Havelock-Allan, that when he was serving in India, there was on one occasion need for some military expedition which would be attended with great danger and difficulty, but which would bring distinction to the officer who could lead it successfully. It properly fell to General Havelock; but there was an officer of lower rank who had made some grave mistake or failed in some previous expedition of which he had had charge, and on whose reputation a shadow was resting in consequence. Havelock gave way to the younger officer. He offered him a rare opportunity which he was not slow to embrace.3 [Note: H. Bonner, Sermons and Lectures, 208. 2. Past opportunities are no longer in the market. St. Paul knew very well that time misspent can never be recalled. Every man’s past—its evil and its good; what he has done and what he has left undone—lives in the man to-day. If he has lived an evil or thoughtless life, he may, indeed, amend his ways and live a pure and noble life; but time lost is still time lost to him for ever. There are signs in St. Paul’s Epistles that he was occasionally haunted by the shadow of his own past, but still he does not attempt to recall that which is irrevocable; rather, he turns his back deliberately upon it, looks away to the present and the future which are still within his power, and says, “Forgetting those things which are behind, I reach forward.” Our life is not like a placid stream on which, by steadfast endeavour, we may pull back against the tide. It is, rather, like a torrent which, rising on the mountains of Eternity, plunges, the instant it has passed us, into an unfathomable abyss. Our most strenuous effort only maintains us on the edge of the fall; the stream is for ever sliding from under us; and at last we too shall be swept over and be no more seen. Whatever chances we had yesterday, last week, last year, of showing kindness or doing good, of fitting ourselves whether for earth or for heaven, are past for ever. All these opportunities are gone by. No sighs, no tears, no prodigal vows of amendment, will bring one of them back. We might have redeemed them; but now they are captives for ever; or, rather, they are martyrs, and have perished in their captivity. Henceforth there is no redemption for them.1 [Note: S. Cox, Expositions, i. 9. Have you ever seen those marble statues in some public square or garden which are so fashioned into a perennial fountain that through the lips, or through the hands, the clear water flows in a perpetual stream, on and on for ever; and the marble stands there, passionless, cold, making no effort to arrest the gliding water? It is so that time flows through the hands of men, swift, never pausing till it has run itself out; and there is the man, petrified into a marble sleep, not feeling what it is that is passing away for ever.2 [Note: James Brown, Sermons with Memoir, 150. Listen to the watermill, all the livelong day; How the creaking of the wheel wears the hours away. Languidly the water glides, useless on and still; Never coming back again to that watermill. And the proverb haunts my mind, like a spell that’s cast— The mill will never grind with the water that has passed. Take the lesson to yourselves, loving hearts and true; Golden years are fleeting by, youth is fleeting too. Try to make the most of life, lose no honest way; Time will never bring again chances passed away. Leave no tender word unsaid, love while life shall last— The mill will never grind with the water that has passed. Work while yet the daylight shines, man of strength and will; Never does the streamlet glide useless by the mill. Wait not till to-morrow’s sun beams upon your way, All that you can call your own lies in this, To-day. Power, intellect, and strength, may not, cannot last— The mill will never grind with the water that has passed. Oh! the wasted hours of life that have drifted by— Oh! the good we might have done, lost without a sigh, Love that we might once have saved with but a single word, Thoughts conceived, but never penned, perishing unheard. Take this lesson to your heart, take, oh! hold it fast— The mill will never grind with the water that has passed.1 [Note: S. Doudney.] 3. We can all buy up for profitable uses what remains to us of time. (1) The words of the Apostle have a meaning for our ordinary everyday work. Buy up your opportunities. Be diligent in business. Lay yourself to your work with your full mind and strength. There is no opposition between a godly life and the energetic and successful handling of business. A Christian man need not be a dreamer; he may be as wide-awake, as quick on the spot when there is a chance for him as the man who is not a Christian. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” Of Darwin we read: “One characteristic was his respect for time; he never forgot how precious it was. He never wasted a few spare minutes from thinking that it was not worth while to set to work.” His golden rule was “taking care of the minutes.” In one of his letters occurs this passage: “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”2 [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Education of the Heart, 229. On his way to Marengo, Napoleon stopped at the door of a barber’s shop, and asked his former hostess if she remembered a young officer named Bonaparte once quartered in her family. “Indeed I do, and a very disagreeable inmate he was. He was always either shut up in his room, or if he walked out, he never condescended to speak to any one.” “Ah! my good woman,” Napoleon rejoined, “had I passed my time as you wished to have me, I should not now have been in command of the army of Italy.”1 [Note: J. E. Foster, Pain, 217. Wasted an hour at Morton’s talking of the pictures, etc. Nothing learned, came home and was in a hurry for the loss of that hour all night. I will spend no more precious time on acquaintances.2 [Note: Life and Letters of Frederic Shields, 43. (2) But the great prize of life is spiritual. Business is not simply our opportunity for getting on; it is our opportunity for getting up. Rightly done, daily work helps us towards the great ends of life. We may use all the machinery of our life, the money we get, the work we do, in such a way as to bring us more and more of the riches of the soul. Equality of opportunity is perhaps not conceivable, but we can use our particular circumstances so that they can further God’s great design for us. The incandescent mantle is made by laying a mantle made of cotton in a chemical solution. A deposit is made on it, a process of crystallization takes place on the threads. When the mantle is used the threads are fired, and only the mantle which has been formed on them is left. This world, our earthly lot, all the machinery of our life, is only the cotton thread for the making of the soul. It will all be burned up, and only so much character, so much soul, as we have made will remain.3 [Note: H. Bonner, Sermons and Lectures, 211. Carey, before his call to the mission field, used to go about from village to village preaching, for his soul was filled with the love of God. One day a friend came to him and said, “Mr. Carey, I want to speak to you very seriously.” “Well,” said Mr. Carey, “what is it?” The friend replied, “By your going about preaching as you do, you are neglecting your business. If you only attended to your business more you would be all right, and would soon get on and prosper; but, as it is, you are simply neglecting your business.” “Neglecting my business,” said Carey, looking at him steadily, “My business is to extend the Kingdom of God, and I only cobble shoes to pay expenses.”4 [Note: J. Duff, Illuminative Flashes, 103. During December an extraordinary thing happened, for he did allow that there was a small present he would like to have given to him on Christmas Day! This was a seal, and one of Dutch design was found. On the evening of Christmas Day we began to talk of what might be engraved upon it, and I asked him to invent a motto for it. He was silent for a second or two, and then said, “I think I should like to say, ‘The Utmost for the Highest.’ ”1 [Note: M. S. Watts, George Frederic Watts, ii. 137. (3) The special opportunity that the Apostle urges us to embrace is that of rendering service to God and man. “As we have opportunity,” says Paul, “let us do good unto all men.” Every Christian ought to be intent on helping in some form to make the world a happier and a better world. The troubled, the weary, the unfortunate are always near to us. There is always something within our reach which we could do, if we would. The troubles and misfortunes of others are often our opportunity. One day or other the world will slip through our fingers, and all we hold dearest in it. Only the good we have done will remain. That cannot pass away. It is written down in the memory of God, registered in the books of His Divine Retribution. We will need it all when we come to give in our account of our service and go to get our wages—our love, and kindliness, and faith, and unselfishness, and well-doing—we will need it all and more than all when God puts the question to us: “Of what use have you been in My world?”2 [Note: Dr. MacGregor of St. Cuthberts, 109. A heathen king once said that that day was lost in which he had conferred no benefit on a friend; and shall not we feel that day indeed to be lost on which we have returned no thanks to God for the numberless common blessings which cheer and gladden us, in which we have not sought in gratitude to extend to others the hope which we feel ourselves?3 [Note: B. F. Westcott, Village Sermons, 321. It is related of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, that in mid-winter, as she carried in her robe a supply of food to some poor people in the mountains, and as she climbed the steep and slippery path, she met her husband returning from the chase. “What hast thou here, my Elizabeth?” said he. “What art thou carrying away now?” And as she stood confused and blushing, he opened her dress and found it full of red and white roses, lovelier than those of earth. So did the Middle Ages invent legends to glorify the sweet charity of this noble woman, who spent her time, strength, and means in caring for the poor people afflicted by famine and plague. Especially she loved children, and built hospitals for them; and they loved her so that they ran after her, calling out “Mother! mother!” The sick children she took into her hospital, washed and dressed their poor little limbs, and bought them toys and gifts to amuse them. For this she was canonized; and she well deserved it, not because of the miracles which they tell of her, but for that which is more Divine than any miracle, her tender heart and love of humanity.1 [Note: J. F. Clarke.] Up, up, my soul, the long-spent time redeeming; Sow thou the seeds of better deeds and thought; Light other lamps while yet thy lamp is beaming— The time is short. Think of the good thou might’st have done when brightly The suns to thee life’s choicest season brought; Hours lost to God in pleasure passing lightly— The time is short. If thou hast friends, give them thy best endeavour, Thy warmest impulse, and thy purest thought, Keeping in mind and word and action ever— The time is short.2 [Note: E. Prentiss.] II Circumstances that Increase the Value of the Article St. Paul regards life as an opportunity for which a price must be paid; the full price of constant watchfulness and endeavour and sacrifice. He speaks in the language of the market or the exchange; and far down in the undercurrents of his mind seems to be moving the thought that, if men would but expend upon the investment of their intellectual and spiritual possessions one-tenth of the pains they give to the investment of their worldly goods, their redemption would already have begun. And yet it is in the spiritual sphere that it is most needful to pay the price. Experience confirms the protest of King David that he could not—not merely would not, but could not—make an offering to the Lord his God of that which had cost him nothing. In all the higher walks of life, we neither get nor give anything of value, if it has cost us nothing in the getting or the giving. 1. Opportunities both rise in price and grow fewer every time we refuse to purchase them.—If it be hard to subdue passion and the cravings of irregular desire to-day, it will be harder to-morrow, should we leave the hours of to-day unimproved. If it would cost us much to do what we know to be the will of the Lord to-day, it will cost us more every day we neglect our duty. A man who has long disobeyed the Divine will has in doing that will difficulties which the obedient can but faintly conceive. His polluted memory, his perverted and obstinate will, the force of sinful habit, the stings of impure desire, or even the mere custom of indifference to things unseen and eternal, turn the obedience which should be his happiness into mere labour and pain. This moment’s thine, thou never more may’st hear The clarion-summons-call thus loud and clear; What now thou buyest cheap may yet prove dear. Part with thine all, spare not the needed cost; That which thou partest with were better lost, Thy selfish worldly schemes more wisely crossed. Thy loss infinitesimal, thy gain Endless, immense; thy momentary pain The single step the boundless bliss to attain! Eye hath not seen, man’s ear hath never heard, Nor heart conceived—save some faint image blurred— The bliss of those who keep the Christly word— Let go; my soul, let go!1 [Note: William Hall, “Via Crucis.”] 2. Evil times give a special value to opportunity.—The disciples of Jesus Christ, living in the midst of a great pagan city, were exposed to grievous and continuous perils. The moral corruption of the ancient world found there its most complete and deadly expression. It entered into all the relations of life—commerce, politics, society, worst of all, religion, were steeped in it. The very atmosphere of existence was heavy with gross sin. Evil, which in the country diffused itself over a wider area, and was at all times checked and shadowed by the solemn and beautiful scenes of nature, was here brought together into a centre, and obtruded upon the notice without hindrance or intermission. To borrow Cardinal Newman’s simile, “It was basking under the sun, and rioting and extending itself to its amplest dimensions, like some glittering serpent, or spotted pard … without interposition from heaven or earth in correction of so awful a degradation.” Such a centre and focus of evil was ancient Ephesus. St. Paul sets a good example of his own precept by his own practice. When he wrote this Epistle he was a prisoner, bound to a soldier. The days were evil for him: but he redeemed them. He made his prison to be a pulpit, from which he preached to the world. The Roman soldier’s presence was a perpetual memento to him that he himself was a soldier of Christ. Every part of the soldier’s armour suggested to him a weapon of Christian warfare, to be wielded in the cause of Christ.1 [Note: H. G. Miller, The Epistle to the Ephesians, 278. On the death of General Booth of the Salvation Army, one of his lieutenants was asked what the probable effect would be on the army. The reply was, “I think that probably the departure of the General will mean the consecration afresh of every Salvationist to the great work to which the General gave his life. Now that he is gone, I must do more.” III Types of Traders The Apostle speaks of the wise and the foolish, and urges the Ephesians to be among the wise, walking circumspectly, redeeming the time, and looking to see what the will of the Lord is. All men may be divided into two great classes, according as they do or do not perceive that life is an opportunity. To the one class life has a twofold meaning: it means the opportunity of development; it means the opportunity of service to God and man. To the other class life has no meaning at all; they simply drift from day to day; and whether it is business or amusement of which they see most, there is no real aim or purpose in what they do. The lethargic let chance after chance to do good slip away unseized, unimproved; the wise and watchful, however, charm by a smile, warn by a word, persuade by an action, prevail by a prayer every hour; they are like the quicksilver that does not permit a particle of gold to escape. If I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed.1 [Note: W. James, The Will to Believe, 4. 1. The foolish miss or misuse their opportunity.—There they sit, like Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, dreaming that something is going to happen which will place them on the wave of prosperity and sweep them into the harbour of success. They never do anything, because that for which they are looking never happens. Some times are taken from us by force; some others are stolen from us; and others slip away. But the most disgraceful loss is that which arises from our own negligence.2 [Note: Seneca.] Spend not your time in that which profits not; for your labour and your health, your time and your studies, are very valuable; and it is a thousand pities to see a diligent and hopeful person spend himself in gathering cockle-shells and little pebbles, in telling sands upon the shores, and making garlands of useless daisies.3 [Note: Jeremy Taylor.] Perhaps there stands in modern literature no more pathetic figure than that of Amiel, whose gifts were so high, and whose achievements were so meagre. One of his friends writes, “We found him always kindly and amiable, a nature one might trust and lean upon with perfect security. Yet he wakened in us but one regret. We could never understand how it was a man so richly gifted, produced nothing, or only trivialities.” In his own journal one of the last entries, written with trembling hand, ten days before his death, reads thus: “So much promise, to end in so meagre a result! I shall end like the Rhine—lost among the sands, and the hour is close by, when my thread of water shall have for ever disappeared.” If this befell: At some fair dawning-time, Ere failed the wistful world its dreams and dew, Sheer from the height of heaven reached down to you A cloud-piled stair more pure than glistening rime, And firm as marble wrought, in flights sublime That pierced the void, whence lights come faint and few, Beyond all starry outposts: toward what new Wild-wondered shores—ah, would you dare to climb? And if, while yet you doubted, lo, too late, You saw it reft past range of fear and hope, Caught up the vast, and here you needs must wait Mere day’s returning; would not narrow scope Wide earth yield? Yea, the azure’s amplest cope Enclose your spirit like a dungeon-grate?1 [Note: Jane Barlow.] 2. The wise perceive the value of opportunity and buy it up.—That is to say, they reclaim it by hard toil from misuse, they turn every fraction of it to good account; they even create occasions to carry out the great ends of life. For all men alike, failure is blindness to the strategic element in events; success is readiness for instant action when the opportune moment arrives. When nature has fully ripened an opportunity man must stretch out his hand and pluck it. Inventions may be defined as great minds detecting the strategic moment in nature; Galileo finding a lens in the ox’s eye; Watt witnessing steam lift an iron lid; Columbus observing an unknown wood drifting upon the shore. To untold multitudes nature offered these opportune moments for discovery, but only Galileo, Watt, and Columbus were ready to seize them. As for the rest, this is our only answer to nature: “While thy servant was busy here and there, the strategic moment was gone.”2 [Note: N. D. Hillis, The Investment of Influence, 222. After much consideration we settled the question where to spend the winter by taking a house at Brighton. There was the advantage of a well-lighted studio, built for a picture-gallery, large enough to take in his big painting of the “Court of Death,” and as many others as he wished to have there. His doctor knew and recommended this house, and to 31 Sussex Square we went on November 1. A big platform was built up in this studio to make it possible for him to work upon the “Court of Death.” When he went into that room to find that these preparations had been made, his feeling seemed to be a sort of despair at the amount of work that still remained undone. But before an hour had passed he had pulled himself together, saying, “Come, this won’t do”; and the frail little figure stood drawn up erect and full of unconquerable spirit. He had worked hard the last day before leaving Little Holland House, upon the “Physical Energy.” There were some roughened bits and deep scores he was anxious to fill up. “The idea of its being left in that state was dreadful to me,” he said, adding, “in case anything should happen to me.” He lived always as a good pilgrim, girt and ready for the long journey whenever the summons should come. The tick of the clock had in it for him the sound of Time’s footstep. “I know it,” he said, “and remember that each line that I draw is one less, one nearer the last.”1 [Note: M. S. Watts, George Frederic Watts, ii. 135. In a letter from Uganda during the days of fierce persecutions in which that Church was cradled, the following phrase occurs—“Times of persecution are busy printing times.” The undaunted men who planted the standard of the cross in Uganda had already reduced the language to writing, and translated portions of Scripture, with prayers and hymns, for the use of the Baganda. And during those dark days, when active and aggressive work was unwise, if not impossible, they plied the printing-press and issued from it the first literature of that wonderful race, which Mr. Stanley found them studying when he visited them on one of his journeys.2 [Note: T. W. Drury, The Prison-Ministry of St. Paul, 98. Sometimes Bonaparte forgot his part, and displayed the shrewd, calculating, hard-working man behind the mask, who was less a fatalist than a personified fate, less a child of fortune than its maker. “Great events,” he wrote from Italy, “ever depend but upon a single hair. The adroit man profits by everything, neglects nothing which can increase his chances; the less adroit, by sometimes disregarding a single chance, fails in everything.” Here is the whole philosophy of Bonaparte’s life.3 [Note: W. M. Sloane, Napoleon Bonaparte, i. 321. Another day may bring another mind, A mind to learn, when there is none to teach; To follow, when no leader we can find; To enjoy, when good is now beyond our reach: A better mind, but not a better time, A mind to will, but not a time to do What had been done, if we in life’s bright prime, When God was ready, had been ready too. But what the better for his better mind Were changing man, and God not still the same? When guide and light and joy we cannot find Unchanging love has sent us useful shame. This other mind may bring another day, For days are given as man for days prepares; Though many days of grace have passed away, The grace that gave them still the trifler spares; And saddens times while Time itself may last, That unwise man may come to better thought, Accept his future, and renounce his past, And be by sorrow into goodness brought.1 [Note: T. T. Lynch, The Rivulet, 122. The Purchase of Opportunity Literature Alexander (S. A.), The Christianity of St. Paul, 204. Ashley (J. M.), A Promptuary for Preachers, ii. 280. Baring-Gould (S.), Village Preaching for a Year, 1st Ser., i. 50. Beaumont (J. A.), Walking Circumspectly, 1. Blunt (J. J.), Plain Sermons, i. 259. Bonner (H.), Sermons and Lectures, 206. Brown (J.), Sermons with Memoir, 148. Bruce (J.), Sermons, 227. Calthrop (G.), The Future Life, 174. Campbell (L.), The Christian Ideal, 223. Cox (S.), Expositions, i. 2. Foster (J. E.), Pain: Its Mystery and Meaning, 209. Henson (H. H.), Light and Leaven, 178. MacColl (M.), Life Here and Hereafter, 290. Maclaren (A.), Leaves from the Tree of Life, 1. Maurice (F. D.), Christmas Day, 56. Morgan (G. C.), The True Estimate of Life, 151. Neville (W. G.), Sermons, 194. Nicholson (M.), Redeeming the Time, 1. Reid (J.), The Uplifting of Life, 126. Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xii. (1874), No. 916. Watkinson (W. L.), The Education of the Heart, 228. Westcott (B. F.), Village Sermons, 314. Wilmot-Buxton (H. J.), The Life of Duty, i. 45. Christian World Pulpit, xli. 42 (Hocking); li. 248 (Maclagan). Churchman’s Pulpit: The Old and New Year: ii. 477 (Hodges); The Lenten Season, v. 90 (Cooke); Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, xiii. 35 (Moberly). Clergyman’s Magazine, New Ser., viii. 230 (Hayman).