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+\documentclass[twoside]{book}
+\usepackage{verse}
+\begin{document}
+\thispagestyle{empty}
+\small
+\begin{verbatim}
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans
+Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V), by Alexander Maclaren
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V)
+
+Author: Alexander Maclaren
+
+Release Date: October 5, 2004 [EBook #13601]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: TeX
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Franks, John Hagerson, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+\end{verbatim}
+\normalsize
+\newpage
+
+\frontmatter
+
+\begin{center}
+\huge EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE
+
+\bigskip\bigskip\bigskip
+\large ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D. \\
+\bigskip\bigskip
+ROMANS \\
+\bigskip CORINTHIANS \textit{(To II Corinthians, Chap. V)}
+\end{center}
+
+\tableofcontents
+
+%% THE WITNESS OF THE RESURRECTION (Romans i. 4, R. V.)
+%% PRIVILEGE AND OBLIGATION (Romans i. 7)
+%% PAUL'S LONGING (Romans i. 11, 12)
+%% DEBTORS TO ALL MEN (Romans i. 14)
+%% THE GOSPEL THE POWER OF GOD (Romans i. 16)
+%% WORLD-WIDE SIN AND WORLD-WIDE REDEMPTION (Romans iii. 19-26)
+%% NO DIFFERENCE (Romans iii. 22)
+%% `LET US HAVE PEACE' (Romans v. 1, R. V.)
+%% ACCESS INTO GRACE (Romans v. 2)
+%% THE SOURCES OF HOPE (Romans v. 2-4)
+%% A THREEFOLD CORD (Romans v. 5)
+%% WHAT PROVES GOD'S LOVE (Romans v. 8)
+%% THE WARRING QUEENS (Romans v. 21)
+%% `THE FORM OF TEACHING' (Romans vi. 17)
+%% `THY FREE SPIRIT' (Romans viii. 2)
+%% CHRIST CONDEMNING SIN (Romans viii. 8)
+%% THE WITNESS OF THE SPIRIT (Romans viii. 16)
+%% SONS AND HEIRS (Romans viii. 17)
+%% SUFFERING WITH CHRIST, A CONDITION OF GLORY WITH CHRIST (Romans viii. 17)
+%% THE REVELATION OF SONS (Romans viii. 19)
+%% THE REDEMPTION OF THE BODY (Romans viii. 23)
+%% THE INTERCEDING SPIRIT (Romans viii. 26)
+%% THE GIFT THAT BRINGS ALL GIFTS (Romans viii. 32)
+%% MORE THAN CONQUERORS (Romans viii. 37)
+%% LOVE'S TRIUMPH (Romans viii. 38, 39)
+%% THE SACRIFICE OF THE BODY (Romans xii. 1)
+%% TRANSFIGURATION (Romans xii. 2)
+%% SOBER THINKING (Romans xii. 3)
+%% MANY AND ONE (Romans xii. 4, 5)
+%% GRACE AND GRACES (Romans xii. 6-8)
+%% LOVE THAT CAN HATE (Romans xii. 9, 10, R. V.)
+%% A TRIPLET OF GRACES (Romans xii. 11)
+%% ANOTHER TRIPLET OF GRACES (Romans xii. 12)
+%% STILL ANOTHER TRIPLET (Romans xii. 13-15)
+%% STILL ANOTHER TRIPLET (Romans xii. 16, R. V.)
+%% STILL ANOTHER TRIPLET (Romans xii, 17, 18, R. V.)
+%% STILL ANOTHER TRIPLET (Romans xii. 19-21)
+%% LOVE AND THE DAY (Romans xiii. 8-14)
+%% SALVATION NEARER (Romans xiii. 11)
+%% THE SOLDIER'S MORNING-CALL (Romans xiii. 12)
+%% THE LIMITS OF LIBERTY (Romans xiv. 12-23)
+%% TWO FOUNTAINS, ONE STREAM (Romans xv. 4, 13)
+%% JOY AND PEACE IN BELIEVING (Romans xv. 13)
+%% PH\OE{}BE (Romans xvi. 1, 2, R. V.)
+%% PRISCILLA AND AQUILA (Romans xvi. 3-5)
+%% TWO HOUSEHOLDS (Romans xvi. 10,11)
+%% TRYPHENA AND TRYPHOSA (Romans xvi. 12)
+%% PERSIS (Romans xvi. 12)
+%% A CRUSHED SNAKE (Romans xvi. 20)
+%% TERTIUS (Romans xvi. 22, R. V.)
+%% QUARTUS A BROTHER (Romans xvi. 23)
+
+\mainmatter
+
+\addcontentsline{toc}{part}{ROMANS}
+
+\chapter{The Witness of the Resurrection}
+\markright{ROMANS i. 4}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Declared to be the Son of God with power, ... by the resurrection
+of the dead.'---\textsc{Romans} i. 4 (R.~V.).
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+It is a great mistake to treat Paul's writings, and especially
+this Epistle, as mere theology. They are the transcript of his
+life's experience. As has been well said, the gospel of Paul is an
+interpretation of the significance of the life and work of Jesus
+based upon the revelation to him of Jesus as the risen Christ. He
+believed that he had seen Jesus on the road to Damascus, and it
+was that appearance which revolutionised his life, turned him from
+a persecutor into a disciple, and united him with the Apostles as
+ordained to be a witness with them of the Resurrection. To them
+all the Resurrection of Jesus was first of all a historical fact
+appreciated chiefly in its bearing on Him. By degrees they
+discerned that so transcendent a fact bore in itself a revelation
+of what would become the experience of all His followers beyond
+the grave, and a symbol of the present life possible for them. All
+three of these aspects are plainly declared in Paul's writings. In
+our text it is chiefly the first which is made prominent. All that
+distinguishes Christianity; and makes it worth believing, or
+mighty, is inseparably connected with the Resurrection.
+
+I. The Resurrection of Christ declares His Sonship.
+
+Resurrection and Ascension are inseparably connected. Jesus does
+not rise to share again in the ills and weariness of humanity.
+Risen, `He dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over Him.'
+`He died unto sin once'; and His risen humanity had nothing in it
+on which physical death could lay hold. That He should from some
+secluded dimple on Olivet ascend before the gazing disciples until
+the bright cloud, which was the symbol of the Divine Presence,
+received Him out of their sight, was but the end of the process
+which began unseen in morning twilight. He laid aside the garments
+of the grave and passed out of the sepulchre which was made sure
+by the great stone rolled against its mouth. The grand avowal of
+faith in His Resurrection loses meaning, unless it is completed as
+Paul completed his `yea rather that was raised from the dead,'
+with the triumphant `who is at the right hand of God.' Both are
+supernatural, and the Virgin Birth corresponds at the beginning to
+the supernatural Resurrection and Ascension at the close. Both
+such an entrance into the world and such a departure from it,
+proclaim at once His true humanity, and that `this is the Son of
+God.'
+
+Still further, the Resurrection is God's solemn `Amen' to the
+tremendous claims which Christ had made. The fact of His
+Resurrection, indeed, would not declare His divinity; but the
+Resurrection of One who had spoken such words does. If the Cross
+and a nameless grave had been the end, what a \textit{reductio ad
+absurdum} that would have been to the claims of Jesus to have ever
+been with the Father and to be doing always the things that
+pleased Him. The Resurrection is God's last and loudest
+proclamation, `This is My beloved Son: hear ye Him.' The Psalmist
+of old had learned to trust that his sonship and consecration to
+the Father made it impossible that that Father should leave his
+soul in Sheol, or suffer one who was knit to Him by such sacred
+bonds to see corruption; and the unique Sonship and perfect
+self-consecration of Jesus went down into the grave in the assured
+confidence, as He Himself declared, that the third day He would
+rise again. The old alternative seems to retain all its sharp
+points: Either Christ rose again from the dead, or His claims are
+a series of blasphemous arrogances and His character irremediably
+stained.
+
+But we may also remember that Scripture not only represents
+Christ's Resurrection as a divine act but also as the act of
+Christ's own power. In His earthly life He asserted that His
+relation both to physical death and to resurrection was an
+entirely unique one. `I have power,' said He, `to lay down my
+life, and I have power to take it again'; and yet, even in this
+tremendous instance of self-assertion, He remains the obedient
+Son, for He goes on to say, `This commandment have I received of
+My Father.' If these claims are just, then it is vain to stumble
+at the miracles which Jesus did in His earthly life. If He could
+strip it off and resume it, then obviously it was not a life like
+other men's. The whole phenomenon is supernatural, and we shall
+not be in the true position to understand and appreciate it and
+Him until, like the doubting Thomas, we fall at the feet of the
+risen Son, and breathe out loyalty and worship in that rapturous
+exclamation, `My Lord and my God.'
+
+II. The Resurrection interprets Christ's Death.
+
+There is no more striking contrast than that between the absolute
+non-receptivity of the disciples in regard to all Christ's plain
+teachings about His death and their clear perception after
+Pentecost of the mighty power that lay in it. The very fact that
+they continued disciples at all, and that there continued to be
+such a community as the Church, demands their belief in the
+Resurrection as the only cause which can account for it. If He did
+not rise from the dead, and if His followers did not know that He
+did so by the plainest teachings of common-sense, they ought to
+have scattered, and borne in isolated hearts the bitter memories
+of disappointed hopes; for if He lay in a nameless grave, and they
+were not sure that He was risen from the dead, His death would
+have been a conclusive showing up of the falsity of His claims. In
+it there would have been no atoning power, no triumph over sin. If
+the death of Christ were not followed by His Resurrection and
+Ascension, the whole fabric of Christianity falls to pieces. As
+the Apostle puts it in his great chapter on resurrection, `Ye are
+yet in your sins.' The forgiveness which the Gospel holds forth to
+men does not depend on the mercy of God or on the mere penitence
+of man, but upon the offering of the one sacrifice for sins in His
+death, which is justified by His Resurrection as being accepted by
+God. If we cannot triumphantly proclaim `Christ is risen indeed,'
+we have nothing worth preaching.
+
+We are told now that the ethics of Christianity are its vital
+centre, which will stand out more plainly when purified from these
+mystical doctrines of a Death as the sin-offering for the world,
+and a Resurrection as the great token that that offering avails.
+Paul did not think so. To him the morality of the Gospel was all
+deduced from the life of Christ the Son of God as our Example, and
+from His death for us which touches men's hearts and makes
+obedience to Him our joyful answer to what He has done for us.
+Christianity is a new thing in the world, not as moral teaching,
+but as moral power to obey that teaching, and that depends on the
+Cross interpreted by the Resurrection. If we have only a dead
+Christ, we have not a living Christianity.
+
+III. Resurrection points onwards to Christ's coming again.
+
+Paul at Athens declared in the hearing of supercilious Greek
+philosophers, that the Jesus, whom he proclaimed to them, was `the
+Man whom God had ordained to judge the world in righteousness,'
+and that `He had given assurance thereof unto all men, in that He
+raised Him from the dead.' The Resurrection was the beginning of
+the process which, from the human point of view, culminated in the
+Ascension. Beyond the Ascension stretches the supernatural life of
+the glorified Son of God. Olivet cannot be the end, and the words
+of the two men in white apparel who stood amongst the little group
+of the upward gazing friends, remain as the hope of the Church:
+`This same Jesus shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him
+go into heaven.' That great assurance implies a visible corporeal
+return locally defined, and having for its purpose to complete the
+work which Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, each
+advanced a stage. The Resurrection is the corner-stone of the
+whole Christian faith. It seals the truths that Jesus is the Son
+of God with power, that He died for us, that He has ascended on
+high to prepare a place for us, that He will come again and take
+us to Himself. If we, by faith in Him, take for ours the women's
+greeting on that Easter morning, `The Lord hath risen indeed,' He
+will come to us with His own greeting, `Peace be unto you.'
+
+\chapter{Privilege and Obligation}
+\markright{ROMANS i. 7}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`To all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called to be
+saints.'---\textsc{Romans} i. 7.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+ This is the address of the Epistle. The first thing to
+be noticed about it, by way of introduction, is the universality
+of this designation of Christians. Paul had never been in Rome,
+and knew very little about the religious stature of the converts
+there. But he has no hesitation in declaring that they are all
+`beloved of God' and `saints.' There were plenty of imperfect
+Christians amongst them; many things to rebuke; much deadness,
+coldness, inconsistency, and yet none of these in the slightest
+degree interfered with the application of these great designations
+to them. So, then, `beloved of God' and `saints' are not
+distinctions of classes within the pale of Christianity, but
+belong to the whole community, and to each member of the body.
+
+The next thing to note, I think, is how these two great terms,
+`beloved of God' and `saints,' cover almost the whole ground of
+the Christian life. They are connected with each other very
+closely, as I shall have occasion to show presently, but in the
+meantime it may be sufficient to mark how the one carries us deep
+into the heart of God and the other extends over the whole ground
+of our relation to Him. The one is a statement of a universal
+prerogative, the other an enforcement of a universal obligation.
+Let us look, then, at these two points, the universal privilege
+and the universal obligation of the Christian life.
+
+I. The universal privilege of the Christian life.
+
+`Beloved of God.' Now we are so familiar with the juxtaposition of
+the two ideas, `love' and `God,' that we cease to feel the
+wonderfulness of their union. But until Jesus Christ had done His
+work no man believed that the two thoughts could be brought
+together.
+
+Does God love any one? We think the question too plain to need to
+be put, and the answer instinctive. But it is not by any means
+instinctive, and the fact is that until Christ answered it for us,
+the world stood dumb before the question that its own heart
+raised, and when tortured spirits asked, `Is there care in heaven,
+and is there love?' there was `no voice, nor answer, nor any that
+regarded.' Think of the facts of life; think of the facts of
+nature. Think of sorrows and miseries and pains, and sins, and
+wasted lives and storms, and tempests, and diseases, and
+convulsions; and let us feel how true the grim saying is, that
+\begin{verse}
+`Nature, red in tooth and claw, \\
+ With rapine, shrieks against the creed'
+\end{verse}
+\noindent that God is love.
+
+And think of what the world has worshipped, and of all the
+varieties of monstrosity, not the less monstrous because sometimes
+beautiful, before which men have bowed. Cruel, lustful, rapacious,
+capricious, selfish, indifferent deities they have adored. And
+then, `God hath established,' proved, demonstrated `His love to us
+in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.'
+
+Oh, brethren, do not let us kick down the ladder by which we have
+climbed; or, in the name of a loving God, put away the Christian
+teaching which has begotten the conception in humanity of a God
+that loves. There are men to-day who would never have come within
+sight of that sunlight truth, even as a glimmering star, away down
+upon the horizon, if it had not been for the Gospel; and who now
+turn round upon that very Gospel which has given them the
+conception, and accuse it of narrow and hard thoughts of the love
+of God.
+
+One of the Scripture truths against which the assailant often
+turns his sharpest weapons is that which is involved in my text,
+the Scripture answer to the other question, `Does not God love
+all?' Yes! yes! a thousand times, yes! But there is another
+question, Does the love of God, to all, make His special
+designation of Christian men as His beloved the least unlikely?
+Surely there is no kind of contradiction between the broadest
+proclamation of the universality of the love of God and Paul's
+decisive declaration that, in a very deep and real manner, they
+who are in Christ are the beloved of God. Surely special affection
+is not in its nature, inconsistent with universal beneficence and
+benevolence. Surely it is no exaltation, but rather a degradation
+of the conception of the divine love, if we proclaim its utter
+indifference to men's characters. Surely you are not honouring God
+when you say, `It is all the same to Him whether a man loves Him
+and serves Him, or lifts himself up in rebellion against Him, and
+makes himself his own centre, and earth his aim and his all.'
+Surely to imagine a God who not only makes His sun to shine and
+His rains and dews to fall on the unthankful and the evil, that He
+may draw them to love Him, but who also is conceived as taking the
+sinful creature who yet cleaves to his sins to His heart, as He
+does the penitent soul that longs for His image to be produced in
+it, is to blaspheme, and not to honour the love, the universal
+love of God.
+
+God forbid that any words that ever drop from my lips should seem
+to cast the smallest shadow of doubt on that great truth, `God so
+loved the world that He gave His Son!' But God forbid, equally,
+that any words of mine should seem to favour the, to me, repellent
+idea that the infinite love of God disregards the character of the
+man on whom it falls. There are manifestations of that loving
+heart which any man can receive; and each man gets as much of the
+love of God as it is possible to pour upon him. But granite rock
+does not drink in the dew as a flower does; and the nature of the
+man on whom God's love falls determines how much, and what manner
+of its manifestations shall pass into his true possession, and
+what shall remain without.
+
+So, on the whole, we have to answer the questions, `Does God love
+any? Does not God love all? Does God specially love some?' with
+the one monosyllable, `Yes.'
+
+And so, dear brethren, let us learn the path by which we can pass
+into that blessed community of those on whom the fullness and
+sweetness and tenderest tenderness of the Father's heart will
+fall. `If a man love Me, he will keep My words; and My Father will
+love him.' Myths tell us that the light which, at the beginning,
+had been diffused through a nebulous mass, was next gathered into
+a sun. So the universal love of God is concentrated in Jesus
+Christ; and if we have Him we have it; and if we have faith we
+have Him, and can say, `Neither life, nor death, nor things
+present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
+creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which
+is in Christ Jesus our Lord.'
+
+II. Then, secondly, mark the universal obligation of the Christian
+life.
+
+`Called to be saints,' says my text. Now you will observe that the
+two little words `to be' are inserted here as a supplement. They may
+be correct enough, but they are open to the possibility of
+misunderstanding, as if the saintship, to which all Christian people
+are `called' was something future, and not realised at the moment.
+Now, in the context, the Apostle employs the same form of expression
+with regard to himself in a clause which illuminates the meaning of
+my text. `Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ' says he, in the first
+verse, `called to be an Apostle' or, more correctly, `a called
+Apostle.' The apostleship coincided in time with the call, was
+contemporaneous with that which was its cause. And if Paul was an
+Apostle since he was called, saints are saints since \textit{they}
+are called. `The beloved of God' are `the called saints.'
+
+I need only observe, further, that the word `called' here does not
+mean `named' or `designated' but `summoned.' It describes not the
+name by which Christian men are known, but the thing which they
+are invited, summoned, `called' by God to be. It is their
+vocation, not their designation. Now, then, I need not, I suppose,
+remind you that `saint' and `holy' convey precisely the same idea:
+the one expressing it in a word of Teutonic, and the other in one
+of classic derivation.
+
+We notice that the true idea of this universal holiness which,
+\textit{ipso facto}, belongs to all Christian people, is
+consecration to God. In the old days temple, altars, sacrifices,
+sacrificial vessels, persons such as priests, periods like
+Sabbaths and feasts, were called `holy.' The common idea running
+through all these uses of the word is \textit{belonging to God},
+and that is the root notion of the New Testament `saint' a man who
+is God's. God has claimed us for Himself when He gave us Jesus
+Christ. We respond to the claim when we accept Christ. Henceforth
+we are not our own, but `consecrated'---that is, `saints.'
+
+Now the next step is purity, which is the ordinary idea of
+sanctity. Purity will follow consecration, and would not be worth
+much without it, even if it was possible to be attained. Now, look
+what a far deeper and nobler idea of the service and conditions of
+moral goodness this derivation of it from surrender to God gives,
+than does a God-ignoring morality which talks and talks about acts
+and dispositions, and never goes down to the root of the whole
+matter; and how much nobler it is than a shallow religion which in
+like manner is ever straining after acts of righteousness, and
+forgets that in order to be right there must be prior surrender to
+God. Get a man to yield himself up to God and no fear about the
+righteousness. Virtue, goodness, purity, righteousness, all these
+synonyms express very noble things; but deep down below them all
+lies the New Testament idea of holiness, consecration of myself to
+God, which is the parent of them all.
+
+And then the next thing to remind you of is that this consecration
+is to be applied all through a man's nature. Yielding yourselves
+to God is the talismanic secret of all righteousness, as I have
+said; and every part of our complex, manifold being is capable of
+such consecration. I hallow my heart if its love twines round His
+heart. I hallow my thoughts if I take His truth for my guide, and
+ever seek to be led thereby in practice and in belief. I hallow my
+will when it bows and says, `Speak, Lord! Thy servant heareth!' I
+hallow my senses when I use them as from Him, with recognition of
+Him and for Him. In fact, there are two ways of living in the
+world; and, narrow as it sounds, I venture to say there are only
+two. Either God is my centre, and that is holiness; or self is my
+centre, in more or less subtle forms, and that is sin.
+
+Then the next step is that this consecration, which will issue in
+all purity, and will cover the whole ground of a human life, is
+only possible when we have drunk in the blessed thought `beloved
+of God.' My yielding of myself to Him can only be the echo of His
+giving of Himself to me. He must be the first to love. You cannot
+argue a man into loving God, any more than you can hammer a
+rosebud open. If you do you spoil its petals. But He can love us
+into loving Him, and the sunshine, falling on the closed flower,
+will expand it, and it will grow by its reception of the light,
+and grow sunlike in its measure and according to its nature. So a
+God who has only claims upon us will never be a God to whom we
+yield ourselves. A God who has love for us will be a God to whom
+it is blessed that we should be consecrated, and so saints.
+
+Then, still further, this consecration, thus built upon the
+reception of the divine love, and influencing our whole nature,
+and leading to all purity, is a universal characteristic of
+Christians. There is no faith which does not lead to surrender.
+There is no aristocracy in the Christian Church which deserves to
+have the family name given especially to it. `Saint' this, and
+`Saint' that, and `Saint' the other---these titles cannot be used
+without darkening the truth that this honour and obligation of
+being saints belong equally to all that love Jesus Christ. All the
+men whom thus God has drawn to Himself, by His love in His Son,
+they are all, if I may so say, objectively holy; they belong to
+God. But consecration may be cultivated, and must be cultivated
+and increased. There is a solemn obligation laid upon every one of
+us who call ourselves Christians, to be saints, in the sense that
+we have consciously yielded up our whole lives to Him; and are
+trying, body, soul, and spirit, `to perfect holiness in the fear
+of the Lord.'
+
+Paul's letter, addressed to the `beloved in God,' the `called
+saints' that are in Rome, found its way to the people for whom it
+was meant. If a letter so addressed were dropped in our streets,
+do you think anybody would bring it to you, or to any Christian
+society as a whole, recognising that we were the people for whom
+it was meant? The world has taunted us often enough with the name
+of saints; and laughed at the profession which they thought was
+included in the word. Would that their taunts had been undeserved,
+and that it were not true that `saints' in the Church sometimes
+means less than `good men' out of the Church! `Seeing that we have
+these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all
+filthiness of flesh and spirit; perfecting holiness in the fear of
+the Lord.'
+
+\chapter{Paul's Longing}
+\markright{ROMANS i. 11, 12}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual
+gift, to the end ye may be established; 12.\ That is, that I may
+be comforted together with you, by the mutual faith both of you
+and me.'---\textsc{Romans} i. 11, 12.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+I am not wont to indulge in personal references in the pulpit, but
+I cannot but yield to the impulse to make an exception now, and to
+let our happy circumstances mould my remarks.\footnote{Preached
+after long absence on account of illness.} I speak mainly to mine
+own people, and I must trust that other friends who may hear or
+read my words will forgive my doing so.
+
+In taking such a text as this, I desire to shelter myself behind
+Paul, and in expounding his feelings to express my own, and to
+draw such lessons as may be helpful and profitable to us all. And
+so there are three things in this text that I desire to note: the
+manly expression of Christian affection; the lofty consciousness
+of the purpose of their meeting; and the lowly sense that there
+was much to be received as well as much to be given. A word or two
+about each of these things is all on which I can venture.
+
+I. First, then, notice the manly expression of Christian affection
+which the Apostle allows himself here.
+
+Very few Christian teachers could or should venture to talk so
+much about themselves as Paul did. The strong infusion of the
+personal element in all his letters is so transparently simple, so
+obviously sincere, so free from any jarring note of affectation or
+unctuous sentiment that it attracts rather than repels. If I might
+venture upon a paradox, his personal references are instances of
+self-oblivion in the midst of self-consciousness.
+
+He had never been in Rome when he wrote these words; he had no
+personal relations with the believers there; he had never looked
+them in the face; there were no sympathy and confidence between
+them, as the growth of years. But still his heart went out towards
+them, and he was not ashamed to show it. `I \textit{long} to see
+you,'---in the original the word expresses a very intense amount
+of yearning blended with something of regret that he had been so
+long kept from them.
+
+Now it is not a good thing for people to make many professions of
+affection, and I think a public teacher has something better to do
+than to parade such feelings before his audiences. But there are
+exceptions to all rules, and I suppose I may venture to let my
+heart speak, and to say how gladly I come back to the old place,
+dear to me by so many sacred memories and associations, and how
+gladly I reknit the bonds of an affection which has been unbroken,
+and deepening on both sides through thirty long years.
+
+Dear friends! let us together thank God to-day if He has knit our
+hearts together in mutual affection; and if you and I can look
+each other, as I believe we can, in the eyes, with the assurance
+that I see only the faces of friends, and that you see the face of
+one who gladly resumes the old work and associations.
+
+But now, dear brethren, let us draw one lesson. Unless there be
+this manly, honest, though oftenest silent, Christian affection,
+the sooner you and I part the better. Unless it be in my heart I
+can do you no good. No man ever touched another with the sweet
+constraining forces that lie in Christ's Gospel unless the heart
+of the speaker went out to grapple the hearts of the hearers. And
+no audience ever listen with any profit to a man when they come in
+the spirit of carping criticism, or of cold admiration, or of
+stolid indifference. There must be for this simple relationship
+which alone binds a Nonconformist preacher to his congregation, as
+a \textit{sine qua non} of all higher things and of all spiritual
+good, a real, though oftenest it be a concealed, mutual affection
+and regard. We have to thank God for much of it; let us try to get
+more. That is all I want to say about the first point here.
+
+II. Note the lofty consciousness of the purpose of their
+meeting.
+
+`I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift.'
+Paul knew that he had something which he could give to these people,
+and he calls it by a very comprehensive term, `some spiritual
+gift'---a gift of some sort which, coming from the Divine Spirit,
+was to be received into the human spirit.
+
+Now that expression---a spiritual gift---in the New Testament has
+a variety of applications. Sometimes it refers to what we call
+miraculous endowments, sometimes it refers to what we may call
+official capacity; but here it is evidently neither the one nor
+the other of these more limited and special things, but the
+general idea of a divine operation upon the human spirit which
+fills it with Christian graces---knowledge, faith, love. Or, in
+simpler words, what Paul wanted to give them was a firmer grasp
+and fuller possession of Jesus Christ, His love and power, which
+would secure a deepening and strengthening of their whole
+Christian life. He was quite sure he had this to give, and that he
+could impart it, if they would listen to what he would say to
+them. But whilst thus he rises into the lofty conception of the
+purpose and possible result of his meeting the Roman Christians,
+he is just as conscious of the limitations of his power in the
+matter as he is of the greatness of his function. These are
+indicated plainly. The word which he employs here, `gift' is never
+used in the New Testament for a thing that one man can give to
+another, but is always employed for the concrete results of the
+grace of God bestowed upon men. The very expression, then, shows
+that Paul thought of himself, not as the original giver, but
+simply as a channel through which was communicated what God had
+given. In the same direction points the adjective which
+accompanies the noun---a `\textit{spiritual} gift'---which
+probably describes the origin of the gift as being the Spirit of
+God, rather than defines the seat of it when received as being the
+spirit of the receiver. Notice, too, as bearing on the limits of
+Paul's part in the gift, the propriety and delicacy of the
+language in his statement of the ultimate purpose of the gift. He
+does not say `that I may strengthen you,' which might have sounded
+too egotistical, and would have assumed too much to himself, but
+he says `that ye may be strengthened,' for the true strengthener
+is not Paul, but the Spirit of God.
+
+So, on the one hand, the Christian teacher is bound to rise to the
+height of the consciousness of his lofty vocation as having in
+possession a gift that he can bestow; on the other hand, he is
+bound ever to remember the limitations within which that is
+true---viz. that the gift is not his, but God's, and that the
+Spirit of the Lord is the true Giver of all the graces which may
+blossom when His word, ministered by human agents, is received
+into human hearts.
+
+And, now, what are the lessons that I take from this? Two very
+simple ones. First, no Christian teacher has any business to open
+his mouth, unless he is sure that he has received something to
+impart to men as a gift from the Divine Spirit. To preach our
+doubts, to preach our own opinions, to preach poor platitudes, to
+talk about politics and morals and taste and literature and the
+like in the pulpit, is profanation and blasphemy. Let no man open
+his lips unless he can say: `The Lord hath showed me this; and
+this I bring to you as His word.' Nor has a Christian organisation
+any right to exist, unless it recognises the communication and
+reception and further spreading of this spiritual gift as its
+great function. Churches which have lost that consciousness, and,
+instead of a divine gift, have little more to offer than formal
+worship, or music, or entertainments, or mere intellectual
+discourse, whether orthodox or `advanced,' have no right to be;
+and by the law of the survival of the fittest will not long be.
+The one thing that warrants such a relationship as subsists
+between you and me is this, my consciousness that I have a message
+from God, and your belief that you hear such from my lips. Unless
+that be our bond the sooner these walls crumble, and this voice
+ceases, and these pews are emptied, the better. `I have,' says,
+Paul, `a gift to impart; and I long to see you that I may impart
+it to you.' Oh! for more, in all our pulpits, of that burdened
+consciousness of a divine message which needs the relief of
+speech, and longs with a longing caught from Christ to impart its
+richest treasures.
+
+That is the one lesson. And the other one is this. Have you, dear
+friends, received the gift that I have, under the limitations
+already spoken of, to bestow? There are some of you who have
+listened to my voice ever since you were children---some of you,
+though not many, have heard it for well on to thirty years. Have
+you taken the thing that all these years I have been---God knows
+how poorly, but God knows how honestly---trying to bring to you?
+That is, have you taken Christ, and have you faith in Him? And, as
+for those of you who say that you are Christians, many blessings
+have passed between you and me through all these years; but, dear
+friends, has the chief blessing been attained? Are you being
+strengthened day by day for the burdens and the annoyances and the
+sorrows of life by your coming here? Do I do you any good in that
+way; are you better men than when we first met together? Is Christ
+dearer, and more real and nearer to you; and are your lives more
+transparently consecrated, more manifestly the result of a hidden
+union with Him? Do you walk in the world like the Master, because
+you are members of this congregation? If so, its purpose has been
+accomplished. If not, it has miserably failed.
+
+I have said that I have to thank God for the unbroken affection
+that has knit us together. But what is the use of such love if it
+does not lead onwards to this? I have had enough, and more than
+enough, of what you call popularity and appreciation, undeserved
+enough, but rendered unstintedly by you. I do not care the snap of
+a finger for it by comparison with this other thing. And oh, dear
+brethren! if all that comes of our meeting here Sunday after
+Sunday is either praise or criticism of my poor words and ways,
+our relationship is a curse, and not a blessing, and we come
+together for the worse and not for the better. The purpose of the
+Church, and the purpose of the ministry, and the meaning of our
+assembling are, that spiritual gifts may be imparted, not by me
+alone, but by you, too, and by me in my place and measure, and if
+that purpose be not accomplished, all other purposes, that are
+accomplished, are of no account, and worse than nothing.
+
+III. And now, lastly, note the lowly consciousness that much was
+to be received as well as much to be given.
+
+The Apostle corrects himself after he has said `that I may impart
+unto you some spiritual gift,' by adding, `that is, that I may be
+comforted (or rather, encouraged) together with you by the mutual
+faith both of you and me.' If his language were not so
+transparently sincere, and springing from deep interest in the
+relationship between himself and these people, we should say that
+it was exquisite courtesy and beautiful delicacy. But it moves in
+a region far more real than the region of courtesy, and it speaks
+the inmost truth about the conditions on which the Roman
+Christians should receive---viz. that they should also give. There
+is only one Giver who is only a Giver, and that is God. All other
+givers are also receivers. Paul desired to see his Roman brethren
+that he might be encouraged; and when he did see them, as he
+marched along the Appian Way, a shipwrecked prisoner, the Acts of
+the Apostles tells us, `He thanked God and took courage.' The
+sight of them strengthened him and prepared him for what lay
+before him.
+
+Paul's was a richly complicated nature---firm as a rock in its
+will, tremulously sensitive in its sympathies; like some
+strongly-rooted tree with its stable stem and a green cloud of
+fluttering foliage that moves in the lightest air. So his spirit
+rose and fell according to the reception that he met from his
+brethren, and the manifestation of their faith quickened and
+strengthened his.
+
+And he is but one instance of a universal law. All teachers, the
+more genuine they are, the more sympathetic they are, are the more
+sensitive of their environment. The very oratorical temperament
+places a man at the mercy of surroundings. All earnest work has
+ever travelling with it as its shadow seasons of deep depression;
+and the Christian teacher does not escape these. I am not going to
+speak about myself, but this is unquestionably true, that every
+Elijah, after the mightiest effort of prophecy, is apt to cover
+his head in his mantle and to say, `Take me away; I am not better
+than my fathers.' And when a man for thirty years, amidst all the
+changes incident to a great city congregation in that time, has to
+stand up Sunday after Sunday before the same people, and mark how
+some of them are stolidly indifferent, and note how others are
+dropping away from their faithfulness, and see empty places where
+loving forms used to sit---no wonder that the mood comes ever and
+anon, `Then, said I, surely I have laboured in vain and spent my
+strength for nought.' The hearer reacts on the speaker quite as
+much as the speaker does on the hearer. If you have ice in the
+pews, that brings down the temperature up here. It is hard to be
+fervid amidst people that are all but dead. It is difficult to
+keep a fire alight when it is kindled on the top of an iceberg.
+And the unbelief and low-toned religion of a congregation are
+always pulling down the faith and the fervour of their minister,
+if he be better and holier, as they expect him to be, than they
+are.
+
+`He did not many works because of their unbelief.' Christ knew the
+hampering and the restrictions of His power which came from being
+surrounded by a chill, unsympathetic environment. My strength and
+my weakness are largely due to you. And if you want your minister
+to preach better, and in all ways to do his work more joyfully and
+faithfully, the means lie largely in your own hands. Icy
+indifference, ill-natured interpretations, carping criticisms,
+swift forgetfulness of one's words, all these things kill the
+fervour of the pulpit.
+
+On the other hand, the true encouragement to give a man when he is
+trying to do God's will, to preach Christ's Gospel, is not to pat
+him on the back and say, `What a remarkable sermon that was of
+yours! what a genius! what an orator!' not to go about praising
+it, but to come and say, `Thy words have led me to Christ, and
+from thee I have taken the gift of gifts.'
+
+Dear brethren, the encouragement of the minister is in the
+conversion and the growth of the hearers. And I pray that in this
+new lease of united fellowship which we have taken out, be it
+longer or shorter---and advancing years tell me that at the
+longest it must be comparatively short---I may come to you ever
+more and more with the lofty and humbling consciousness that I
+have a message which Christ has given to me, and that you may come
+more and more receptive---not of \textit{my} words, God
+forbid---but of Christ's truth; and that so we may be helpers one
+of another, and encourage each other in the warfare and work to
+which we all are called and consecrated.
+
+\chapter{Debtors to all Men}
+\markright{ROMANS i. 14}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`I am a debtor both to the Greeks and to the Barbarians, both to
+the wise and to the unwise.'---\textsc{Romans} i. 14.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+No doubt Paul is here referring to the special obligation laid
+upon him by his divine call to be the Apostle to the Gentiles. He
+was entrusted with the Gospel as a steward, and was therefore
+bound to carry it to all sorts and conditions of men. But the
+principle underlying the statement applies to all Christians. The
+indebtedness referred to is no peculiarity of the Apostolic order,
+but attaches to every believer. Every servant of Jesus Christ, who
+has received the truth for himself, has received it as a steward,
+and is, as such, indebted to God, from whom he got the trust, and
+to the men for whom he got it. The only limit to the obligation
+is, as Paul says in the context, `as much as in me is.' Capacity,
+determined by faculties, opportunities, and circumstances,
+prescribes the kind and the degree of the work to be done in
+discharge of the obligation; but the obligation is universal. We
+are not at liberty to choose whether we shall do our part in
+spreading the name of Jesus Christ. It is a debt that we owe to
+God and to men. Is that the view of duty which the average
+Christian man takes? I am afraid it is not. If it were, our
+treasuries would be full, and great would be the multitude of them
+that preached the Word.
+
+It is no very exalted degree of virtue to pay our debts. We do not
+expect to be praised for that; and we do not consider that we are
+at liberty to choose whether we shall do it or not. We are
+dishonest if we do not. It is no merit in us to be honest. Would
+that all Christian people applied that principle to their
+religion. The world would be different, and the Church would be
+different, if they did.
+
+Let me try, then, to enforce this thought of indebtedness and of
+common honesty in discharging the indebtedness, which underlies
+these words. Paul thought that he went a long way to pay his debts
+to humanity by carrying to everybody whom he could reach the `Name
+that is above every name.'
+
+I. Now, first, let me say that we Christians are debtors to all
+men by our common manhood.
+
+It is not the least of the gifts which Christianity has brought to
+the world, that it has introduced the new thought of the
+brotherhood of mankind. The very word `humanity' is a Christian
+coinage, and it was coined to express the new thought that began
+to throb in men's hearts, as soon as they accepted the message
+that Jesus Christ came to give, the message of the Fatherhood of
+God. For it is on that belief of God's Fatherhood that the belief
+of man's brotherhood rests, and on it alone can it be secured and
+permanently based.
+
+Here is a Jew writing to Latins in the Greek language. The
+phenomenon itself is a sign of a new order of things, of the
+rising of a flood that had surged over, and in the course of ages
+would sap away and dissolve, the barriers between men. The Apostle
+points to two of the widest gulfs that separated men, in the words
+of my text. `Greeks and Barbarians' divides mankind, according to
+race and language. `Wise and unwise' divides them according to
+culture and intellectual capacity. Both gulfs exist still, though
+they have been wonderfully filled up by the influence, direct and
+indirect, of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The fiercest antagonisms
+of race which still subsist are felt to belong to a decaying
+order, and to be sure, sooner or later, to pass away. I suppose
+that the gulf made by the increased culture of modern society
+between civilised and the savage peoples, and, within the limits
+of our own land, the gulf made by education between the higher and
+the lower layers of our community---I speak not of higher and
+lower in regard to wealth or station, but in regard to
+intellectual acquirement and capacity---are greater than, perhaps,
+they ever were in the past. But yet over the gulf a bridge is
+thrown, and the gulf itself is being filled up. High above all the
+superficial distinctions which separate Jew and Gentile, Greek and
+Barbarian, educated and illiterate, scientific and unscientific,
+wise and unwise, there stretches the great rainbow of the truth
+that all are one in Christ Jesus. Fraternity without Fatherhood is
+a ghastly mockery that ended a hundred years ago in the
+guillotine, and to-day will end in disappointment; and it is
+little more than cant. But when Christianity comes and tells us
+that we have one Father and one Redeemer, then the unity of the
+race is secured.
+
+And that oneness which makes us debtors to all men is shown to be
+real by the fact that, beneath all superficial distinctions of
+culture, race, age, or station, there are the primal necessities
+and yearnings and possibilities that lie in every human soul. All
+men, savage or cultivated, breathe the same air, see by the same
+light, are fed by the same food and drink, have the same yearning
+hearts, the same lofty aspirations that unfulfilled are torture;
+the same experience of the same guilt, and, blessed be God! the
+same Saviour and the same salvation.
+
+Because, then, we are all members of the one family, every man is
+bound to regard all that he possesses, and is, and can do, as
+committed to him in stewardship to be imparted to his fellows. We
+are not sponges to absorb, but we are pipes placed in the spring,
+that we may give forth the precious water of life.
+
+Cain is not a very good model, but his question is the world's
+question, and it implies the expectation of a negative
+answer---`Am I my brother's keeper?' Surely, the very language
+answers itself, and, although Cain thinks that the only answer is
+`No,' wisdom sees that the only answer is `Yes.' For if I am my
+brother's brother, then surely I am my brother's keeper. We have a
+better example. There is another Elder Brother who has come to
+give to His brethren all that Himself possessed, and we but poorly
+follow our Master's pattern unless we feel that the mystic tie
+which binds us in brotherhood to every man makes us every man's
+debtor to the extent of our possessions. That is the Christian
+truth that underlies the modern Socialistic idea, and, whatever
+the form in which it is ultimately brought into practice as the
+rule of mankind, the principle will triumph one day; and we are
+bound, as Christian men, to hasten the coming of its victory. We
+are debtors by reason of our common humanity.
+
+II. We are debtors by our possession of the universal
+salvation.
+
+The principle which I have already been laying down applies all
+round, to everything that we have, are, or can do. But its most
+stringent obligation, and the noblest field for its operations,
+are found in reference to the Christian man's possession of the
+Gospel for the joy of his own heart, and to the duties that are
+therein involved. Christ draws men to Himself for their own sakes,
+blessed be His name! but not for their own sakes only. He draws
+them to Himself, that they, in their turn, may draw others with
+whose hands theirs are linked, and so may swell the numbers of the
+flock that gathers round the one Shepherd. He puts the dew of His
+blessing into the chalice of the tiniest flower, that it may
+`share its dewdrop with another near.' Just as every particle of
+inert dough as it is leavened becomes in its turn leaven, and the
+medium for leavening the particle contiguous to it, so every
+Christian is bound, or, to use the metaphor of my text, is a
+debtor to God and man, to impart the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
+`Greek and Barbarian,' says Paul, `wise or unwise'; all
+distinctions vanish. If I can get at a man, no matter what colour,
+his race, his language, his capacity, his acquirements, he is my
+creditor, and I am defrauding him of what he has a right to expect
+from me if I do not do my best to bring him to Jesus Christ.
+
+This obligation receives additional weight from the proved
+adaptation of the Gospel to all sorts and conditions of men. Alone
+of all religions has Christianity proved itself capable of
+dominating every type of character, of influencing every stage of
+civilisation, of assuming the speech of every tongue, and of
+wearing the garb of every race. There are other religions which
+are evidently destined only to a narrow field of operations, and
+are rigidly limited by geographical conditions, or by stages of
+civilisation. There are wines that are ruined by a sea voyage, and
+can only be drunk in the land where the vintage was gathered; and
+that is the condition of all the ethnic religions. Christianity
+alone passes through the whole earth, and influences all men. The
+history of missions shows us that. There has yet to be found the
+race that is incapable of receiving, or is beyond the need of
+possessing, or cannot be elevated by the operation of, the Gospel
+of Jesus Christ.
+
+So to all men we are bound, as much as in us is, to carry the
+Gospel. The distinction that is drawn so often by the people who
+never move a finger to help the heathen either at home or abroad,
+between the home and the foreign field of work, vanishes
+altogether when we stand at the true Christian standpoint. Here is
+a man who wants the Gospel; I have it; I can give it to him. That
+constitutes a summons as imperative as if we were called by name
+from Heaven, and bade to go, and as much as in us is to preach the
+Gospel. Brethren! we do not obey the command, `Owe no man
+anything,' unless, to the extent of our ability, or over the whole
+field which we can influence at home or abroad, we seek to spread
+the name of Christ and the salvation that is in Him.
+
+III. We are debtors by benefits received.
+
+I am speaking to men and women a very large proportion of whom get
+their living, and some of whom amass their wealth, by trade with
+lands that need the Gospel. It is not for nothing that England has
+won the great empire that she possesses---won it, alas! far too
+often by deeds that will not bear investigation in the light of
+Christian principle, but won it.
+
+What do we owe to the lands that we call `heathen'? The very
+speech by which we communicate with one another; the beginning of
+our civilisation; wide fields for expanding population and
+emigration; treasures of wisdom of many kinds; an empire about
+which we are too fond of crowing and too reluctant to recognise
+its responsibilities---and Manchester its commerce and prosperity!
+Did God put us where we are as a nation only in order that we
+might carry the gifts of our literature, great as that is; of our
+science, great as that is; of our law, blessed as that is; of our
+manufactures, to those distant lands? The best thing that we can
+give is the thing that all of us can help to give---the Gospel of
+Jesus Christ. `Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom
+for such a time as this?'
+
+IV. Lastly, we are debtors by injuries inflicted.
+
+Many subject-races seem destined to fade away by contact with our
+race; and if we think of the nameless cruelties, and the iliad of
+woes which England's possession of this great Colonial Empire has
+had accompanying it, we may feel that the harm in many aspects
+outweighs the good, and that it had been better for these men to
+be left suckled in creeds outworn, and ignorant of our
+civilisation, than to receive from us the fatal gifts that they
+often have received. I do not wish to exaggerate, but if you will
+take the facts of the case as brought out by people that have no
+Christian prejudices to serve, I think you will acknowledge that
+we as a nation owe a debt of reparation to the barbarians and the
+unwise.
+
+What about killing African tribes by the thousand with the vile
+stuff that we call rum, and send to them in exchange for their
+poor commodities? What about introducing new diseases, the
+offspring of vice, into the South Sea Islands, decimating and all
+but destroying the population? Is it not true that, as the prophet
+wailed of old about a degenerate Israel, we may wail about the
+beach-combers and other loafers that go amongst savage lands from
+England---`Through you the name of God is blasphemed among the
+Gentiles.' A Hindoo once said to a missionary, `Your Book is very
+good. If you were as good as your Book you would conquer India in
+five years.' That may be true or it may not, but it gives us the
+impression that is produced by godless Englishmen on heathen
+peoples. We are taking away their religion from them, necessarily,
+as the result of education and contact with European thought. And
+if we do not substitute for it the one faith that elevates and
+saves, the last state of that man will be worse than the
+first.
+
+We can almost hear the rattle of the guns on the north-west
+frontier of India to-day. There is another specimen of the
+injuries inflicted. This is not the place to talk politics, but I
+feel that this is the place to ask this question, `Are Christian
+principles to have anything to do in determining national
+actions?' Is it Christian to impose our yoke on unwilling tribes
+who have as deep a love for independence as the proudest
+Englishmen of us all, and as good a right to it? Are punitive
+expeditions and Maxim guns instalments of our debt to all men? I
+wonder what Jesus Christ, who died for Afridis and Orakzais and
+all the rest of them, thinks about such conduct?
+
+Brethren, we are debtors to all men. Let us do our best to
+influence national action in accordance with the brotherhood which
+has been revealed to us by the Elder Brother of us all; and let
+us, at least for our own parts, recognise, and, as much as in us
+is, discharge the debt which, by our common humanity, and by our
+possession of the universal Gospel we owe to all men, and which is
+made more weighty by the benefits we receive from many, and by the
+injuries which England has inflicted on not a few. Else shall we
+hear rise above all the voices that palliate crime, on the plea of
+`State necessity,' the stern words of the Master, `In thy skirts
+is found the blood of the souls of poor innocents.' We are
+debtors; let us pay our debts.
+
+\chapter{The Gospel the Power of God}
+\markright{ROMANS i. 16}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is the power of
+God unto salvation to every one that believeth.'---\textsc{Romans}
+i. 16.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+To preach the Gospel in Rome had long been the goal of Paul's
+hopes.\footnote{Preached before Baptist Union.} He wished to do in
+the centre of power what he had done in Athens, the home of
+wisdom; and with superb confidence, not in himself, but in his
+message, to try conclusions with the strongest thing in the world.
+He knew its power well, and was not appalled. The danger was an
+attraction to his chivalrous spirit. He believed in flying at the
+head when you are fighting with a serpent, and he knew that
+influence exerted in Rome would thrill through the Empire. If we
+would understand the magnificent audacity of these words of my
+text we must try to listen to them with the ears of a Roman. Here
+was a poor little insignificant Jew, like hundreds of his
+countrymen down in the Ghetto, one who had his head full of some
+fantastic nonsense about a young visionary whom the procurator of
+Syria had very wisely put an end to a while ago in order to quiet
+down the turbulent province; and he was going into Rome with the
+notion that his word would shake the throne of the C\ae{}sars.
+What proud contempt would have curled their lips if they had been
+told that the travel-stained prisoner, trudging wearily up the
+Appian Way, had the mightiest thing in the world entrusted to his
+care! Romans did not believe much in ideas. Their notion of power
+was sharp swords and iron yokes on the necks of subject peoples.
+But the history of Christianity, whatever else it has been, has
+been the history of the supremacy and the revolutionary force of
+ideas. Thought is mightier than all visible forces. Thought
+dissolves and reconstructs. Empires and institutions melt before
+it like the carbon rods in an electric lamp; and the little
+hillock of Calvary is higher than the Palatine with its regal
+homes and the Capitoline with its temples: `I am not ashamed of
+the Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto
+salvation.'
+
+Now, dear friends, I have ventured to take these great words for
+my text, though I know, better than any of you can tell me, how
+sure my treatment of them is to enfeeble rather than enforce them,
+because I, for my poor part, feel that there are few things which
+we, all of us, people and ministers, need more than to catch some
+of the infection of this courageous confidence, and to be fired
+with some spark of Paul's enthusiasm for, and glorying in, the
+Gospel of Jesus Christ.
+
+I ask you, then, to consider three things: (1) what Paul thought
+was the Gospel? (2) what Paul thought the Gospel was? and (3) what
+he felt about the Gospel?
+
+I. What Paul thought was the Gospel?
+
+He has given to us in his own rapid way a summary statement,
+abbreviated to the very bone, and reduced to the barest elements,
+of what he meant by the Gospel. What was the irreducible minimum?
+The facts of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, as you
+will find written in the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to
+the Corinthians. So, then, to begin with, the Gospel is not a
+statement of principles, but a record of facts, things that have
+happened in this world of ours. But the least part of a fact is
+the visible part of it, and it is of no significance unless it has
+explanation, and so Paul goes on to bind up with the facts an
+explanation of them. The mere fact that Jesus, a young Nazarene,
+was executed is no more a gospel than the other one, that two
+brigands were crucified beside Him. But the fact that could be
+seen, plus the explanation which underlies and interprets it,
+turns the chronicle into a gospel, and the explanation begins with
+the name of the Sufferer; for if you want to understand His death
+you must understand who it was that died. His death is a thought
+pathetic in all aspects, and very precious in many. But when we
+hear `Christ died according to the Scriptures,' the whole
+symbolism of the ancient ritual and all the glowing anticipations
+of the prophets rise up before us, and that death assumes an
+altogether different aspect. If we stop with `Jesus died,' then
+that death may be a beautiful example of heroism, a sweet,
+pathetic instance of innocent suffering, a conspicuous example of
+the world's wages to the world's teachers, but it is little more.
+If, however, we take Paul's words upon our lips, `Brethren, I
+declare unto you the Gospel which I preached ... how that Christ
+died ... according to the Scriptures,' the fact flashes up into
+solid beauty, and becomes the Gospel of our salvation. And the
+explanation goes on, `How that Christ died for our sins.' Now, I
+may be very blind, but I venture to say that I, for my part,
+cannot see in what intelligible sense the Death of Christ can be
+held to have been for, or on behalf of, our sins---that is, that
+they may be swept away and we delivered from them---unless you
+admit the atoning nature of His sacrifice for sins. I cannot stop
+to enlarge, but I venture to say that any narrower interpretation
+evacuates Paul's words of their deepest significance. The
+explanation goes on, `And that He was buried.' Why that trivial
+detail? Partly because it guarantees the fact of His Death, partly
+because of its bearing on the evidences of His Resurrection. `And
+that He rose from the dead according to the Scriptures.' Great
+fact, without which Christ is a shattered prop, and `ye are yet in
+your sins.'
+
+But, further, notice that my text is also Paul's text for this
+Epistle, and that it differs from the condensed summary of which I
+have been speaking only as a bud with its petals closed differs
+from one with them expanded in their beauty. And now, if you will
+take the words of my text as being the keynote of this letter, and
+read over its first eight chapters, what is the Apostle talking
+about when he in them fulfils his purpose and preaches `the
+Gospel' to them that are at Rome also? Here is, in the briefest
+possible words, his summary---the universality of sin, the awful
+burden of guilt, the tremendous outlook of penalty, the
+impossibility of man rescuing himself or living righteously, the
+Incarnation, and Life, and Death of Jesus Christ as a sacrifice
+for the sins of the world, the hand of faith grasping the offered
+blessing, the indwelling in believing souls of the Divine Spirit,
+and the consequent admission of man into a life of sonship, power,
+peace, victory, glory, the child's place in the love of the Father
+from which nothing can separate. These are the teachings which
+make the staple of this Epistle. These are the explanations of the
+weighty phrases of my text. These are at least the essential
+elements of the Gospel according to Paul.
+
+But he was not alone in this construction of his message. We hear
+a great deal to-day about Pauline Christianity, with the
+implication, and sometimes with the assertion, that he was the
+inventor of what, for the sake of using a brief and easily
+intelligible term, I may call Evangelical Christianity. Now, it is
+a very illuminating thought for the reading of the New Testament
+that there are the three sets of teaching, roughly, the Pauline,
+Petrine, and Johannine, and you cannot find the distinctions
+between these three in any difference as to the fundamental
+contents of the Gospel; for if Paul rings out, `God commendeth His
+love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for
+us,' Peter declares, `Who His own self bare our sins in His own
+body on the tree,' and John, from his island solitude, sends
+across the waters the hymn of praise, `Unto Him that loved us and
+washed us from our sins in His own blood.' And so the proud
+declaration of the Apostle, which he dared not have ventured upon
+in the face of the acrid criticism he had to front unless he had
+known he was perfectly sure of his ground, is natural and
+warranted---`Therefore, whether it were I or they, so we
+preach.'
+
+We are told that we must go back to the Christ of the Gospels, the
+historical Christ, and that He spoke nothing concerning all these
+important points that I have mentioned as being Paul's conception
+of the Gospel. Back to the Christ of the Gospels by all means, if
+you will go to the Christ of all the Gospels and of the whole of
+each Gospel. And if you do, you will go back to the Christ who
+said, `The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to
+minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.' You will go
+back to the Christ who said, `And I, if I be lifted up from the
+earth, will draw all men unto Me.' You will go back to the Christ
+who said, `The bread that I will give is My flesh, which I will
+give for the life of the world.' You will go back to the Christ
+who bade His followers hold in everlasting memory, not the
+tranquil beauty of His life, not the persuasive sweetness of His
+gracious words, not the might of His miracles of blessing, but the
+mysterious agonies of His last hours, by which He would have us
+learn that there lie the secret of His power, the foundation of
+our hopes, the stimulus of our service.
+
+Now, brethren, I have ventured to dwell so long upon this matter,
+because it is no use talking about the Gospel unless we understand
+what we mean by it, and I, for my part, venture to say that that
+is what Paul meant by it, and that is what I mean by it. I plead
+for no narrow interpretation of the phrases of my text. I would
+not that they should be used to check in the smallest degree the
+diversities of representation which, according to the differences
+of individual character, must ever prevail in the conceptions
+which we form and which we preach of this Gospel of Jesus Christ.
+I want no parrot-like repetition of a certain set of phrases
+embodied, however great may be their meanings, in every sermon.
+And I would that the people to whom those truths are true would
+make more allowance than they sometimes do for the differences to
+which I have referred, and would show a great deal more sympathy
+than they often do to those, especially those young men, who, with
+their faces toward Christ, have not yet grown to the full
+acceptance of all that is implied in those gracious words. There
+is room for a whole world of thought in the Gospel of Christ as
+Paul conceived it, with all the deep foundations of implication
+and presupposition on which it rests, and with all the, as yet,
+undiscovered range of conclusions to which it may lead. Remember
+that the Cross of Christ is the key to the universe, and sends its
+influence into every region of human thought.
+
+II. What Paul thought the Gospel was.
+
+`The power of God unto salvation.' There was in the background of
+the Apostle's mind a kind of tacit reference to the antithetical
+power that he was going up to meet, the power of Rome, and we may
+trace that in the words of my text. Rome, as I have said, was the
+embodiment of physical force, with no great faith in ideas. And
+over against this carnal might Paul lifts the undissembled
+weakness of the Cross, and declares that it is stronger than man,
+`the power of God unto salvation.' Rome is high in force; Athens
+is higher; the Cross is highest of all, and it comes shrouded in
+weakness having a poor Man hanging dying there. That is a strange
+embodiment of divine power. Yes, and because so strange, it is so
+touching, and so conquering. The power that is draped in weakness
+is power indeed. Though Rome's power did make for righteousness
+sometimes, yet its stream of tendency was on the whole a power to
+destruction and grasped the nations of the earth as some rude hand
+might do rich clusters of grapes and squeeze them into a formless
+mass. The tramp of the legionary meant death, and it was true in
+many respects of them what was afterwards said of later invaders
+of Europe, that where their horses' hoofs had once stamped no
+grass ever grew. Over against this terrific engine of destruction
+Paul lifts up the meek forces of love which have for their sole
+object the salvation of man.
+
+Then we come to another of the keywords about which it is very
+needful that people should have deeper and wider notions than they
+often seem to cherish. What is salvation? Negatively, the removal
+and sweeping away of all evil, physical and moral, as the schools
+speak. Positively, the inclusion of all good for every part of the
+composite nature of a man which the man can receive and which God
+can bestow. And that is the task that the Gospel sets to itself.
+Now, I need not remind you how, for the execution of such a
+purpose, it is plain that something else than man's power is
+absolutely essential. It is only God who can alter my relation to
+His government. It is only God who can trammel up the inward
+consequences of my sins and prevent them from scourging me. It is
+only God who can bestow upon my death a new life, which shall grow
+up into righteousness and beauty, caught of, and kindred to, His
+own. But if this be the aim of the Gospel, then its diagnosis of
+man's sickness is a very much graver one than that which finds
+favour amongst so many of us now. Salvation is a bigger word than
+any of the little gospels that we hear clamouring round about us
+are able to utter. It means something a great deal more than
+either social or intellectual, or still more, material or
+political betterment of man's condition. The disease lies so deep,
+and so great are the destruction and loss partly experienced, and
+still more awfully impending over every soul of us, that something
+else than tinkering at the outsides, or dealing, as self-culture
+does, with man's understanding or, as social gospels do, with
+man's economical and civic condition, should be brought to bear.
+Dear brethren, especially you Christian ministers, preach a social
+Christianity by all means, an applied Christianity, for there does
+lie in the Gospel of Jesus Christ a key to all the problems that
+afflict our social condition. But be sure first that there is a
+Christianity before you talk about applying it. And remember that
+the process of salvation begins in the deep heart of the
+individual and transforms him first and foremost. The power is `to
+every one that believeth.' It is power in its most universal
+sweep. Rome's Empire was wellnigh ubiquitous, but, blessed be God,
+the dove of Christ flies farther than the Roman eagle with beak
+and claw ready for rapine, and wherever there are men here is a
+Gospel for them. The limitation is no limitation of its
+universality. It is no limitation of the claim of a medicine to be
+a panacea that it will only do good to the man who swallows it.
+And that is the only limitation of which the Gospel is
+susceptible, for we have all the same deep needs, the same
+longings; we are fed by the same bread, we are nourished by the
+same draughts of water, we breathe the same air, we have the same
+sins, and, thanks be to God, we have the same Saviour. `The power
+of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.'
+
+Now before I pass from this part of my subject there is only one
+thing more that I want to say, and that is, that you cannot apply
+that glowing language about `the power of God unto salvation' to
+anything but the Gospel that Paul preached. Forms of Christianity
+which have lost the significance of the Incarnation and Death of
+Jesus Christ, and which have struck out or obscured the central
+facts with which I have been dealing, are not, never were, and, I
+may presumptuously venture to say, never will be, forces of large
+account in this world. Here is a clock, beautiful, chased on the
+back, with a very artistic dial-plate, and works modelled
+according to the most approved fashion, but, somehow or other, the
+thing won't go. Perhaps the mainspring is broken. And so it is
+only the Gospel, as Paul expounds it and expands it in this
+Epistle, that is `the power of God unto salvation.' Dear brethren,
+in the course of a sermon like this, of course, one must lay
+himself open to the charge of dogmatising. That cannot be helped
+under the conditions of my space. But let me say as my own solemn
+conviction---I know that that is not worth much to you, but it is
+my justification for speaking in such a fashion---let me say as my
+solemn conviction that you may as well take the keystone out of an
+arch, with nothing to hold the other stones together or keep them
+from toppling in hideous ruin on your unfortunate head, as take
+the doctrine that Paul summed up in that one word out of your
+conception of Christianity and expect it to work. And be sure of
+this, that there is only one Name that lords it over the demons of
+afflicted humanity, and that if a man goes and tries to eject them
+with any less potent charm than Paul's Gospel, they will turn upon
+him with `Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are you?'
+
+III. What Paul felt about this Gospel.
+
+His restrained expression, `I am not ashamed,' is the stronger for
+its very moderation. It witnesses to the fixed purpose of his
+heart and attitude of his mind, whilst it suggests that he was
+well aware of all the temptations in Rome to being ashamed of it
+there. Think of what was arrayed against him---venerable religion,
+systematised philosophies, bitter hatred and prejudice, material
+power and wealth. These were the brazen armour of Goliath, and
+this little David went cheerily down into the valley with five
+pebble stones in a leathern wallet, and was quite sure how it was
+going to end. And it ended as he expected. His Gospel shook the
+kingdom of the Roman, and cast it in another mould.
+
+And there are temptations, plenty of them, for us, dear friends,
+to-day, to bate our confidence. The drift of what calls itself
+influential opinion is anti-supernatural, and we all are conscious
+of the presence of that element all round about us. It tells with
+special force upon our younger men, but it affects us all. In this
+day, when a large portion of the periodical press, which does the
+thinking for most of us, looks askance at these truths, and when, on
+the principle that in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is
+the king, popular novelists become our theological tutors, and when
+every new publishing season brings out a new conclusive destruction
+of Christianity, which supersedes last season's equally complete
+destruction, it is hard for some of us to keep our flags flying. The
+ice round about us will either bring down the temperature, or, if it
+stimulates us to put more fuel on the fire, perhaps the fire may
+melt it. And so the more we feel ourselves encompassed by these
+temptations, the louder is the call to Christian men to cast
+themselves back on the central verities, and to draw at first hand
+from them the inspiration which shall be their safety. And how is
+that to be done? Well, there are many ways by which thoughtful, and
+cultivated, students may do it. But may I venture to deal here
+rather with ways which all Christian people have open before them?
+And I am bold to say that the way to be sure of `the power of God
+unto salvation' is to submit ourselves continually to its cleansing
+and renewing influence. This certitude, brethren, may be contributed
+to by books of apologetics, and by other sources of investigation
+and study which I should be sorry indeed to be supposed in any
+degree to depreciate. But the true way to get it is, by deep
+communion with the living God, to realise the personality of Jesus
+Christ as present with us, our Friend, our Saviour, our Sanctifier
+by His Holy Spirit. Why, Paul's Gospel was, I was going to say,
+altogether---that would be an exaggeration---but it was to a very
+large extent simply the generalisation of his own experience. That
+is what all of us will find to be the Gospel that we have to preach.
+`We speak that we do know and testify that we have seen.' And it was
+because this man could say so assuredly---because the depths of his
+own conscience and the witness within him bore testimony to it---`He
+loved me and gave Himself for me,' that he could also say, `The
+power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.' Go down
+into the depths, brother and friend; cry to Him out of the depths.
+Then you will feel His strong, gentle grip lifting you to the
+heights, and that will give power that nothing else will, and you
+will be able to say, `I have heard Him myself, and I know that this
+is the Christ, the Saviour of the world.'
+
+But there is yet another source of certitude open to us all, and
+that is the history of the centuries. Our modern sceptics,
+attacking the truth of Christianity mostly from the physical side,
+are strangely blind to the worth of history. It is a limitation of
+faculty that besets them in a good many directions, but it does
+not work anywhere more fatally than it does in their attitude
+towards the Gospel. After all, Jesus Christ spoke the ultimate
+word when He said, `By their fruits ye shall know them.' And it is
+so, because just as what is morally wrong cannot be politically
+right, so what is intellectually false cannot be morally good.
+Truth, goodness, beauty, they are but three names for various
+aspects of one thing, and if it be that the difference between
+\textsc{b.c.} and \textsc{a.d.} has come from a Gospel which is
+not the truth of God, then all I can say is, that the richest
+vintage that ever the world saw, and the noblest wine of which it
+ever drank, did grow upon a thorn. I know that the Christian
+Church has sinfully and tragically failed to present Christ
+adequately to the world. But for all that, `Ye are My witnesses,
+saith the Lord'; and nobler manners and purer laws have come in
+the wake of this Gospel of Jesus Christ. And as I look round about
+upon what Christianity has done in the world, I venture to say,
+`Show us any system of religion or of no religion that has done
+that or anything the least like it, and then we will discuss with
+you the other evidences of the Gospel.'
+
+In closing these words, may I venture relying on the melancholy
+privilege of seniority, to drop for a minute or two into a tone of
+advice? I would say, do not be frightened out of your confidence
+either by the premature paean of victory from the opposite camp,
+or by timid voices in our own ranks. And that you may not be so
+frightened, be sure to keep clear in your mind the distinction
+between the things that can be shaken and the kingdom that cannot
+be moved. It is bad strategy to defend an elongated line. It is
+cowardice to treat the capture of an outpost as involving the
+evacuation of the key of the position. It is a mistake, to which
+many good Christian people are sorely tempted in this day, to
+assert such a connection between the eternal Gospel and our
+deductions from the principles of that Gospel as that the
+refutation of the one must be the overthrow of the other. And if
+it turns out to be so in any case, a large part of the blame lies
+upon those good and mistaken people who insist that everything
+must be held or all must be abandoned. The burning questions of
+this day about the genuineness of the books of Scripture,
+inspiration, inerrancy, and the like, are not so associated with
+this word, `God so loved the world ... that whosoever believeth in
+Him should not perish, but have everlasting life,' as that the
+discovery of errors in the Second Book of Chronicles shakes the
+foundations of the Christian certitude. In a day like this truth
+must change its vesture. Who believes that the Dissenting Churches
+of England are the highest, perfect embodiment of the Kingdom of
+God? And who believes that any creed of man's making has in it all
+and has in it only the everlasting Gospel? So do not be
+frightened, and do not think that when the things that can be
+shaken are removed, the things that cannot be shaken are at all
+less likely to remain. Depend upon it, the Gospel, whose outline I
+have imperfectly tried to set before you now, will last as long as
+men on earth know they are sinners and need a Saviour. Did you
+ever see some mean buildings that have by degrees been gathered
+round the sides of some majestic cathedral, and do you suppose
+that the sweeping away of those shanties would touch the solemn
+majesty of the medi\ae{}val glories of the building that rises
+above them? Take them away if need be, and it, in its proportion,
+beauty, strength, and heavenward aspiration, will stand more
+glorious for the sweeping away. Preach positive truth. Do not
+preach doubts. You remember Mr.\ Kingsley's book \textit{Yeast}.
+Its title was its condemnation. Yeast is not meant to be drunk; it
+is meant to be kept in the dark till the process of fermentation
+goes on and it works itself clear, and then you may bring it out.
+Do not be always arguing with the enemy. It is a great deal better
+to preach the truth. Remember what Jesus said: `Let them alone,
+they are blind leaders of the blind, they will fall into the
+ditch.' It is not given to every one of us to conduct
+controversial arguments in the pulpit. There are some much wiser
+and abler brethren amongst us than you or I who can do it. Let us
+be contented with, not the humbler but the more glorious, office
+of telling what we have known, leaving it, as it will do, to prove
+itself. You remember what the old woman, who had been favoured by
+her pastor with an elaborate sermon to demonstrate the existence
+of God, said when he had finished; `Well, I believe there is a
+God, for all the gentleman says.'
+
+As one who sees the lengthening shadows falling over the darkening
+field, may I say one word to my junior brethren, with all whose
+struggles and doubts and difficulties I, for one, do most tenderly
+sympathise? I beseech them---though, alas! the advice condemns the
+giver of it as he looks back over long years of his ministry---to
+be faithful to the Gospel how that `Jesus Christ died for our sins
+according to the Scriptures.' Dear young friends, if you only go
+where Paul went, and catch the inspiration that he caught there,
+your path will be clear. It was in contact with Christ, whose
+passion for soul-winning brought Him from heaven, that Paul
+learned his passion for soul-winning. And if you and I are touched
+with the divine enthusiasm, and have that aim clear before us, we
+shall soon find out that there is only one power, one name given
+under heaven among men whereby we can accomplish what we
+desire---the name of `Jesus Christ that died, yea, rather, that is
+risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, and also maketh
+intercession for us.' If our aim is clear before us it will
+prescribe our methods, and if the inspiration of our ministry is,
+`I determine not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ and
+Him crucified,' then, whether men will hear or whether they will
+forbear, they shall know that there hath been a Prophet among
+them.
+
+\chapter{World-Wide Sin and World-Wide Redemption}
+\markright{ROMANS iii. 19--26}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Now we know, that what things soever the law saith, it saith to
+them who are under the law; that every mouth may be stopped, and
+all the world may become guilty before God. 20.\ Therefore by the
+deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight:
+for by the law is the knowledge of sin. 21.\ But now the
+righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being
+witnessed by the law and the prophets; 22.\ Even the righteousness
+of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all
+them that believe; for there is no difference: 23.\ For all have
+sinned, and come short of the glory of God: 24.\ Being justified
+freely by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ
+Jesus; 25.\ Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through
+faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission
+of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; 26.\ To
+declare, I say, at this time His righteousness; that He might be
+just, and the justifier of him which believeth in
+Jesus.'---\textsc{Romans} iii. 19--26.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+Let us note in general terms the large truths which this passage
+contains. We may mass these under four heads:
+
+I. Paul's view of the purpose of the law.
+
+He has been quoting a mosaic of Old Testament passages from the
+Psalms and Isaiah. He regards these as part of `the law,' which
+term, therefore, in his view, here includes the whole previous
+revelation, considered as making known God's will as to man's
+conduct. Every word of God, whether promise, or doctrine, or
+specific command, has in it some element bearing on conduct. God
+reveals nothing only in order that we may know, but all that,
+knowing, we may do and be what is pleasing in His sight. All His
+words are law.
+
+But Paul sets forth another view of its purpose here; namely, to
+drive home to men's consciences the conviction of sin. That is not
+the only purpose, for God reveals duty primarily in order that men
+may do it, and His law is meant to be obeyed. But, failing
+obedience, this second purpose comes into action, and His law is a
+swift witness against sin. The more clearly we know our duty, the
+more poignant will be our consciousness of failure. The light
+which shines to show the path of right, shines to show our
+deviations from it. And that conviction of sin, which it was the
+very purpose of all the previous Revelation to produce, is a
+merciful gift; for, as the Apostle implies, it is the prerequisite
+to the faith which saves.
+
+As a matter of fact, there was a far profounder and more inward
+conviction of sin among the Jews than in any heathen nation.
+Contrast the wailings of many a psalm with the tone in Greek or
+Roman literature. No doubt there is a law written on men's hearts
+which evokes a lower measure of the same consciousness of sin.
+There are prayers among the Assyrian and Babylonian tablets which
+might almost stand beside the Fifty-first Psalm; but, on the
+whole, the deep sense of sin was the product of the revealed law.
+The best use of our consciousness of what we ought to be, is when
+it rouses conscience to feel the discordance with it of what we
+are, and so drives us to Christ. Law, whether in the Old
+Testament, or as written in our hearts by their very make, is the
+slave whose task is to bring us to Christ, who will give us power
+to keep God's commandments.
+
+Another purpose of the law is stated in verse 21, as being to bear
+witness, in conjunction with the prophets, to a future more
+perfect revelation of God's righteousness. Much of the law was
+symbolic and prophetic. The ideal it set forth could not always
+remain unfulfilled. The whole attitude of that system was one of
+forward-looking expectancy. There is much danger lest, in modern
+investigations as to the authorship, date, and genesis of the Old
+Testament revelation, its central characteristic should be lost
+sight of; namely, its pointing onwards to a more perfect
+revelation which should supersede it.
+
+II. Paul's view of universal sinfulness.
+
+He states that twice in this passage (vs.\ 20 to 24), and it
+underlies his view of the purpose of law. In verse 20 he asserts
+that `by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified,' and in
+verses 23 and 24 he advances from that negative statement to the
+positive assertion that all have sinned. The impossibility of
+justification by the works of the law may be shown from two
+considerations: one, that, as a matter of fact, no flesh has ever
+done them all with absolute completeness and purity; and, second,
+that, even if they had ever been so done, they would not have
+availed to secure acquittal at a tribunal where motive counts for
+more than deed. The former is the main point with Paul.
+
+In verse 23 the same fact of universal experience is contemplated
+as both positive sin and negative falling short of the `glory'
+(which here seems to mean, as in John v.\ 44, xii.\ 43,
+approbation from God). `There is no distinction,' but all
+varieties of condition, character, attainment, are alike in this,
+that the fatal taint is upon them all. `We have, all of us, one
+human heart.' We are alike in physical necessities, in primal
+instincts, and, most tragically of all, in the common experience
+of sinfulness.
+
+Paul does not mean to bring all varieties of character down to one
+dead level, but he does mean to assert that none is free from the
+taint. A man need only be honest in self-examination to endorse
+the statement, so far as he himself is concerned. The Gospel would
+be better understood if the fact of universal sinfulness were more
+deeply felt. Its superiority to all schemes for making everybody
+happy by rearrangements of property, or increase of culture, would
+be seen through; and the only cure for human misery would be
+discerned to be what cures universal sinfulness.
+
+III. So we have next Paul's view of the remedy for man's sin. That
+is stated in general terms in verses 21, 22. Into a world of
+sinful men comes streaming the light of a `righteousness of God.'
+That expression is here used to mean a moral state of conformity
+with God's will, imparted by God. The great, joyful message, which
+Paul felt himself sent to proclaim, is that the true way to reach
+the state of conformity which law requires, and which the
+unsophisticated, universal conscience acknowledges not to have
+been reached, is the way of faith.
+
+The message is so familiar to us that we may easily fail to
+realise its essential greatness and wonderfulness when first
+proclaimed. That God should give righteousness, that it should be
+`of God,' not only as coming from Him, but as, in some real way,
+being kindred with His own perfection; that it should be brought
+to men by Jesus Christ, as ancient legends told that a beneficent
+Titan brought from heaven, in a hollow cane, the gift of fire; and
+that it should become ours by the simple process of trusting in
+Jesus Christ, are truths which custom has largely robbed of their
+wonderfulness. Let us meditate more on them till they regain, by
+our own experience of their power, some of the celestial light
+which belongs to them.
+
+Observe that in verse 22 the universality of the redemption which
+is in Christ is deduced from the universality of sin. The remedy
+must reach as far as the disease. If there is no difference in
+regard to sin, there can be none in regard to the sweep of
+redemption. The doleful universality of the covering spread over
+all nations, has corresponding to it the blessed universality of
+the light which is sent forth to flood them all. Sin's empire
+cannot stretch farther than Christ's kingdom.
+
+IV. Paul's view of what makes the Gospel the remedy.
+
+In verses 21 and 22 it was stated generally that Christ was the
+channel, and faith the condition, of righteousness. The personal
+object of faith was declared, but not the special thing in Christ
+which was to be trusted in. That is fully set forth in verses
+24--26. We cannot attempt to discuss the great words in these
+verses, each of which would want a volume. But we may note that
+`justified' here means to be accounted or declared righteous, as a
+judicial act; and that justification is traced in its ultimate
+source to God's `grace,'---His own loving disposition---which
+bends to unworthy and lowly creatures, and is regarded as having
+for the medium of its bestowal the `redemption' that is in Christ
+Jesus. That is the channel through which grace comes from God.
+
+`Redemption' implies captivity, liberation, and a price paid. The
+metaphor of slaves set free by ransom is exchanged in verse 25 for
+a sacrificial reference. A propitiatory sacrifice averts
+punishment from the offerer. The death of the victim procures the
+life of the worshipper. So, a propitiatory or atoning sacrifice is
+offered by Christ's blood, or death. That sacrifice is the
+ransom-price through which our captivity is ended, and our liberty
+assured. As His redemption is the channel `through' which God's
+grace comes to men, so faith is the condition `through' which
+(ver. 25) we make that grace ours.
+
+Note, then, that Paul does not merely point to Jesus Christ as
+Saviour, but to His death as the saving power. We are to have
+faith in Jesus Christ (ver. 22). But that is not a complete
+statement. It must be faith in His propitiation, if it is to bring
+us into living contact with His redemption. A gospel which says
+much of Christ, but little of His Cross, or which dilates on the
+beauty of His life, but stammers when it begins to speak of the
+sacrifice in His death, is not Paul's Gospel, and it will have
+little power to deal with the universal sickness of sin.
+
+The last verses of the passage set forth another purpose attained
+by Christ's sacrifice; namely, the vindication of God's
+righteousness in forbearing to inflict punishment on sins
+committed before the advent of Jesus. That Cross rayed out its
+power in all directions---to the heights of the heavens; to the
+depths of Hades (Col.\ i.\ 20); to the ages that were to come, and
+to those that were past. The suspension of punishment through all
+generations, from the beginning till that day when the Cross was
+reared on Calvary, was due to that Cross having been present to
+the divine mind from the beginning. `The judge is condemned when
+the guilty is acquitted,' or left unpunished. There would be a
+blot on God's government, not because it was so severe, but
+because it was so forbearing, unless His justice was vindicated,
+and the fatal consequences of sin shown in the sacrifice of
+Christ. God could not have shown Himself just, in view either of
+age-long forbearance, or of now justifying the sinner, unless the
+Cross had shown that He was not immorally indulgent toward
+sin.
+
+\chapter{No Difference}
+\markright{ROMANS iii. 22}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`There is no difference.'---\textsc{Romans} iii. 22.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The things in which all men are alike are far more important than
+those in which they differ. The diversities are superficial, the
+identities are deep as life. Physical processes and wants are the
+same for everybody. All men, be they kings or beggars, civilised
+or savage, rich or poor, wise or foolish, cultured or illiterate,
+breathe the same breath, hunger and thirst, eat and drink, sleep,
+are smitten by the same diseases, and die at last the same death.
+We have all of us one human heart. Tears and grief, gladness and
+smiles, move us all. Hope, fear, love, play the same music upon
+all heart-strings. The same great law of duty over-arches every
+man, and the same heaven of God bends above him.
+
+Religion has to do with the deep-seated identities and not with
+the superficial differences. And though there have been many
+aristocratic religions in the world, it is the great glory of
+Christianity that it goes straight to the central similarities,
+and brushes aside, as of altogether secondary importance, all the
+subordinate diversities, grappling with the great facts which are
+common to humanity, and with the large hopes which all may
+inherit.
+
+Paul here, in his grand way, triumphs and rises above all these
+small differences between man and man, more pure or less pure, Jew
+or Gentile, wise or foolish, and avers that, in regard of the
+deepest and most important things, `there is no difference,' and
+so his Gospel is a Gospel for the world, because it deals with all
+men on the same level. Now I wish to work out this great glory and
+characteristic of the Gospel system in a few remarks, and to point
+out to you the more important of these things in which all men, be
+they what or who they may, stand in one category and have
+identical experiences and interests.
+
+I. First, there is no difference in the fact of sin.
+
+Now let us understand that the Gospel does not assert that there
+is no difference in the degrees of sin. Christianity does not
+teach, howsoever some of its apostles may seem to have taught, or
+unconsciously lent themselves to representations which imply the
+view that there was no difference between a man who `did by nature
+the things contained in the law,' as Paul says, and the man who
+set himself to violate law. There is no such monstrous teaching in
+the New Testament as that all blacks are the same shade, all sin
+of the same gravity, no such teaching as that a man that tries
+according to his light to do what is right stands on exactly the
+same level as the man who flouts all such obligations, and has
+driven the chariots of his lusts and passions through every law
+that may stand in his way.
+
+But even whilst we have to insist upon that, that the teaching of
+my text is not of an absolute identity of criminality, but only an
+universal participation in criminality, do not let us forget that,
+if you take the two extremes, and suppose it possible that there
+were a best man in all the world, and a worst man in all the
+world, the difference between these two is not perhaps so great as
+at first sight it looks. For we have to remember that motives make
+actions, and that you cannot judge of these by considering those,
+that `as a man thinketh in his heart,' and not as a man does with
+his hands, `so is he.' We have to remember, also, that there may
+be lives, sedulously and immaculately respectable and pure, which
+are white rather with the unwholesome leprosy of disease than with
+the wholesome purity of health.
+
+In Queen Elizabeth's time, the way in which they cleaned the hall
+of a castle, the floor of which might be covered with remnants of
+food and all manner of abominations, was to strew another layer of
+rushes over the top of the filth, and then they thought themselves
+quite neat and respectable. And that is what a great many of you
+do, cover the filth well up with a sweet smelling layer of
+conventional proprieties, and think yourselves clean, and the
+pinks of perfection. God forbid that I should say one word that
+would seem to cast any kind of slur upon the effort that any man
+makes to do what he knows to be right, but this I proclaim, or
+rather my text proclaims for me, that, giving full weight and
+value to all that, and admitting the existence of variations in
+degree, the identity is deeper than the diversity; and there is
+`not a just man upon earth that doeth good and sinneth not.'
+
+Oh, dear friends! it is not a question of degree, but of
+direction; not how far the ship has gone on her voyage, but how
+she heads. Good and evil are the same in essence, whatever be
+their intensity and whatever be their magnitude. Arsenic is
+arsenic, whether you have a ton of it or a grain; and a very small
+dose will be enough to poison. The Gospel starts with the
+assertion that there is no difference in the fact of sin. The
+assertion is abundantly confirmed. Does not conscience assent? We
+all admit `faults,' do we not? We all acknowledge `imperfections.'
+It is that little word `sin' which seems to bring in another order
+of considerations, and to command the assent of conscience less
+readily. But sin is nothing except fault considered in reference
+to God's law. Bring the notion of God into the life, and `faults'
+and `slips' and `weaknesses,' and all the other names by which we
+try to smooth down the ugliness of the ugly thing, start up at
+once into their tone, magnitude, and importance, and stand avowed
+as \textit{sins}.
+
+Well now, if there be, therefore, this universal consciousness of
+imperfection, and if that consciousness of imperfection has only
+need to be brought into contact with God, as it were, to flame
+thus, let me remind you, too, that this fact of universal
+sinfulness puts us all in one class, no matter what may be the
+superficial difference. Shakespeare and the Australian savage, the
+biggest brain and the smallest, the loftiest and the lowest of us,
+the purest and the foulest of us, we all come into the same order.
+It is a question of classification. `The Scripture hath concluded
+all under sin,' that is to say, has shut all men up as in a
+prison. You remember in the French Revolution, all manner of
+people were huddled indiscriminately into the same dungeon of the
+Paris prisons. You would find a princess and some daughter of
+shame from the gutters; a boor from the country and a landlord, a
+count, a marquis, a \textit{savant}, a philosopher and an
+illiterate workman, all together in the dungeons. They kept up the
+distinctions of society and of class with a ghastly mockery, even
+to the very moment when the tumbrils came for them. And so here
+are we all, in some sense inclosed within the solemn cells of this
+great prison-house, and whether we be wise or foolish, we are
+prisoners, whether we have titles or not, we are prisoners. You
+may be a student, but you are a sinner: you may be a rich
+Manchester merchant, but you are a sinner; you may be a man of
+rank, but you are a sinner. Naaman went to Elisha and was very
+much offended because Elisha treated him as a leper who happened
+to be a nobleman. He wanted to be treated as a nobleman who
+happened to be a leper. And that is the way with a great many of
+us; we do not like to be driven into one class with all the crowd
+of evildoers. But, my friend, `there is no difference.' `All have
+sinned and come short of the glory of God.'
+
+II. Again, there is no difference in the fact of God's love to
+us.
+
+God does not love men because of what they are, therefore He does
+not cease to love them because of what they are. His love to the
+sons of men is not drawn out by their goodness, their morality,
+their obedience, but it wells up from the depths of His own heart,
+because `it is His nature and property,' and if I may so say, He
+cannot help loving. You do not need to pump up that great
+affection by any machinery of obedience and of merits; it rises
+like the water in an Artesian well, of its own impulse, with
+ebullient power from the central heat, and spreads its great
+streams everywhere. And therefore, though our sin may awfully
+disturb our relations with God, and may hurt and harm us in a
+hundred ways, there is one thing it cannot do, it cannot stop Him
+from loving us. It cannot dam back His great love, which flows out
+for ever towards all His creatures, and laves them all in its
+gentle, strong flood, from which nothing can draw them away. `In
+Him we live, and move, and have our being,' and to live in Him,
+whatever else it may mean---and it means a great deal more---is
+most certainly to live in His love. A man can as soon pass out of
+the atmosphere in which he breathes as he can pass out of the love
+of God. We can no more travel beyond that great over-arching
+firmament of everlasting love which spans all the universe than a
+star set in the blue heavens can transcend the liquid arch and get
+beyond its range. `There is no difference' in the fact that all
+men, unthankful and evil as they are, are grasped and held in the
+love of God.
+
+But there \textit{is} a difference. Sin cannot dam God's love
+back, but sin has a terrible power in reference to the love of
+God. Two things it can do. It can make us incapable of receiving
+the highest blessings of that love. There are many mercies which
+God pours `upon the unthankful and the evil.' These are His least
+gifts; His highest and best cannot be given to the unthankful and
+the evil. They would if they could, but they cannot, because they
+cannot be received by them. You can shut the shutters against the
+light; you can close the vase against the stream. You cannot
+prevent its shining, you cannot prevent its flowing, but you can
+prevent yourself from receiving its loftiest and best
+blessings.
+
+And another awful power that my sin has in reference to God's love
+is, that it can modify the form which God's love takes in its
+dealings with me. We may force Him to do `His work,' `His strange
+work,' as Isaiah calls it, and to punish when He would fain only
+succour and comfort and bless. Just as a fog in the sky does not
+touch the sun, but turns it to our eyes into a fiery ball, red and
+lurid, so the mist of my sin coming between me and God, may, to my
+apprehension and to my capacity of reception, solemnly make
+different that great love of His. But yet there is no difference
+in the fact of God's love to us.
+
+III. Thirdly, there is no difference in the purpose and power of
+Christ's Cross for us all.
+
+`He died for all.' The area over which the purpose and the power
+of Christ's death extend is precisely conterminous with the area
+over which the power of sin extends. It cannot be---blessed be
+God!---that the raven Sin shall fly further than the dove with the
+olive branch in its mouth. It cannot be that the disease shall go
+wider than the cure. And so, dear friends, I have to come to you
+now with this message. No matter what a man is, how far he has
+gone, how sinful he has been, how long he has stayed away from the
+sweetness and grace of that great sacrifice on the Cross, that
+death was for him. The power of Christ's sacrifice makes possible
+the forgiveness of all the sins of all the world, past, present,
+and to come. The worth of that sacrifice, which was made by the
+willing surrender of the Incarnate Son of God to the death of the
+Cross, is sufficient for the ransom price of all the sins of all
+men.
+
+Nor is it only the power of the Cross which is all embracing, but
+its purpose also. In the very hour of Christ's death, there stood,
+clear and distinct, before His divine omniscience, each man,
+woman, and child of the race. And for them all, grasping them all
+in the tenderness of His sympathy and in the clearness of His
+knowledge, in the design of His sufferings for them all, He died,
+so that every human being may lay his hand on the head of the
+sacrifice, and \textit{know} `his guilt was there,' and may say,
+with as triumphant and appropriating faith as Paul did, `He loved
+\textit{me},' and in that hour of agony and love `gave Himself for
+\textit{me}.'
+
+To go back to a metaphor already employed, the prisoners are
+gathered together in the prison, not that they may be slain, but
+`God hath included them all,' shut them all up, `that He might
+have mercy upon all.' And so, as it was in the days of Christ's
+life upon earth, so is it now, and so will it be for ever. All the
+crowd may come to Him, and whosoever comes `is made whole of
+whatsoever disease he had.' There are no incurables nor outcasts.
+`There is no difference.'
+
+IV. Lastly, there is no difference in the way which we must take
+for salvation.
+
+The only thing that unites men to Jesus Christ is faith. You must
+trust Him, you must trust the power of His sacrifice, you must
+trust the might of His living love. You must trust Him with a
+trust which is self-distrust. You must trust Him out and out. The
+people with whom Paul is fighting, in this chapter, were quite
+willing to admit that faith was the thing that made Christians,
+but they wanted to tack on something besides. They wanted to tack
+on the rites of Judaism and obedience to the moral law. And ever
+since men have been going on in that erroneous rut. Sometimes it
+has been that people have sought to add a little of their own
+morality; sometimes to add ceremonies and sacraments. Sometimes it
+has been one thing and sometimes it has been another; but there
+are not two ways to the Cross of Christ, and to the salvation
+which He gives. There is only one road, and all sorts of men have
+to come by it. You cannot lean half upon Christ and half upon
+yourselves, like the timid cripple that is not quite sure of the
+support of the friendly arm. You cannot eke out the robe with
+which He will clothe you with a little bit of stuff of your own
+weaving. It is an insult to a host to offer to pay for
+entertainment. The Gospel feast that Christ provides is not a
+social meal to which every guest brings a dish. Our part is simple
+reception, we have to bring empty hands if we would receive the
+blessing.
+
+We must put away superficial differences. The Gospel is for the
+world, therefore the act by which we receive it must be one which
+all men can perform, not one which only some can do. Not wisdom,
+nor righteousness, but faith joins us to Christ. And, therefore,
+people who fancy themselves wise or righteous are offended that
+`special terms' are not made with them. They would prefer to have
+a private portion for themselves. It grates against the pride of
+the aristocratic class, whether it be aristocratic by
+culture---and that is the most aristocratic of all---or by
+position, or anything else---it grates against their pride to be
+told: `You have to go in by that same door that the beggar is
+going in at'; and `there is no difference.' Therefore, the very
+width of the doorway, that is wide enough for all the world, gets
+to be thought narrowness, and becomes a hindrance to our entering.
+As Naaman's servant put a common-sense question to him, so may I
+to you. `If the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest
+thou not have done it?' Ay! that you would! `How much more when He
+says ``Wash and be clean!''\,' There is only one way of getting
+dirt off, and that is by water. There is only one way of getting
+sin off, and that is by the blood of Jesus Christ. There is only
+one way of having that blood applied to your heart, and that is
+trusting Him. `The common salvation' becomes ours when we exercise
+`the common faith.' `There is no difference' in our sins. Thank
+God! `there is no difference' in the fact that He grasps us with
+His love. There is no difference in the fact that Jesus Christ has
+died for us all. Let there be no difference in our faith, or there
+will be a difference, deep as the difference between Heaven and
+Hell; the difference between them that believe and them that
+believe not, which will darken and widen into the difference
+between them that are saved and them that perish.
+
+\chapter{Let Us Have Peace}
+\markright{ROMANS v. 1}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Let us have peace with God through our Lord Jesus
+Christ.'---\textsc{Romans} v. 1. (R.~V.).
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+In the rendering of the Revised Version, `Let us have peace with
+God through our Lord Jesus Christ,' the alteration is very slight,
+being that of one letter in one word, the substitution of a long
+`o' for a short one. The majority of manuscripts of authority read
+`let us have,' making the clause an exhortation and not a
+statement. I suppose the reason why, in some inferior MSS., the
+statement takes the place of the exhortation is because it was
+felt to be somewhat of a difficulty to understand the Apostle's
+course of thought. But I shall hope to show you that the true
+understanding of the context, as well as of the words I have taken
+for my text, requires the exhortation and not the affirmation.
+
+One more remark of an introductory character: is it not very
+beautiful to see how the Apostle here identifies himself, in all
+humility, with the Christians whom he is addressing, and feels
+that he, Apostle as he is, has the same need for the same counsel
+and stimulus that the weakest of those to whom he is writing have?
+It would have been so easy for him to isolate himself, and say,
+`Now you have peace with God; see that you keep it.' But he puts
+himself into the same class as those whom he is exhorting, and
+that is what all of us have to do who would give advice that will
+be worth anything or of any effect. He does not stand upon a
+little molehill of superiority, and look down upon the Roman
+Christians, and imply that they have needs that he has not, but he
+exhorts himself too, saying, `Let all of us who have obtained like
+precious faith, which is alike in an Apostle and in the humblest
+believer, have peace with God.'
+
+Now a word, first, about the meaning of this somewhat singular
+exhortation.
+
+There is a theory of man and his relation to God underlying it,
+which is very unfashionable at present, but which corresponds to
+the deepest things in human nature, and the deepest mysteries in
+human history, and that is, that something has come in to produce
+the totally unnatural and monstrous fact that between God and man
+there is not amity or harmony. Men, on their side, are alienated,
+because their wills are rebellious and their aims diverse from
+God's purpose concerning them. And---although it is an awful thing
+to have to say, and one from which the sentimentalism of much
+modern Christianity weakly recoils---on God's side, too, the
+relation has been disturbed, and `we are by nature the children of
+wrath, even as others'; not of a wrath which is unloving, not of a
+wrath which is impetuous and passionate, not of a wrath which
+seeks the hurt of its objects, but of a wrath which is the
+necessary antagonism and recoil of pure love from such creatures
+as we have made ourselves to be. To speak as if the New Testament
+taught that `reconciliation' was lop-sided---which would be a
+contradiction in terms, for reconciliation needs two to make
+it---to talk as if the New Testament taught that reconciliation
+was only man's putting away his false relation to God, is, as I
+humbly think, to be blind to its plainest teaching. So, there
+being this antagonism and separation between God and man, the
+Gospel comes to deal with it, and proclaims that Jesus Christ has
+abolished the enmity, and by His death on the Cross has become our
+peace; and that we, by faith in that Christ, and grasping in faith
+His death, pass from out of the condition of hostility into the
+condition of reconciliation.
+
+With this by way of basis, let us come back to my text. It sounds
+strange; `Therefore, being justified by faith, let up have peace.'
+`Well,' you will say, `but is not all that you have been saying
+just this, that to be justified by faith, to be declared righteous
+by reason of faith in Him who makes us righteous, is to have peace
+with God? Is not your exhortation an entirely superfluous one?' No
+doubt that is what the old scribe thought who originated the
+reading which has crept into our Authorised Version. The two
+things do seem to be entirely parallel. To be justified by faith
+is a certain process, to have peace with God is the inseparable
+and simultaneous result of that process itself. But that is going
+rather too fast. `Being justified by faith let us have peace with
+God,' really is just this---see that you abide where you are; keep
+what you have. The exhortation is not to attain peace, but retain
+it. `Hold fast that thou hast; let no man take thy crown.' `Being
+justified by faith' cling to your treasure and let nothing rob you
+of it---`let us have peace with God.'
+
+Now a word, in the next place, as to the necessity and importance
+of this exhortation.
+
+There underlies it, this solemn thought, which Christian people,
+and especially some types of Christian doctrine, do need to have
+hammered into them over and over again, that we hold the blessed
+life itself, and all its blessings, only on condition of our own
+cooperation in keeping them; and that just as physical life dies,
+unless by reception of food we nourish and continue it, so a man
+that is in this condition of being justified by faith, and having
+peace with God, needs, in order to the permanence of that
+condition, to give his utmost effort and diligence. It will all go
+if he do not. All the old state will come back again if we are
+slothful and negligent. We cannot keep the treasure unless we
+guard it. And just because we have it, we need to put all our
+mind, the earnestness of our will, and the concentration of our
+efforts, into the specific work of retaining it.
+
+For, consider how manifold and strong are the forces which are
+always working against our continual possession of this
+justification by faith, and consequent peace with God. There are
+all the ordinary cares and duties and avocations and fortunes of
+our daily life, which, indeed, may be so hallowed in their motives
+and in their activities, as that they may be turned into helps
+instead of hindrances, but which require a great deal of diligence
+and effort in order that they should not work like grains of dust
+that come between the parts of some nicely-fitting engine, and so
+cause friction and disaster. There are all the daily tasks that
+tempt us to forget the things that we only know by faith, and to
+be absorbed in the things that we can touch and taste and handle.
+If a man is upon an inclined plane, unless he is straining his
+muscles to go upwards, gravitation will make short work of him,
+and bring him down. And unless Christian men grip hard and
+continually that sense of having fellowship and peace with God, as
+sure as they are living they will lose the clearness of that
+consciousness, and the calm that comes from it. For we cannot go
+into the world and do the work that is laid upon us all without
+there being possible hostility to the Christian life in everything
+that we meet. Thank God there is possible help, too, and whether
+our daily calling is an enemy or a friend to our religion depends
+upon the earnestness and continuousness of our own efforts. But
+there is a worse force than these external distractions working to
+draw us away, one that we carry within, in our own vacillating
+wills and wayward hearts and treacherous affections and passions
+that usually lie dormant, but wake up sometimes at the most
+inopportune periods. Unless we keep a very tight hand upon
+ourselves, certainly these will rob us of this consciousness of
+being justified by faith which brings with it peace with God that
+passes understanding.
+
+In the Isle of Wight massive cliffs rise hundreds of feet above the
+sea, and seem as if they were as solid as the framework of the earth
+itself. But they rest upon a sharply inclined plane of clay, and the
+moisture trickles through the rifts in the majestic cliffs above,
+and gets down to that slippery substance and makes it like the
+greased ways down which they launch a ship; and away goes the cliff
+one day, with its hundreds of feet of buttresses that have fronted
+the tempest for centuries, and it lies toppled in hideous ruin on
+the beach below. We have all a layer of `blue slipper' in ourselves,
+and unless we take care that no storm-water finds its way down
+through the chinks in the rocks above they will slide into awful
+ruin. `Being justified, let us have peace with God,' and remember
+that the exhortation is enforced not only by a consideration of the
+many strong forces which tend to deprive us of this peace, but also
+by a consideration of the hideous disaster that comes upon a man's
+whole nature if he loses peace with God. For there is no peace with
+ourselves, and there is no peace with man, and there is no peace in
+face of the warfare of life and the calamities that are certainly
+before us all, unless, in the deepest sanctuary of our being, there
+is the peace of God because in our consciences there is peace with
+God. If I desire to be at rest---and there is no blessedness but
+rest---if I desire to know the sovereign joy of tranquillity,
+undisturbed by my own stormy passions or by any human enmity, and to
+have even the `beasts of the field at peace with' me, and all things
+my helpers and allies, there is but one way to realise the desire,
+and that is the retention of peace with God that comes with being
+justified by faith.
+
+Lastly, a word or two as to the ways by which this exhortation can
+be carried into effect.
+
+I have tried to explain how the peace of which my text speaks
+comes originally through Christ's work laid hold of by my faith,
+and now I would say only three things.
+
+Retain the peace by the exercise of that same faith which at first
+brought it. Next, retain it by union with that same Lord from whom
+you at first received it. Very significantly, in the immediate
+context, we have the Apostle drawing a broad distinction between
+the benefits which we have received from Christ's death, and those
+which we shall receive through His life. And that is the best
+commentary on the words of my text. `If when we were enemies, we
+were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being
+reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.' So let our faith grasp
+firmly the great twin facts of the Christ who died that He might
+abolish the enmity, and bring us peace; and of the Christ who
+lives in order that He may pour into our hearts more and more of
+His own life, and so make us more and more in His own image. And
+the last word that I would say, in addition to these two plain,
+practical precepts is, let your conduct be such as will not
+disturb your peace with God. For if a man lets his own will rise
+up in rebellion against God's, whether that divine will command
+duty or impose suffering, away goes all his peace. There is no
+possibility of the tranquil sense of union and communion with my
+Father in heaven lasting when I am in rebellion against Him. The
+smallest sin destroys, for the time being, our sense of
+forgiveness and our peace with God. The blue surface of the lake,
+mirroring in its unmoved tranquillity the sky and the bright sun,
+or the solemn stars, loses all that reflected heaven in its heart
+when a cat's paw of wind ruffles its surface. If we would keep our
+hearts as mirrors, in their peace, of the peace in the heavens
+that shine down on them, we must fence them from the winds of evil
+passions and rebellious wills. `Oh! that thou wouldest hearken
+unto Me, then had thy peace been like a river.'
+
+\chapter{Access into Grace}
+\markright{ROMANS v. 2}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we
+stand.'---\textsc{Romans} v. 2.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+I may be allowed to begin with a word or two of explanation of the
+terms of this passage. Note then, especially, that \textit{also}
+which sends us back to the previous clause, and tells us that our
+text adds something to what was spoken of there. What was spoken
+of there? `The peace of God' which comes to a man by Jesus Christ
+through faith, the removal of enmity, and the declaration of
+righteousness. But that peace with God, which is the beginning of
+everything in the Christian view, is only the beginning, and there
+is much to follow. While, then, there is a progress clearly marked
+in the words of our text, and `access into this grace wherein we
+stand' is something more than, and after, the `peace with God,'
+mark next the similarity of the text and the preceding verse. The
+two great truths in the latter, Christ's mediation or
+intervention, and our faith as the condition by which we receive
+the blessings which are brought to us in and through Him, are both
+repeated, with no unmeaning tautology, but with profound
+significance in our text---`By whom also we have access'---as well
+as---`the peace of God'---`access \textit{by faith} into this
+grace.' So then, for the initial blessing, and for all the
+subsequent blessings of the Christian life, the way is the same.
+The medium and channel is one, and the act by which we avail
+ourselves of the blessings coming through that one medium is the
+same. Now the language of my text, with its talking about access,
+faith, and grace, sounds to a great many of us, I am afraid, very
+hard and remote and technical. And there are not wanting people
+who tell us that all that terminology in the New Testament is like
+a dying brand in the fire, where the little kernel of glowing heat
+is getting covered thicker and thicker with grey ashes. Yes; but
+if you blow the ashes off, the fire is there all the same. Let us
+try if we can blow the ashes off.
+
+This text seems to me in its archaic phraseology, only to need to
+be pondered in order to flash up into wonderful beauty. It carries
+in it a magnificent ideal of the Christian life, in three things:
+the Christian place, `access into grace'; the Christian attitude,
+`wherein we stand'; and the Christian means of realising that
+ideal, `through Christ' and `by faith.' Now let us look at these
+three points.
+
+I. The Christian Place.
+
+There is clearly a metaphor here, both in the word `access' and in
+that other one `stand.' `The grace' is supposed as some ample
+space into which a man is led, and where he can continue, stand,
+and expatiate. Or, we may say, it is regarded as a palace or
+treasure-house into which we can enter. Now, if we take that great
+New Testament word `grace,' and ponder its meanings, we find that
+they run something in this fashion. The central thought, grand and
+marvellous, which is enshrined in it, and which often is buried
+for careless ears, is that of the active love of God poured out
+upon inferiors who deserve something very different. Then there
+follows a second meaning, which covers a great part of the ground
+of the use of the phrase in the New Testament, and that is the
+communication of that love to men, the specific and individualised
+gifts which come out of that great reservoir of patient,
+pardoning, condescending, and bestowing love. Then there may be
+taken into view a meaning which is less prominent in Scripture but
+not absent, namely, the resulting beauty of character. A gracious
+soul ought to be, and is, a graceful soul; a supreme loveliness is
+imparted to human nature by the communication to it of the gifts
+which are the results of the undeserved, free, and infinite love
+of God.
+
+Now if we take all these three thoughts as blended together in the
+grand metaphor of the Apostle, of the ample space into which the
+Christian man passes, we get such lessons as this. A Christian
+life may, and therefore should, be suffused with a continual
+consciousness of the love of God. That would change everything in
+it. Here is some great sweep of rolling country, perhaps a
+Highland moor: the little tarns on it are grey and cold, the
+vegetation is gloomy and dark, dreariness is over all the scene,
+because there is a great pall of cloud drawn beneath the blue. But
+the sun pierces with his lances through the grey, and crumples up
+the mists, and sends them flying beneath the horizon. Then what a
+change in the landscape! All the tarns that looked black and
+wicked are now infantile in their innocent blue and sunny
+gladness, and every dimple in the heights shows, and all the
+heather burns with the sunshine that falls upon it. So my lonely
+doleful life, if that light from God, the beam of His love, shines
+down upon it, rises into nobility, and flashes into beauty, and is
+calm and fair and great, as nothing else can make it. You may
+dwell in love by dwelling in God, and then your lives will be
+fair. You have access into the grace; see that you go there. They
+tell us that nightingales sing by the wayside by preference, and
+we may have in our lives, singing a quiet tune, the continual
+thought of the love of God, even whilst life's highway is dusty
+and rough, and our feet are often weary in treading it. A
+Christian life may be, and therefore should be, suffused with the
+sense of the abiding love of God.
+
+Take the other meaning of the word, the secondary and derived
+meaning, the communication of that love to us, and that leads us
+to say that a Christian life may, and therefore should, be
+enriched with continual gifts from God's fullness. I said that the
+Apostle was using a metaphor here, regarding the grace as being an
+ample space into which a man was admitted, or we may say that he
+is thinking of it as a great treasure-house. We have the right of
+entrance there, where on every side, as it were, lie ingots of
+uncoined gold, and masses of treasure, and we may have just as
+much or as little as we choose. It is entirely in our own
+determination how much of the wealth of God we shall possess. We
+have access to the treasure-house; and this permit is put into our
+hands: `Be it unto thee even as thou wilt.' The size of the sack
+that the man brings, in the old story, determined the amount of
+wealth that he carried away. Some of you bring very tiny baskets
+and expect little and desire little; you get no more than you
+desired and expected.
+
+That wealth, the fullness of God, takes the shape of, as well as
+is determined in its measure by the magnitude of, the vessel into
+which it is put. It is multiform, and we get whatever we desire,
+and whatever either our characters or our circumstances require.
+The one gift assumes all forms, just as water poured into a vase
+takes the shape of the vase into which it is poured. The same gift
+unfolds itself in an infinite variety of manners, according to the
+needs of the man to whom it is given; just as the writer's pen,
+the carpenter's hammer, the farmer's ploughshare, are all made out
+of the same metal. So God's grace comes to you in a different
+shape from that in which it comes to me, according to our
+different callings and needs, as fixed by our circumstances, our
+duties, our sorrows, our temptations.
+
+So, brethren, how shameful it is that, having the possibility of so
+much, we should have the actuality of so little. There is an old
+story about one of our generals in India long ago, who, when he came
+home, was accused of rapacity because he had brought away so much
+treasure from the Rajahs whom he had conquered, and his answer to
+the charge was, `I was surprised at my own moderation.' Ah! there
+are a great many Christian people who ought to be ashamed of their
+moderation. They have gone into the treasure-house; stacks of
+jewels, jars of gold on all sides of them---and they have been
+content to come away with some one poor little coin, when they might
+have been `rich beyond the dreams of avarice.' Brethren, you have
+`access' to the fullness of God. Whose fault is it if you are empty?
+
+Then, further, I said there was another meaning in these great
+words. The love which may suffuse our lives, the gifts, the
+consequence of that love, which may enrich our lives, should, and
+in the measure in which they are received will, adorn and make
+beautiful our lives. For `grace' means loveliness as well as
+goodness, and the God who is the fountain of it all is the
+fountain of `whatsoever things are fair,' as well as of whatsoever
+things are good. That suggests two considerations on which I have
+no time to dwell. One is that the highest beauty is goodness, and
+unless the art of a nation learns that, its art will become filthy
+and a minister of sin. They talk about `Art for Art's sake.' Would
+that all these poets and painters who are trying to find beauty in
+corruption---and there is a phosphorescent glimmer in rotting
+wood, and a prismatic colouring on the scum of a stagnant
+pond---would that all those men who are seeking to find beauty
+apart from goodness, and so are turning a divine instinct into a
+servant of evil, would learn that the true gracefulness comes from
+the grace which is the fullness of God given unto men.
+
+But there is another lesson, and that is that Christian people who
+say that they have their lives irradiated by the love of God, and
+who profess to be receiving gifts from His full hand, are bound to
+take care that their goodness is not `harsh and crabbed,' as not
+only `dull fools suppose' it to be, but as it sometimes is, but is
+musical and fair. You are bound to make your goodness attractive,
+and to show that the things that are `of good report' are likewise
+the `things that are lovely.'
+
+II. And so, now, turn to the second point here, viz. the Christian
+attitude.
+
+`The grace wherein ye \textit{stand}'; that word is very emphatic
+here, and does not merely mean `continue,' but it suggests what I
+have put into that phrase, the Christian attitude.
+
+Two things are implied. One is that a life thus suffused by the
+love, and enriched by the gifts, and adorned by the loveliness
+that come from God, will be stable and steadfast. Resistance and
+stability are implied in the words. One very important item in
+determining a man's power of resistance, and of standing firm
+against whatever assaults may be hurled against him, is the sort
+of footing that he has. If you stand on slippery mud, or on the
+ice of a glacier, you will find it hard to stand firm; but if you
+plant your foot on the grace of God, then you will be able to
+`withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand.' And how
+does a man plant his foot on the grace of God? simply by trusting
+in God, and not in himself. So that the secret of all
+steadfastness of life, and of all successful resistance to the
+whirling onrush of temptations and of difficulties, is to set your
+foot upon that rock, and then your `goings' will be
+established.
+
+Jesus Christ brings to us, in the gift of life in Him, stability
+which will check the vacillations of our own hearts. We go up and
+down, we yield when pressure is brought to bear against us, we are
+carried off our feet often by the sudden swirl of the stream, and
+the fitful blast of the wind. But His grace comes in, and will make
+us able to stand against all assaults. Our poor natures, necessarily
+changeable, and sinfully vacillating and weak, will be uniform, in
+the measure in which the grace of God comes into our hearts. Just as
+in these so-called petrifying wells, they take a bit of cloth, a
+bird's nest, a billet of wood, and plunge it into the water, and the
+mineral held in solution there infiltrates into the substance of the
+thing plunged in, and makes it firm and inflexible: so let us plunge
+our poor, changeful, vacillating resolutions, our wayward, wandering
+hearts, our passions, so easily excited by temptation, into that
+great fountain, and there will filter into our flexibility what will
+make it firm, and into our changefulness what will give in us some
+faint copy of the divine immutability, and we shall stand fast in
+the Lord and in the power of His might.
+
+Further, in regard to this attitude, which is the result of the
+possession of grace, we may say that it indicates not only
+stability and steadfastness, but erectness, as in opposition to
+crouching or bowing. A man's independence is guaranteed by his
+dependence upon, and his possession of, that communicated grace of
+God. And so you have the fact that the phase of the Christian
+teaching which has laid most stress on the decrees and sovereign
+will of God, on divine grace in fact, and too little upon the
+human side---the phase which is roughly described as
+Calvinism---has underlain the liberties of Europe, and has
+stiffened men into the rejection of all priestly and civic
+domination. `Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,'
+and if a man has in his heart the grace of God, then he stands
+erect as a man. `Ye are bought with a price; be ye not the
+servants of men.' The Christian democracy, the Christian rejection
+of all sacerdotal and other domination, flows from the access of
+each individual Christian to the fountain of all wisdom, the only
+source of law and command, the inspirer of all strength, the giver
+of all grace. By faith ye stand. `Stand fast therefore in the
+liberty wherewith Christ has made you free.'
+
+III. Lastly, and only a word; we have here the Christian way of
+entrance into grace.
+
+I have already remarked on the emphasis with which, both in my
+text and in the preceding clause, there are laid down the two
+conditions of possessing this grace, or the peace which precedes
+it: `By Christ---through faith.' Notice, too, that Jesus Christ
+gives us `access.' Now that expression is but an imperfect
+rendering of the original. If it were not for its trivial
+associations, one might read instead of `access,' introduction,
+`by whom we have introduction into this grace wherein we stand.'
+The thought is that Jesus Christ secures us entry into this ample
+space, this treasure-house, as some court officer might take by
+the hand a poor rustic, standing on the threshold of the palace,
+and lead him through all the glittering series of unfamiliar
+splendour, and present him at last in the central ring around the
+king. The reality that underlies the metaphor is plain. We sinners
+can never pass into that central glory, nor ever possess those
+gifts of grace, unless the barrier that stands between us and God,
+between us and His highest gifts of love, is swept away.
+
+I recall an old legend where two knights are represented as
+seeking to enter a palace, where there is a mysterious fire
+burning in the middle of the portal. One of them tries to pass
+through, and recoils scorched; but when the other essays an
+entrance the fierce fire sinks, and the path is cleared. Jesus
+Christ has died, and I say it with all reverence, as His blood
+touches the fire it flickers down and the way is opened `into the
+holiest of all, whither the Forerunner is for us entered.' He both
+brings the grace and makes it possible that we should go in where
+the grace is.
+
+But Jesus Christ's work is nothing to you unless your personal
+faith comes in, and so that is pointed to in the second of the
+clauses here: `\textit{By faith} we have access.' That is no
+arbitrary appointment. It lies in the very nature of the gift and
+of the recipient. How can God give access into that grace to a man
+who shrinks from being near Him; who does not want `access,' and
+who could not use the grace if he had it? How can God bestow
+inward and spiritual gifts upon any man who closes his heart
+against them, and will not have them? My faith is the condition;
+Christ is the Giver. If I ally myself to Him by my faith, He gives
+to me. If I do not, with all the will to do it, He cannot bestow
+His best gifts any more than a man who stretches out his hand to
+another sinking in the flood can lift him out, and set him on the
+safe shore, if the drowning man's hand is not stretched out to
+grasp the rescuer's outstretched hand.
+
+Brethren, God is infinitely willing to give the choicest gifts of
+His love to us all, to gladden, to enrich, to adorn, to make
+stable and erect. But He cannot give them unless you will trust
+Him. `It pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness
+dwell.' That alabaster box is brought to earth. It was broken on
+the Cross that `the house' might be `filled with the odour of the
+ointment.' Our faith is the only condition; it is only the
+condition, but it is the indispensable condition, of our being
+anointed with that fragrant anointing. He, and He only, can give
+us the fullness of God.
+
+\chapter{The Sources of Hope}
+\markright{ROMANS v. 2--4}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`We rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3.\ And not only so, but
+we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh
+patience; 4.\ And patience, experience; and experience,
+hope.'---\textsc{Romans} v. 2--4.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+We have seen in a previous sermon that the Apostle in the
+foregoing context is sketching a grand outline of the ideal
+Christian life, as all rooted in `being justified by faith,' and
+flowering into `peace with God,' `access into grace,' and a firm
+stand against all antagonists and would-be masters. In our text he
+advances to complete the outline by sketching the true Christian
+attitude towards the future. I have ventured to take so pregnant
+and large a text, because there is a very striking and close
+connection throughout the verses, which is lost unless we take
+them together. Note, then, `we rejoice in hope,' `we glory in
+tribulation.' Now, it is one word in the original which is
+diversely rendered in these two clauses by `rejoice' and `glory.'
+The latter is a better rendering than the former, because the
+original expression designates not only the emotion of joy, but
+the expression of it, especially in words. So it is frequently
+rendered in the New Testament by the word `boast,' which, of
+course, has unpleasant associations, which scarcely fit it for use
+here. So then you see Paul regards it as possible for, and more
+than possibly characteristic of, a Christian, that the very same
+emotion should he excited by that great bright future hope, and by
+the blackness of present sorrow. That is strong meat; and so he
+goes on to explain how he thinks it can and must be so, and points
+out that trouble, through a series of results, arrives at last at
+this, that if it is rightly borne, it flashes up into greater
+brightness the hope which has grasped the glory of God. So then we
+have here, not only a wonderful designation of the object around
+which Christian hope twines its tendrils, but of the double source
+from which that hope may come, and of the one emotion with which
+Christian people should front the darkness of the present and the
+brightness of the future. Ah! how different our lives would be if
+that ideal of a steadfast hope and an untroubled joy were realised
+by each of us. It may be. It should be. So I ask you to look at
+these three points which I have suggested.
+
+I. That wonderful designation of the one object of Christian hope
+which should fill, with an uncoruscating and unflickering light,
+all that dark future.
+
+`We rejoice in hope of the glory of God.' Now, I suppose I need
+not remind you that that phrase `the glory of God' is, in the Old
+Testament, used especially to mean the light that dwelt between
+the cherubim above the mercy-seat; the symbol of the divine
+perfections and the token of the Divine Presence. The reality of
+which it was a symbol is the total splendour, so to speak, of that
+divine nature, as it rays itself out into all the universe. And,
+says Paul, the true hope of the Christian man is nothing less than
+that of that glory he shall be, in some true sense, and in an
+eternally growing degree, the real possessor. It is a tremendous
+claim, and one which leads us into deep places that I dare not
+venture into now, as to the resemblance between the human person
+and the Divine Person, notwithstanding all the differences which
+of course exist, and which only a presumptuous form of religion
+has ventured to treat as transitory or insignificant. Let me use a
+technical word, and say that it is no pantheistic absorption in an
+impersonal Light, no Nirvana of union with a vague whole, which
+the Apostle holds out here, but it is the closest possible union,
+personality being saved and individual consciousness being
+intensified. It is the clothing of humanity with so much of that
+glory as can be imparted to a finite creature. That means perfect
+knowledge, perfect purity, perfect love, and that means the
+dropping away of all weaknesses and the access of strange new
+powers, and that means the end of the schism between `will' and
+`ought,' and of the other schism between `will' and `can.' It
+means what this Apostle says: `Whom He justified them He also
+glorified,' and what He says again, `We all, beholding as in a
+glass'---or rather, perhaps, mirroring as a glass does---`the
+glory, are changed into the same image.'
+
+The very heart of Christianity is that the Divine Light of which
+that Shekinah was but a poor and transitory symbol has
+`tabernacled' amongst men in the Christ, and has from Him been
+communicated, and is being communicated in such measure as earthly
+limitations and conditions permit, and that these do point on
+assuredly to perfect impartation hereafter, when `we shall be like
+Him, for we shall see Him as He is.' The Three could walk in the
+furnace of fire, because there was One with them, `like unto the
+Son of God.' `Who among us shall dwell with the everlasting fire,'
+the fire of that divine perfection? They who have had introduction
+by Christ into the grace, and who will be led by Him into the
+glory.
+
+Now, brethren, it seems to me to be of great importance that this,
+the loftiest of conceptions of that future life, should be the
+main aspect under which we think of it. It is well to speak of
+rest from toil; it is well to speak of all the negations of
+present unfavourable, afflictive conditions which that future
+presents to us. And perhaps there is none of the aspects of it
+which appeals to deeper feelings in ourselves, than those which
+say `there shall be no night there,' `there shall be no tears
+there, neither sorrow nor sighing'; `there shall be no toil
+there.' But we must rise above all that, for our heaven is to live
+in God, and to be possessors of His glory. Do not let us dwell
+upon the symbols instead of the realities. Do not let us dwell
+only on the oppositions and contradictions to earth. Let us rather
+rise high above symbols, high above negations, to the positive
+truth, and not contented with saying `We shall be full of
+blessedness; we shall be full of purity; we shall be full of
+knowledge,' let us rather think of that which embraces them
+all---we shall be full of God.
+
+So much, then, for the one object of Christian hope. We have
+here---
+
+II. The double source of that hope.
+
+Observe that the first clause of my text comes as the last term in
+a sequence. It began with `being justified by faith.' The second
+round of the ladder was, `we have peace with God.' The third, `we
+have access into this grace.' The fourth, `we stand,' and then
+comes, `we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.' That is to say,
+to put it into general words, and, of course, presupposing the
+revelation in Jesus Christ as the basis of all, without which
+there is no assured hope of a future beyond the grave, then the
+facts of a Christian man's life are for him the best brighteners
+of the hope beyond. Of course, that is so. `Justified by
+faith'---`peace with God'---`access into grace'; what, in the name
+of common-sense, can death do with these things? How can its
+blunted sword cut the bond that unites a soul that has had such
+experiences as these with the source of them all? Nothing can be
+more grotesque, nothing more incongruous, than to think that that
+subordinate and accidental fact, whose region is the physical, has
+anything whatever to do with this higher region of
+consciousness.
+
+And, further than that, it is absolutely unthinkable to a man in
+the possession of these spiritual gifts, that they should ever
+come to a close; and the fact that in the precise degree in which
+we realise as our very own possession, here and now, these
+Christian emotions and blessings, we instinctively rise to the
+belief that they are `not for an age, but for all time,' and not
+for all time, but for eternity, is itself, if not a proof, yet a
+very strong presumption, if you believe in God, that a man who
+thus `feels he was not made to die' because he has grasped the
+Eternal, is right in so feeling. If, too, we look at the
+experiences themselves, they all have the stamp of incompleteness,
+and suggest completeness by their own incompleteness. The new moon
+with its ragged edge not more surely prophesies its completed
+silver round, than do the experiences of the Christian life here,
+in their greatness and in their smallness, declare that there come
+a time and an order of things in which what was thwarted tendency
+shall be accomplished result. The tender green spikelet, pushing
+up through the brown clods, does not more surely prophesy the
+waving yellow ear, nor the broad highway on which a man comes in
+the wilderness more surely declare that there is a village at the
+end of it, than do the facts of the Christian life, here and now,
+attest the validity of the hope of the glory of God.
+
+And so, brethren, if you wish to brighten that great light that
+fills the future, see to it that your present Christianity is
+fuller of `peace with God,' `access into grace,' and the firm,
+erect standing which flows from these. When the springs in the
+mountains dry up, the river in the valley shrinks; and when they
+are full, it glides along level with the top of its banks. So when
+our Christian life in the present is richest, our Christian hope
+of the future will be the brighter. Look into yourselves. Is there
+anything there that witnesses to that great future; anything there
+that is obviously incipient, and destined to greater power;
+anything there which is like a tropical plant up here in 45
+degrees of north latitude, managing to grow, but with dwarfed
+leaves and scanty flowers and half shrivelled and sourish fruit,
+and that in the cold dreams of the warm native land? Reflecting
+telescopes show the stars in a mirror, and the observer looks down
+to see the heavens. Look into yourselves, and see whether, on the
+polished plate within, there are any images of the stars that move
+around the Throne of God.
+
+But let us turn for a moment to the second source to which the
+Apostle traces the Christian hope here. I must not be tempted to
+more than just a word of explanation, but perhaps you will
+tolerate that. Paul says that trouble works patience, that is to
+say, not only passive endurance, but brave persistence in a
+course, in spite of antagonisms. That is what trouble does to a
+man when it is rightly borne. Of course the Apostle is speaking
+here of its ideal operation, and not of the reality which alas!
+often is seen when our tribulations lash us into impatience, or
+paralyse our efforts. Tribulation worketh patience, `and patience
+\textit{experience}.' That is a difficult word to put into
+English. There underlies it the frequent thought which is familiar
+in Scripture, of trouble of all kinds as testing a man, whether as
+the refiner's fire or the winnower's fan. It tests a man, and if
+he bears the trouble with patient persistence, then he has passed
+the test and is approved. Patient perseverance thus works
+approval, or proof of the man's Christianity, and, still more,
+proof of the reality and power of the Christ whom his Christianity
+grasps. And so from out of that approval or proof which comes,
+through perseverance, from tribulation, there rises, of course, in
+that heart that has been tested and has stood, a calm hope that
+the future will be as the past, and that, having fought through
+six troubles, by God's help the seventh will be vanquished also,
+till at last troubles will end, and heaven be won.
+
+Brethren, there is the true point of view from which to look, not
+only at tribulations, but at all the trials, for they too bring
+trials, that lie in duty and in enjoyment, and in earthly things.
+They are meant to work in us a conviction, by our experience of
+having been able to meet them aright, of the reality of our grasp
+of God, and of the reality and power of the God whom we grasp. If
+we took that point of view in regard to all the changes of this
+changeful life, we should not so often be bewildered and upset by
+the darkest of our sorrows. The shining lancets and cruel cutting
+instruments that the surgeon lays out on his table before he
+begins the operation are very dreadful. But the way to think of
+them is that they are there in order to remove from a man what it
+does him harm to keep, and what, if it is not taken away, will
+kill him. So life, with its troubles, great and small, is all
+meant for this, to make us surer of, and bring us closer to, our
+God, and to brace and strengthen us in our own personal character.
+And if it does that, then blessed be everything that produces
+these results, and leads us thereby to glorying in the troubles by
+which shines out on us a brighter hope.
+
+So there are the two sources, you see: the one is the blessedness
+of the Christian life, the other the sorrows of the outward life,
+and both may converge upon the brightening of our Christian hope.
+Our rainbow is the child of the marriage of the sun and the rain.
+The Christian hope comes from being `justified by faith, having
+peace with God ... and access into grace,' and it comes from
+tribulation, which `worketh patience,' and patience which `worketh
+approval.' The one spark is struck from the hard flint by the cold
+steel, and the other is kindled by the sun itself, but they are
+both fire.
+
+And so, lastly, we have here---
+
+III. The one emotion with which the Christian should front all the
+facts, inward and outward, of his earthly life.
+
+`We glory in the hope,' `we glory in tribulation,' I need not
+dwell upon the lesson which is taught us here by the fact that the
+Apostle puts as one in a series of Christian characteristics this
+of a steadfast and all-embracing joy. I do not believe that we
+Christian people half enough realise how imperative a Christian
+duty, as well as how great a Christian privilege, it is to be glad
+always. You have no right to be anxious; you are wrong to be
+hypochondriac and depressed, and weary and melancholy. True; there
+are a great many occasions in our Christian life which minister
+sadness. True; the Christian joy looks very gloomy to a worldly
+eye. But there are far more occasions which, if we were right,
+would make joy instinctive, and which, whether we are right or
+not, make it obligatory upon us. I need not speak of how, if that
+hope were brighter than it commonly is with us, and if it were
+more constantly present to our minds and hearts, we should sing
+with gladness. I need not dwell upon that great and wonderful
+paradox by which the co-existence of sorrow and of joy is
+possible. The sorrows are on the surface; beneath there may be
+rest. All the winds of heaven may rave across the breast of ocean,
+and fret it into clouds of spume against a storm-swept sky. But
+deep down there is stillness, and yet not stagnation, because
+there is the great motion that brings life and freshness; and so,
+though there will be wind-vexed surfaces on our too-often agitated
+spirits, there ought to be deeper than these the calm setting of
+the whole ocean of our nature towards God Himself. It is possible,
+as this Apostle has it, to be `sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.'
+It is possible, as his brother Apostle has it, to `rejoice
+greatly, though now for a season we are in sorrow through manifold
+temptations.' Look back upon your lives from the point of view
+that your tribulation is an instrument to produce hope, and you
+will be able to thank God for all the way by which He has led
+you.
+
+Now, brethren, the plain lesson of all this is just that we have
+here, in these texts, a linked chain, one end of which is wrapped
+around our sinful hearts, and the other is fastened to the Throne of
+God. You cannot drop any of the links, and you must begin at the
+beginning, if you are to be carried on to the end. If we are to have
+a joy immovable, we must have a `steadfast hope.' If we are to have
+a `steadfast hope,' we must have a present `grace.' If we are to
+have a present `grace,' and `access' to the fullness of God, we must
+have `peace with God.' If we are to have `peace with God,' we must
+have the condemnation and the guilt taken away. If we are to have
+the condemnation and the guilt taken away, Jesus Christ must take
+them. If Jesus Christ is to take them away, we must have faith in
+Him. Then you can work it backward, and begin at your own end, and
+say, `If I have faith in Jesus Christ, then every link of the chain
+in due succession will pass through my hand, and I shall have
+justifying, peace, access, the grace, erectness, hope, and
+exultation, and at last He will lead me by the hand into the glory
+for which I dare to hope, the glory which the Father gave to Him
+before the foundation of the world, and which He will give to me
+when the world has passed away in fervent heat.'
+
+\chapter{A Threefold Cord}
+\markright{ROMANS v. 5}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed
+abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto
+us.'---\textsc{Romans} v. 5.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+We have seen in former sermons that, in the previous context, the
+Apostle traces Christian hope to two sources: one, the series of
+experiences which follow `being justified by faith' and the other,
+those which follow on trouble rightly borne. Those two golden
+chains together hold up the precious jewel of hope. But a chain
+that is to bear a weight must have a staple, or it will fall to
+the ground. And so Paul here turns to yet another thought, and,
+going behind both our inward experiences and our outward
+discipline, falls back on that which precedes all. After all is
+said and done, the love of God, eternal, self-originated, the
+source of all Christian experiences because of the work of Christ
+which originates them all, is the root fact of the universe, and
+the guarantee that our highest anticipations and desires are not
+unsubstantial visions, but morning dreams, which are proverbially
+sure to be fulfilled. God is love; therefore the man who trusts
+Him shall not be put to shame.
+
+But you will notice that here the Apostle not only adduces the
+love of God as the staple, so to speak, from which these golden
+chains hang, but that he traces the heart's being suffused with
+that love to its source, and as, of course, is always the case in
+the order of analysis, that which was last in time comes first in
+statement. We begin at the surface, and go down and down and down
+from effect to cause, and yet again to the cause of that cause
+which is itself effect. We strip off, as it were, layer after
+layer, until we get to the living centre---hope comes from the
+love, the love comes from the Spirit in the heart. And so to get
+at the order of time and of manifestation, we must reverse the
+order of analysis in my text, and begin where it ends. So we have
+here three things---the Spirit given, the love shed abroad by that
+Spirit, and the hope established by that love. Now just look at
+them for a moment.
+
+I. The Spirit given.
+
+Now, the first point to notice here is that the Revised Version
+presents the meaning of our text more accurately than the
+Authorised Version, because, instead of reading `is given,' it
+correctly reads `was given.' And any of you that can consult the
+original will see that the form of the language implies that the
+Apostle is thinking, not so much of a continuous bestowment, as of
+a definite moment when this great gift was bestowed upon the man
+to whom he is speaking.
+
+So the first question is, when was that Spirit given to these
+Roman Christians? The Christian Church has been split in two by
+its answers to that question. One influential part, which has
+taken a new lease of life amongst us to-day, says `in baptism,'
+and the other says `at the moment of faith.' I am not going to be
+tempted into controversial paths now, for my purpose is a very
+different one, but I cannot help just a word about the former of
+these two answers. `Given in baptism,' say our friends, and I
+venture to think that they thereby degrade Christianity into a
+system of magic, bringing together two entirely disparate things,
+an external physical act and a spiritual change. I do not say
+anything about the disastrous effects that have followed from such
+a conception of the medium by which this greatest of all Christian
+gifts is effected upon men. Since the Spirit who is given is life,
+the result of the gift of that Spirit is a new life, and we all
+know what disastrous and debasing consequences have followed from
+that dogma of regeneration by baptism. No doubt it is perfectly
+true that normally, in the early Church, the Divine Spirit was
+given at baptism; but for one thing, that general rule had
+exceptions, as in the case of Cornelius, and, for another thing,
+though it was given \textit{at} baptism, it was not given
+\textit{in} baptism, but it was given through faith, of which in
+those days baptism was the sequel and the sign.
+
+But I pass altogether from this, and fall back on the great words
+which, to me at least, if there were no other, would determine the
+whole answer to this question as to when the Spirit was given:
+`This spake He of the Holy Ghost, which they that \textit{believe}
+on Him should receive'; and I would ask the modern upholders of
+the other theory the indignant question which the Apostle Paul
+fired off out of his heavy artillery at their ancient analogues,
+the circumcisers in the Galatian Church: `This only would I know
+of you: Received ye the Holy Spirit by the works of the law, or by
+the hearing of faith?'
+
+The answer which the evangelical Christian gives to this ancient
+question suggested by my text, `When was that Divine Spirit
+bestowed?' is congruous with the spirituality of the Christian
+faith, and is eminently reasonable. For the condition required is
+the opening of the whole nature in willing welcome to the entrance
+of the Divine Spirit, and as surely as, wherever there is an
+indentation of the land, and a concavity of a receptive bay, the
+ocean will pour into it and fill it, so surely where a heart is
+open for God, God in His Divine Spirit will enter into that heart,
+and there will shed His blessed influences.
+
+So, dear brethren, and this is the main point to which I wish to
+direct your attention, the Apostle here takes it for granted that
+all these Roman Christians knew in themselves the truth of what he
+was saying, and had an experience which confirmed his assertion
+that the Divine Spirit of God was given to them when they
+believed. Ah! I wonder if that is true about us professing
+Christians; if we are aware in any measure of a higher life than
+our own having been breathed into us; if we are aware in any
+measure of a Divine Spirit dwelling in our spirits, moulding,
+lifting, enlightening, guiding, constraining, and yet not
+coercing? We ought to be, `Know ye not that the Spirit dwelleth in
+you, except ye be rejected?' Brethren, it seems to me to be of the
+very last importance, in this period of the Church's history, that
+the proportion between the Church's teaching as to the work of
+Christ on the Cross, and as to the consequent work of the Spirit
+of Christ in our hearts and spirits, should be changed. We must
+become more mystical if we are not to become less Christian. And
+the fact that so many of us seem to imagine that the whole Gospel
+lies in this, that `He died for our sins according to the
+Scriptures,' and have relegated the teaching that He, by His
+Spirit, lives in us, if we are His disciples, to a less prominent
+place, has done enormous harm, not only to the type of Christian
+life, but to the conception of what Christianity is, both amongst
+those who receive it, and amongst those who do not accept it,
+making it out to be nothing more than a means of escape from the
+consequences of our transgression, instead of recognising it for
+what it is, the impartation of a new life which will flower into
+all beauty, and bear fruit in all goodness.
+
+There was a question put once to a group of disciples, in
+astonishment and incredulity, by this Apostle, when he said to the
+twelve disciples in Ephesus, `Did you receive the Holy Ghost when
+you believed?' The question might well be put to a multitude of
+professing Christians amongst us, and I am afraid a great many of
+them, if they answered truly, would answer as those disciples did,
+`We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy
+Ghost.'
+
+And now for the second point in my text---
+
+II. The love which is shed abroad by that Spirit.
+
+Now, I suppose I do not need to do more than point out that `the
+love of God' here means His to us, and not ours to Him, and that
+the metaphor employed is but partially represented by that
+rendering `shed abroad.' `Poured out' would better convey Paul's
+image, which is that of a flood sent coursing through the heart,
+or, perhaps, rather lying there, as a calm deep lake on whose
+unruffled surface the heavens, with all their stars, are
+reflected. Of course, if God's love to us thus suffuses a heart,
+then there follows the consciousness of that love; though it is
+not the consciousness of the love that the Apostle is primarily
+speaking of, but that which lies behind it, the actual flowing
+into the human heart of that sweet and all-satisfying Love. This
+Divine Spirit that dwells in us, if we are trusting in Christ,
+will pour it in full streams into our else empty hearts. Surely
+there is nothing incongruous with the nature either of God or of
+man, in believing that thus a real communication is possible
+between them, and that by thoughts the occasions of which we
+cannot trace, by moments of elevation, by swift, piercing
+convictions, by sudden clear illuminations, God may speak, and
+will speak, in our waiting hearts.
+
+\begin{verse}
+`Such rebounds the inmost ear \\
+\ \ Catches often from afar. \\
+Listen, prize them, hold them dear; \\
+\ \ For of God, of God, they are.'
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent But we must not forget, too, that, according to the
+whole strain of New Testament thinking, the means by which that
+Divine Spirit does pour out the flashing flood of the love of God
+into a man's heart is, as Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, by
+taking the things of Christ and showing them to us.
+
+Now, as I said about a former point of my sermon, that the Apostle
+was taking for granted that this gift of the Spirit belonged to
+all Christian people; so here again he takes for granted that in
+every Christian heart there is, by a divine operation, the
+presence of the love, and of the consciousness of the love, of
+God. And, again, the question comes to some of us stunningly, to
+all of us warningly, Is that a transcript of our experience? It is
+the ideal of a Christian life; it is meant that it should be so,
+and should be so continuously. The stream that is poured out is
+intended to run summer and winter, not to be dried up in drought,
+nor made turbid and noisy in flood, but with equable flow
+throughout. I fear me that the experience of most good people is
+rather like one of those tropical wadies, or nullahs in Eastern
+lands, where there alternate times of spate and times of drought;
+and instead of a flashing stream, pouring life everywhere, and
+full to the top of its banks, there is for long periods a dismal
+stretch of white sun-baked stones, and a chaos of tumbled rocks
+with not a drop of water in the channel. The Spirit pours God's
+love into men's spirits, but there may be dams and barriers, so
+that no drop of the water comes into the empty heart.
+
+Our Quaker friends have a great deal to say about `waiting for the
+springing of the life within us.' Never mind about the
+phraseology: what is meant is profoundly true, that no Christian
+man will realise this blessing unless he knows how to sit still
+and meditate, and let the gracious influence soak into him. Thus
+being quiet, he may, he will, find rising in his heart the
+consciousness of the love of God. You will not, if you give only
+broken momentary sidelong glances; you will not, if you do not lie
+still. If you hold up a cup in a shaking hand beneath a fountain,
+and often twitch it aside, you will get little water in it; and
+unless we `wait on the Lord,' we shall not `renew our strength.'
+You can build a dam as they do in Holland that will keep out, not
+only the waters of a river, but the waters of an ocean, and not a
+drop will come through the dike. Brethren, we must keep ourselves
+in the love of God.
+
+Lastly, we have here---
+
+III. The hope that is established by the love poured out.
+
+I need not dwell at any length upon this point, because, to a
+large extent, it has been anticipated in former sermons, but just
+a word or two may be permitted me. That love, you may be very
+sure, is not going to lose its objects in the dust. The old
+Psalmist who knew so much less than we do as to the love of God,
+and knew nothing of the whispers of a Divine Spirit within his
+heart charged with the message of the love as it was manifested in
+Jesus Christ, had risen to a height of confidence, the beauty of
+the expression of which is often lost sight of, because we insist
+upon dealing with it as merely being a Messianic prophecy, which
+it is, but not merely: `Thou wilt not leave my soul in Sheol,
+neither wilt Thou suffer Thy beloved' (for that is the real
+meaning of the word translated `thy Holy One')---`Thou wilt not
+suffer the child of Thy love to see corruption.' Death's bony
+fingers can untie all true lover's knots but one; and they fumble
+at that one in vain. God will not lose His child in the grave.
+
+That love, we may be very sure, will not foster in us hopes that are
+to be disappointed. Now, it is a fact that the more a man feels that
+God loves him, the less is it possible for him to believe that that
+love will ever terminate, or that he shall `all die.' In the lock of
+a canal, as the water pours in, the vessel rises. In our hearts, as
+the flood of the full love of God pours in, our hopes are borne up
+and up, nearer and nearer to the heavens. Since it is so, we must
+find in the fact that the constant and necessary result of communion
+with Him here on earth is a conviction of the immortality of that
+communion, a very, very strong guarantee for ourselves that the hope
+is not in vain. And if you say that that is all merely subjective,
+yet I think that the universality of the experience is a fact to be
+taken into account even by those who doubt the reality of the hope,
+and for ourselves, at all events, is a sufficient ground on which to
+rest. We have the historical fact of the Resurrection of Jesus
+Christ. We have the fact that wherever there has been earthly
+experience of true communion with God, there, and in the measure in
+which it has been realised, the thermometer of our hopes of
+immortality, so to speak, has risen. `God is love,' and God will not
+bring the man that trusts Him to confusion.
+
+And may we not venture to say that, contemplating the analogous
+earthly love, we are permitted to believe that that divine Lover
+of our souls desires to have His beloved with Him, and desires
+that there be no separation between Him and them, either, if I
+might so say, in place or in disposition? As certainly as husband
+and wife, lover and friend, long to be together, and need it for
+perfection and for rest, so surely will that divine love not be
+satisfied until it has gathered all its children to its breast and
+made them partakers of itself.
+
+There are many, many hopes that put the men who cherish them to
+shame, partly because they are never fulfilled, partly because,
+though fulfilled, they are disappointed, since the reality is so
+much less than the anticipation. Who does not know that the spray
+of blossom on the tree looks far more lovely hanging above our
+heads than when it is grasped by us? Who does not know that the
+fish struggling on the hook seems heavier than it turns out to be
+when lying on the bank? We go to the rainbow's end, and we find,
+not a pot of gold, but a huddle of cold, wet mist. There is one
+man that is entitled to say: `To-morrow shall be as this day, and
+much more abundant.' Who is he? Only the man whose hope is in the
+Lord his God. If we open our hearts by faith, then these three
+lines of sequence of which we have been speaking will converge,
+and we shall have the hope that is the shining apex of `being
+justified by faith,' and the hope that is the calm result of
+trouble and agitation, and the hope that, travelling further and
+higher than anything in our inward experience or our outward
+discipline, grasps the key-word of the universe, `God is love,'
+and triumphantly makes sure that `neither death nor life, nor
+angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor
+things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature,
+shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in
+Christ Jesus our Lord.'
+
+\chapter{What Proves God's Love}
+\markright{ROMANS v. 8}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet
+sinners, Christ died for us.'---\textsc{Romans} v. 8.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+We have seen in previous sermons on the preceding context that the
+Apostle has been tracing various lines of sequence, all of which
+converge upon Christian hope. The last of these pointed to the
+fact that the love of God, poured into a heart like oil into a
+lamp, brightened that flame; and having thus mentioned the great
+Christian revelation of God as love, Paul at once passes to
+emphasise the historical fact on which the conviction of that love
+rests, and goes on to say that `the love of God is shed abroad in
+our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given to us, \textit{for}
+when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the
+ungodly.' Then there rises before him the thought of how
+transcendent and unparalleled a love is that which pours its whole
+preciousness on unworthy and unresponsive hearts. He thinks to
+himself---`We are all ungodly; without strength---yet, He died for
+us. Would any man do that? No! for,' says he, `it will be a hard
+thing to find any one ready to die for a righteous man---a man
+rigidly just and upright, and because rigidly just, a trifle hard,
+and therefore not likely to touch a heart to sacrifice; and even
+for a good man, in whom austere righteousness has been softened
+and made attractive, and become graciousness and beneficence,
+well! it is just within the limits of possibility that somebody
+might be found even to die for a man that had laid such a strong
+hand upon his affections. But God commendeth His love in that
+while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.' Now, when Paul says
+`commend,' he uses a very significant word which is employed in
+two ways in the New Testament. It sometimes means to establish, or
+to prove, or to make certain. But `prove' is a cold word, and the
+expression also means to recommend, to set forth in such a way as
+to appeal to the heart, and God does both in that great act. He
+establishes the fact, and He, as it were, sweeps it into a man's
+heart, on the bosom of that full tide of self-sacrifice.
+
+So there are two or three points that arise from these words, on
+which I desire to dwell now---to lay them upon our hearts, and not
+only upon our understandings. For it is a poor thing to prove the
+love of God, and we need that not only shall we be sure of it, but
+that we shall be softened by it. So now let me ask you to look
+with me, first, at this question---
+
+I. What Paul thought Jesus Christ died for.
+
+`Died \textit{for} us.' Now that expression plainly implies two
+things: first, that Christ died of His own accord, and being
+impelled by a great motive, beneficence; and, second, that that
+voluntary death, somehow or other, is for our behoof and
+advantage. The word in the original, `for,' does not define in
+what way that death ministers to our advantage, but it does assert
+that for those Roman Christians who had never seen Jesus Christ,
+and by consequence for you and me nineteen centuries off the
+Cross, there is benefit in the fact of that death. Now, suppose we
+quote an incident in the story of missionary martyrdom. There was
+a young lady, whom some of us knew and loved, in a Chinese mission
+station, who, with the rest of the missionary band, was flying.
+Her life was safe. She looked back, and saw a Chinese boy that her
+heart twined round, in danger. She returned to save him; they laid
+hold of her and flung her into the burning house, and her charred
+remains have never been found. That was a death for another, but
+`Jesus died for us' in a deeper sense than that. Take another
+case. A man sets himself to some great cause, not his own, and he
+sees that in order to bless humanity, either by the proclamation
+of some truth, or by the origination of some great movement, or in
+some other way, if he is to carry out his purpose, he must give
+his life. He does so, and dies a martyr. What he aimed at could
+only be done by the sacrifice of his life. The death was a means
+to his end, and he died for his fellows. That is not the depth of
+the sense in which Paul meant that Jesus Christ died for us. It
+was not that He was true to His message, and, like many another
+martyr, died. There is only one way, as it seems to me, in which
+any beneficial relation can be established between the Death of
+Christ and us, and it is that when He died He died for us, because
+`He bare our sins in His own body on the tree.'
+
+Dear brethren, I dare say some of you do not take that view, but I
+know not how justice can be done to the plain words of Scripture
+unless this is the point of view from which we look at the Cross
+of Calvary---that there the Lamb of Sacrifice was bearing, and
+bearing away, the sins of the whole world. I know that Christian
+men who unite in the belief that Christ's death was a sacrifice
+and an atonement diverge from one another in their interpretations
+of the way in which that came to be a fact, and I believe, for my
+part, that the divergent interpretations are like the divergent
+beams of light that fall upon men who stand round the same great
+luminary, and that all of them take their origin in, and are part
+of the manifestation of, the one transcendent fact, which passes
+all understanding, and gathers into itself all the diverse
+conceptions of it which are formed by limited minds. He died for
+us because, in His death, our sins are taken away and we are
+restored to the divine favour.
+
+I know that Jesus Christ is said to have made far less of that
+aspect of His work in the Gospels than His disciples have done in
+the Epistles, and that we are told that, if we go back to Jesus,
+we shall not find the doctrine which for some of us is the first
+form in which the Gospel finds its way into the hearts of men. I
+admit that the fully-developed teaching followed the fact, as was
+necessarily the case. I do not admit that Jesus Christ `spake
+nothing concerning Himself' as the sacrifice for the world's sins.
+For I hear from His lips---not to dwell upon other sayings which I
+could quote---I hear from His lips, `The Son of Man came not to be
+ministered unto, but to minister'---that is only half His
+purpose---`and to give His life a ransom instead of the many.' You
+cannot strike the atoning aspect of His death out of that
+expression by any fair handling of the words.
+
+And what does the Lord's Supper mean? Why did Jesus Christ select
+that one point of His life as the point to be remembered? Why did
+He institute the double memorial, the body parted from the blood
+being a sign of a violent death? I know of no explanation that
+makes that Lord's Supper an intelligible rite except the
+explanation which says that He came, to live indeed, and in that
+life to be a sacrifice, but to make the sacrifice complete by
+Himself bearing the consequences of transgression, and making
+atonement for the sins of the world.
+
+Brethren, that is the only aspect of Christ's death which makes it
+of any consequence to us. Strip it of that, and what does it
+matter to me that He died, any more than it matters to me that any
+philanthropist, any great teacher, any hero or martyr or saint,
+should have died? As it seems to me, nothing. Christ's death is
+surrounded by tenderly pathetic and beautiful accompaniments. As a
+story it moves the hearts of men, and `purges them, by pity and by
+terror.' But the death of many a hero of tragedy does all that.
+And if you want to have the Cross of Christ held upright in its
+place as the Throne of Christ and the attractive power for the
+whole world, you must not tamper with that great truth, but say,
+`He died for our sins, according to the Scriptures.'
+
+Now, there is a second question that I wish to ask, and that is---
+
+II. How does Christ's death `commend' God's love?
+
+That is a strange expression, if you will think about it, that
+`\textit{God} commendeth His love towards us in that
+\textit{Christ} died.' If you take the interpretation of Christ's
+death of which I have already been speaking, one could have
+understood the Apostle if he had said, `Christ commendeth His love
+towards us in that Christ died.' But where is the force of the
+fact of a \textit{man's} death to prove \textit{God's} love? Do
+you not see that underlying that swift sentence of the Apostle
+there is a presupposition, which he takes for granted? It is so
+obvious that I do not need to dwell upon it to vindicate his
+change of persons, viz. that `God was in Christ,' in such fashion
+as that whatsoever Christ did was the revelation of God. You
+cannot suppose, at least I cannot see how you can, that there is
+any force of proof in the words of my text, unless you come up to
+the full belief, `God was in Christ reconciling the world to
+Himself.'
+
+Suppose some great martyr who dies for his fellows. Well, all
+honour to him, and the race will come to his tomb for a while, and
+bring their wreaths and their sorrow. But what bearing has his
+death upon our knowledge of God's love towards us? None whatever,
+or at most a very indirect and shadowy one. We have to dig deeper
+down than that. `God commends His love ... in that Christ died.'
+`He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.' And we have the right
+and the obligation to argue back from all that is manifest in the
+tender Christ to the heart of God, and say, not only, `God so
+loved the world that He' sent His Son, but to see that the love
+that was in Christ is the manifestation of the love of God
+Himself.
+
+So there stands the Cross, the revelation to us, not only of a
+Brother's sacrifice, but of a Father's love; and that because
+Jesus Christ is the revelation of God as being the `eradiation of
+His glory, and the express image of His person.' Friends! light
+does pour out from that Cross, whatever view men take of it. But
+the omnipotent beam, the all-illuminating radiance, the
+transforming light, the heat that melts, are all dependent on our
+looking at it---I do not only say, as Paul looked at it, nor do I
+even say as Christ looked at it, but as the deep necessities of
+humanity require that the world should look at it, as the altar
+whereon is laid the sacrifice for our sins, the very Son of God
+Himself. To me the great truths of the Incarnation and the
+Atonement of Jesus Christ are not points in a mere speculative
+theology; they are the pulsating vital centre of religion. And
+every man needs them in his own experience.
+
+I was going to have said a word or two here---but it is not
+necessary---about the need that the love of God should be
+irrefragably established, by some plain and undeniable and
+conspicuous fact. I need not dwell upon the ambiguous oracles
+which---
+
+\begin{verse}
+`Nature, red in tooth and claw, \\
+ With rapine'
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent gives forth, nor on how the facts of human life, our own
+sorrows, and the world's miseries, the tears that swathe the
+earth, as it rolls on its orbit, like a misty atmosphere, war
+against the creed that God is love. I need not remind you, either,
+of how deep, in our own hearts, when the conscience begins to
+speak its \textit{not} ambiguous oracles, there does rise the
+conviction that there is much in us which it is impossible should
+be the object of God's love. Nor need I remind you how all these
+difficulties in believing in a God who is love, based on the
+contradictory aspects of nature, and the mysteries of providence,
+and the whisperings of our own consciousness, are proved to have
+been insuperable by the history of the world, where we find
+mythologies and religions of all types and gods of every sort, but
+nowhere in all the pantheon a God who is Love.
+
+Only let me press upon you that that conviction of the love of
+God, which is found now far beyond the limits of Christian faith,
+and amongst many of us who, in the name of that conviction itself,
+reject Christianity, because of its sterner aspects, is
+historically the child of the evangelical doctrine of the
+Incarnation and sacrifice of Jesus Christ. And if it still
+subsists, as I know it does, especially in this generation,
+amongst many men who reject what seems to me to be the very kernel
+of Christianity---subsists like the stream cut off from its
+source, but still running, that only shows that men hold many
+convictions the origin of which they do not know. God is love. You
+will not permanently sustain that belief against the pressure of
+outward mysteries and inward sorrows, unless you grasp the other
+conviction that Christ died for our sins. The two are
+inseparable.
+
+And now lastly---
+
+III. What kind of love does Christ's death declare to us as
+existing in God?
+
+A love that is turned away by no sin---that is the thing that
+strikes the Apostle here, as I have already pointed out. The
+utmost reach of human affection might be that a man would die for
+the good---he would scarcely die for the righteous. But God sends
+His Son, and comes Himself in His Son, and His Son died for the
+ungodly and the sinner. That death reveals a love which is its own
+origin and motive. We love because we discern, or fancy we do,
+something lovable in the object. God loves under the impulse, so
+to speak, of His own welling-up heart.
+
+And yet it is a love which, though not turned away by any sin, is
+witnessed by that death to be rigidly righteous. It is no mere
+flaccid, flabby laxity of a loose-girt affection, no mere foolish
+indulgence like that whereby earthly parents spoil their children.
+God's love is not lazy good-nature, as a great many of us think it
+to be and so drag it in the mud, but it is rigidly righteous, and
+therefore Christ died. That Death witnesses that it is a love
+which shrinks from no sacrifices. This Isaac was not `spared.' God
+gave up His Son. Love has its very speech in surrender, and God's
+love speaks as ours does. It is a love which, turned away by no
+sin, and yet rigidly righteous and shrinking from no sacrifices,
+embraces all ages and lands. `God commendeth'---not `commended.'
+The majestic present tense suggests that time and space are
+nothing to the swift and all-filling rays of that great Light.
+That love is `towards us,' you and me and all our fellows. The
+Death is an historical fact, occurring in one short hour. The
+Cross is an eternal power, raying out light and love over all
+humanity and through all ages.
+
+God lays siege to all hearts in that great sacrifice. Do you
+believe that Jesus Christ died for \textit{your} sins `according
+to the Scriptures'? Do you see there the assurance of a love which
+will lift you up above all the cross-currents of earthly life, and
+the mysteries of providence, into the clear ether where the
+sunshine is unobscured? And above all, do you fling back the
+reverberating ray from the mirror of your own heart that directs
+again towards heaven the beam of love which heaven has shot down
+upon you? `Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He
+loved us, and gave His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.'
+Is it true of us that we love God because He first loved us?
+
+\chapter{The Warring Queens}
+\markright{ROMANS v. 21}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`As sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through
+righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our
+Lord.'---\textsc{Romans} v. 21.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+I am afraid this text will sound to some of you rather
+unpromising. It is full of well-worn terms, `sin,' `death,'
+`grace,' `righteousness,' `eternal life,' which suggest dry
+theology, if they suggest anything. When they welled up from the
+Apostle's glowing heart they were like a fiery lava-stream. But
+the stream has cooled, and, to a good many of us, they seem as
+barren and sterile as the long ago cast out coils of lava on the
+sides of a quiescent volcano. They are so well-worn and familiar
+to our ears that they create but vague conceptions in our minds,
+and they seem to many of us to be far away from a bearing upon our
+daily lives. But you much mistake Paul if you take him to be a
+mere theological writer. He is an earnest evangelist, trying to
+draw men to love and trust in Jesus Christ. And his writings,
+however old-fashioned and doctrinally hard they may seem to you,
+are all throbbing with life---instinct with truths that belong to
+all ages and places, and which fit close to every one of us.
+
+I do not know if I can give any kind of freshness to these words,
+but I wish to try. To begin with, I notice the highly-imaginative
+and picturesque form into which the Apostle casts his thoughts
+here. He, as it were, draws back a curtain, and lets us see two
+royal figures, which are eternally opposed and dividing the
+dominion between them. Then he shows us the issues to which these
+two rulers respectively conduct their subjects; and the question
+that is trembling on his lips is `Under which of them do you
+stand?' Surely that is not fossil theology, but truths that are of
+the highest importance, and ought to be of the deepest interest,
+to every one of us. They are to you the former, whether they are
+the latter or not.
+
+I. So, first, look at the two Queens who rule over human life.
+
+Sin and Grace are both personified; and they are both conceived of
+as female figures, and both as exercising dominion. They stand
+face to face, and each recognises as her enemy the other. The one
+has established her dominion: `Sin \textit{hath} reigned.' The
+other is fighting to establish hers: `That Grace \textit{might}
+reign.' And the struggle is going on between them, not only on the
+wide field of the world; but in the narrow lists of the heart of
+each of us.
+
+Sin reigns. The truths that underlie that solemn picture are plain
+enough, however unwelcome they may be to some of us, and however
+remote from the construction of the universe which many of us are
+disposed to take.
+
+Now, let us understand our terms. Suppose a man commits a theft.
+You may describe it from three different points of view. He has
+thereby broken the law of the land; and when we are thinking about
+that we call it crime. He has also broken the law of `morality,'
+as we call it; and when we are looking at his deed from that point
+of view, we call it vice. Is that all? He has broken something
+else. He has broken the law of God; and when we look at it from
+that point of view we call it sin. Now, there are a great many
+things which are sins that are not crimes; and, with due
+limitations, I might venture to say that there are some things
+which are sins that are not to be qualified as vices. Sin implies
+God. The Psalmist was quite right when he said; `Against Thee,
+Thee only have I sinned'; although he was confessing a foul injury
+he had done to Bathsheba, and a glaring crime that he had
+committed against Uriah. It was as to God, and in reference to Him
+only, that his crime and his vice darkened and solidified into
+sin.
+
+And what is it, in our actions or in ourselves considered in
+reference to God, that makes our actions sins and ourselves
+sinners? Remember the prodigal son. `Father! Give me the portion
+of goods that falleth to me.' There you have it all. He went away,
+and `wasted his substance in riotous living.' To claim myself for
+my own; to act independently of, or contrary to, the will of God;
+to try to shake myself clear of Him; to have nothing to do with
+Him, even though it be by mere forgetfulness and negligence, and,
+in all my ways to comport myself as if I had no relations of
+dependence on and submission to him---that is sin. And there may
+be that oblivion or rebellion, not only in the gross vulgar acts
+which the law calls crimes, or in those which conscience declares
+to be vices, but also in many things which, looked at from a lower
+point of view, may be fair and pure and noble. If there is this
+assertion of self in them, or oblivion of God and His will in
+them, I know not how we are to escape the conclusion that even
+these fall under the class of sins. For there can be no act or
+thought, truly worthy of a man, situated and circumstanced as we
+are, which has not, for the very core and animating motive of it,
+a reference to God.
+
+Now, when I come and say, as my Bible teaches me to say, that this
+is the deepest view of the state of humanity that sin reigns, I do
+not wish to fall into the exaggerations by which sometimes that
+statement has been darkened and discredited; but I do want to
+press upon you, dear brethren, this, as a matter of
+\textit{personal} experience, that wherever there is a heart that
+loves, and leaves God out, and wherever there is a will that
+resolves, determines, impels to action, and does not bow itself
+before Him, and wherever there are hands that labour, or feet that
+run, at tasks and in paths self-chosen and unconsecrated by
+reference to our Father in heaven, no matter how great and
+beautiful subsidiary lustres may light up their deeds, the very
+heart of them all is transgression of the law of God. For this,
+and nothing else or less, is His law: `Thou shalt love the Lord
+thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
+thy strength, and with all thy mind.' I do not charge you with
+crimes. You know how far it would be right to charge you with
+vices. \textit{I} do not charge you with anything; but I pray you
+to come with me and confess: `We all have sinned, and come short
+of the glory of God.'
+
+I suppose I need not dwell upon the difficulty of getting a
+lodgment for this conviction in men's hearts. There is no sadder,
+and no more conclusive proof, of the tremendous power of sin over
+us, than that it has lulled us into unconsciousness, hard to be
+broken, of its own presence and existence. You remember the old
+stories---I suppose there is no truth in them, but they will do
+for an illustration---about some kind of a blood-sucking animal
+that perched upon a sleeping man, and with its leathern wings
+fanned him into deeper drowsiness whilst it drew from him his
+life-blood. That is what this hideous Queen does for men. She
+robes herself in a dark cloud, and sends out her behests from
+obscurity. And men fancy that they are free whilst all the while
+they are her servants. Oh, dear brethren! you may call this
+theology, but it is a simple statement of the facts of our
+condition. `Sin hath reigned.'
+
+And now turn to the other picture, `Grace might reign.' Then there
+is an antagonistic power that rises up to confront the widespread
+dominion of this anarch of old. And this Queen comes with twenty
+thousand to war against her that has but ten thousand on her
+side.
+
+Again I say, let us understand our terms. I suppose, there are few
+of the keywords of the New Testament which have lost more of their
+radiance, like quicksilver, by exposure in the air during the
+centuries than that great word Grace, which is always on the lips
+of this Apostle, and to him had music in its sound, and which to
+us is a piece of dead doctrine, associated with certain high
+Calvinistic theories which we enlightened people have long ago
+grown beyond, and got rid of. Perhaps Paul was more right than we
+when his heart leaped up within him at the very thought of all
+which he saw to lie palpitating and throbbing with eager desire to
+bless men, in that great word. What does he mean by it? Let me put
+it into the shortest possible terms. This antagonist Queen is
+nothing but the love of God raying out for ever to us inferior
+creatures, who, by reason of our sinfulness, have deserved
+something widely different. Sin stands there, a hideous hag,
+though a queen; Grace stands here, `in all her gestures dignity
+and love,' fair and self-communicative, though a sovereign. The
+love of God in exercise to sinful men: that is what the New
+Testament means by grace. And is it not a great thought?
+
+Notice, for further elucidation of the Apostle's conception, how
+he sacrifices the verbal correctness of his antithesis in order to
+get to the real opposition. What is the opposite of Sin?
+Righteousness. Why does he not say, then, that `as Sin hath
+reigned unto death, even so might Righteousness reign unto life'?
+Why? Because it is not man, or anything in man, that can be the
+true antagonist of, and victor over, the regnant Sin of humanity;
+but God Himself comes into the field, and only He is the foe that
+Sin dreads. That is to say, the only hope for a sin-tyrannised
+world is in the out-throb of the love of the great heart of God.
+For, notice the weapon with which He fights man's transgression,
+if I may vary the figure for a moment. It is only subordinately
+punishment, or law, or threatening, or the revelation of the
+wickedness of the transgression. All these have their places, but
+they are secondary places. The thing that will conquer a world's
+wickedness is nothing else but the manifested love of God. Only
+the patient shining down of the sun will ever melt the icebergs
+that float in all our hearts. And wonderful and blessed it is to
+think that, in whatsoever aspects man's sin may have been an
+interruption and a contradiction of the divine purpose, out of the
+evil has come a good; that the more obdurate and universal the
+rebellion, the more has it evoked a deeper and more wondrous
+tenderness. The blacker the thundercloud, the brighter glows the
+rainbow that is flung across it. So these two front each other,
+the one settled in her established throne---
+
+\begin{verse}
+`Fierce as ten furies, \\
+ terrible as hell---'
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent the other coming on her adventurous errand to conquer
+the world to herself, and to banish the foul tyranny under which
+men groan. `Sin hath reigned.' Grace is on her way to her
+dominion.
+
+II. Notice the gifts of these two Queens to their subjects.
+
+`Sin hath reigned in death' (as the accurate translation has it);
+`Grace reigns unto eternal life.' The one has established her
+dominion, and its results are wrought out, her reign is, as it
+were, a reign in a cemetery; and her subjects are dead. If you
+want a modern instance to illustrate an ancient saw, think of
+Armenia. There is a reign whose gifts to its subjects are death.
+Sin reigns, says Paul, and for proof points to the fact that men
+die.
+
+Now, I am not going to enter into the question here, and now,
+whether physical death passes over mankind because of the fact of
+transgression. I do not suppose that this is so. But I ask you to
+remember that when the Bible says that `Death passed upon all men,
+for all have sinned,' it does not merely mean the physical fact of
+dissolution, but it means that fact along with the accompaniments
+of it, and the forerunners of it, in men's consciences. `The sting
+of death is sin,' says Paul, in another place. By which he
+implies, I presume, that, if it were not for the fact of
+alienation from God and opposition to His holy will, men might lie
+down and die as placidly as an animal does, and might strip
+themselves for it `as for a bed, that longing they'd been sick
+for.' No doubt, there was death in the world long before there
+were men in it. No doubt, also, the complex whole phenomenon gets
+its terror from the fact of men's sin.
+
+But it is not so much that physical fact with its accompaniments
+which Paul is thinking about when he says that `sin reigns in
+death,' as it is that solemn truth which he is always reiterating,
+and which I pray you, dear friends, to lay to heart, that,
+whatever activity there may be in the life of a man who has rent
+himself away from dependence upon God---however vigorous his
+brain, however active his hand, however full charged with other
+interests his life, in the very depth of it is a living death, and
+the right name for it is death. So this is Sin's gift---that over
+our whole nature there come mortality and decay, and that they who
+live as her subjects are dead whilst they live. Dear brethren,
+that may be figurative, but it seems to me that it is absurd for
+you to turn away from such thoughts, shrug your shoulders, and
+say, `Old-fashioned Calvinistic theology!' It is simply putting
+into a vivid form the facts of your life and of your condition in
+relation to God, if you are subjects of Sin.
+
+Then, on the other hand, the other queenly figure has her hands
+filled with one great gift which, like the fatal bestowment which
+Sin gives to her subjects, has two aspects, a present and a future
+one. Life, which is given in our redemption from Death and Sin,
+and in union with God; that is the present gift that the love of
+God holds out to every one of us. That life, in its very
+incompleteness here, carries in itself the prophecy of its own
+completion hereafter, in a higher form and world, just as truly as
+the bud is the prophet of the flower and of the fruit; just as
+truly as a half-reared building is the prophecy of its own
+completion when the roof tree is put upon it. The men that here
+have, as we all may have if we choose, the gift of life eternal in
+the knowledge of God through Jesus Christ His Son, must
+necessarily tend onwards and upwards to a region where Death is
+beneath the horizon, and Life flows and flushes the whole heaven.
+Brother! do you put out your whole hand to take the poisoned gift
+from the claw-like hand of that hideous Queen; or do you turn and
+take the gift of life eternal from the hands of the queenly
+Grace?
+
+III. How this queenly Grace gives her gifts.
+
+You observe that the Apostle, as is his wont---I was going to
+say---gets himself entangled in a couple of almost parenthetical
+or, at all events, subsidiary sentences. I suppose when he began
+to write he meant to say, simply, `as Sin hath reigned unto death,
+so Grace might reign unto life.' But notice that he inserts two
+qualifications: `through righteousness,' `through Jesus Christ our
+Lord.' What does he mean by these?
+
+He means this, first, that even that great love of God, coming
+throbbing straight from His heart, cannot give eternal life as a
+mere matter of arbitrary will. God can make His sun to shine and
+His rain to fall, `on the unthankful and on the evil,' and if God
+could, God would give eternal life to everybody, bad and good; but
+He cannot. There must be righteousness if there is to be life.
+Just as sin's fruit is death, the fruit of righteousness is
+life.
+
+He means, in the next place, that whilst there is no life without
+righteousness, there is no righteousness without God's gift. You
+cannot break away from the dominion of Sin, and, as it were,
+establish yourselves in a little fortress of your own, repelling
+her assaults by any power of yours. Dear brethren, we cannot undo
+the past; we cannot strip off the poisoned garment that clings to
+our limbs; we can mend ourselves in many respects, but we cannot
+of our own volition and motion clothe ourselves with that
+righteousness of which the wearers shall be worthy to `pass
+through the gate into the city.' There is no righteousness without
+God's gift.
+
+And the other subsidiary clause completes the thought: `through
+Christ.' In Him is all the grace, the manifest love, of God
+gathered together. It is not diffused as the nebulous light in
+some chaotic incipient system, but it is gathered into a sun that
+is set in the centre, in order that it may pour down warmth and
+life upon its circling planets. The grace of God is in Christ
+Jesus our Lord. In Him is life eternal; therefore, if we desire to
+possess it we must possess Him. In Him is righteousness;
+therefore, if we desire our own foulness to be changed into the
+holiness which shall see God, we must go to Jesus Christ. Grace
+reigns in life, but it is life through righteousness, which is
+through Jesus Christ our Lord.
+
+So, then, brother, my message and my petition to each of you
+are---knit yourself to Him by faith in Him. Then He who is `full
+of grace and truth' will come to you; and, coming, will bring in
+His hands righteousness and life eternal. If only we rest
+ourselves on Him, and keep ourselves close in touch with Him; then
+we shall be delivered from the tyranny of the darkness, and
+translated into the Kingdom of the Son of His love.
+
+\chapter{`The Form of Teaching'}
+\markright{ROMANS vi. 17}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`... Ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was
+delivered you.'---\textsc{Romans} vi. 17.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+There is room for difference of opinion as to what Paul precisely
+means by `form' here. The word so rendered appears in English as
+\textit{type}, and has a similar variety of meaning. It signifies
+originally a mark made by pressure or impact; and then, by natural
+transitions, a \textit{mould}, or more generally a
+\textit{pattern} or \textit{example}, and then the copy of such an
+example or pattern, or the cast from such a mould. It has also the
+other meaning which its English equivalent has taken on very
+extensively of late years, such as, for instance, you find in
+expressions like `An English type of face,' meaning thereby the
+general outline which preserves the distinguishing characteristics
+of a thing. Now we may choose between these two meanings in our
+text. If the Apostle means type in the latter sense of the word,
+then the rendering `form' is adequate, and he is thinking of the
+Christian teaching which had been given to the Roman Christians as
+possessing certain well-defined characteristics which
+distinguished it from other kinds of teaching---such, for
+instance, as Jewish or heathen.
+
+But if we take the other meaning, then he is, in true Pauline
+fashion, bringing in a vivid and picturesque metaphor to enforce
+his thought, and is thinking of the teaching which the Roman
+Christians had received as being a kind of mould into which they
+were thrown, a pattern to which they were to be conformed. And
+that that is his meaning seems to me to be made a little more
+probable by the fact that the last words of my text would be more
+accurate if inverted, and instead of reading, as the Authorised
+Version does, `that form of doctrine which was delivered you,' we
+were to read, as the Revised Version does, `that form whereunto ye
+were delivered.'
+
+If this be the general meaning of the words before us, there are
+three thoughts arising from them to which I turn briefly. First,
+Paul's Gospel was a definite body of teaching; secondly, that
+teaching is a mould for conduct and character; lastly, that
+teaching therefore demands obedience. Take, then, these three
+thoughts.
+
+I. First, Paul's Gospel was a definite body of teaching.
+
+Now the word `doctrine,' which is employed in my text, has, in the
+lapse of years since the Authorised Version was made, narrowed its
+significance. At the date of our Authorised translation `doctrine'
+was probably equivalent to `teaching,' of whatever sort it might
+be. Since then it has become equivalent to a statement of abstract
+principles, and that is not at all what Paul means. He does not
+mean to say that his gospel was a form of doctrine in the sense of
+being a theological system, but he means to say that it was a body
+of teaching, the nature of the teaching not being defined at all
+by the word.
+
+Therefore we have to notice that the great, blessed peculiarity of
+the Gospel is that it is a teaching, not of abstract dry
+principles, but of concrete historical facts. From these
+principles in plenty may be gathered, but in its first form as it
+comes to men fresh from God it is not a set of propositions, but a
+history of deeds that were done upon earth. And, therefore, is it
+fitted to be the food of every soul and the mould of every
+character.
+
+Jesus Christ did not come and talk to men about God, and say to
+them what His Apostles afterwards said, `God is love,' but He
+lived and died, and that mainly was His teaching about God. He did
+not come to men and lay down a theory of atonement or a doctrine
+of propitiation, or theology about sin and its relations to God,
+but He went to the Cross and gave Himself for us, and that was His
+teaching about sacrifice. He did not say to men `There is a future
+life, and it is of such and such a sort,' but He came out of the
+grave and He said `Touch Me, and handle Me. A spirit hath not
+flesh and bones,' and \textit{therefore} He brought life and
+immortality to light, by no empty words but by the solid realities
+of facts. He did not lecture upon ethics, but He lived a perfect
+human life out of which all moral principles that will guide human
+conduct may be gathered. And so, instead of presenting us with a
+\textit{hortus siccus}, with a botanic collection of
+scientifically arranged and dead propositions, He led us into the
+meadow where the flowers grow, living and fair. His life and
+death, with all that they imply, are the teaching.
+
+Let us not forget, on the other hand, that the history of a fact
+is not the mere statement of the outward thing that has happened.
+Suppose four people, for instance, standing at the foot of
+Christ's Cross; four other `evangelists' than the four that we
+know. There is a Roman soldier; there is a Pharisee; there is one
+of the weeping crowd of poor women, not disciples; and there is a
+disciple. The first man tells the fact as he saw it: `A Jewish
+rebel was crucified this morning.' The second man tells the fact:
+`A blaspheming apostate suffered what he deserved to-day.' The
+woman tells the fact: `A poor, gentle, fair soul was martyred
+to-day.' And the fourth one tells the fact: `Jesus Christ, the Son
+of God, died for our sins.' The three tell the same fact; the
+fourth preaches the Gospel---that is to say, Christian teaching is
+the facts plus their explanation; and it is that which
+differentiates it from the mere record which is of no avail to
+anybody. So Paul himself in one of his other letters puts it. This
+is his gospel: Jesus of Nazareth `died for \textit{our} sins
+according to the Scriptures, and He was buried, and rose again the
+third day, according to the Scriptures.' That is what turns the
+bald story of the facts into teaching, which is the mould for
+life.
+
+So on the one hand, dear brethren, do not let us fall into the
+superficial error of fancying that our religion is a religion of
+emotion and morality only. It is a religion with a basis of divine
+truth, which, being struck away, all the rest goes. There is a
+revolt against dogma to-day, a revolt which in large measure is
+justified as an essential of progress, and in large measure as an
+instance of progress; but human nature is ever prone to extremes,
+and in the revolt from man's dogma there is danger of casting away
+God's truth. Christianity is not preserved when we hold by the
+bare facts of the outward history, unless we take with these facts
+the interpretation of them, which declares the divinity and the
+sacrifice of the Son of God.
+
+And on the other hand, let us keep very clear in our minds the
+broad and impassable gulf of separation between the Christian
+teaching as embodied in the Scripture and the systems which
+Christianity has evolved therefrom. Men's intellects must work
+upon the pabulum that is provided for them, and a theology in a
+systematised form is a necessity for the intellectual and
+reasonable life of the Christian Church. But there is all the
+difference between man's inferences from and systematising of the
+Christian truth and the truth that lies here. The one is the
+golden roof that is cast over us; the other is too often but the
+spiders' webs that are spun across and darken its splendour. It is
+a sign of a wholesome change in the whole sentiment and attitude
+of the modern Christian mind that the word `doctrine,' which has
+come to mean men's inferences from God's truth, should have been
+substituted as it has been in our Revised Version of my text, by
+the wholesome Christian word `teaching.' The teaching is the facts
+with the inspired commentary on them.
+
+II. Secondly, notice that this teaching is in Paul's judgment a
+mould or pattern according to which men's lives are to be
+conformed.
+
+There can be no question but that, in that teaching as set forth
+in Scripture, there does lie the mightiest formative power for
+shaping our lives, and emancipating us from our evil.
+
+Christ is \textit{the} type, the mould into which men are to be
+cast. The Gospel, as presented in Scripture, gives us three
+things. It gives us the perfect mould; it gives us the perfect
+motive; it gives us the perfect power. And in all three things
+appears its distinctive glory, apart from and above all other
+systems that have ever tried to affect the conduct or to mould the
+character of man.
+
+In Jesus Christ we have in due combination, in perfect proportion,
+all the possible excellences of humanity. As in other cases of
+perfect symmetry, the very precision of the balanced proportions
+detracts from the apparent magnitude of the statue or of the fair
+building, so to a superficial eye there is but little beauty there
+that we should desire Him, but as we learn to know Him, and live
+nearer to Him, and get more familiar with all His sweetness, and
+with all His power, He towers before us in ever greater and yet
+never repellent or exaggerated magnitude, and never loses the
+reality of His brotherhood in the completeness of His perfection.
+We have in the Christ the one type, the one mould and pattern for
+all striving, the `glass of form,' the perfect Man.
+
+And that likeness is not reproduced in us by pressure or by a
+blow, but by the slow and blessed process of gazing until we
+become like, beholding the glory until we are changed into the
+glory.
+
+It is no use having a mould and metal unless you have a fire. It
+is no use having a perfect Pattern unless you have a motive to
+copy it. Men do not go to the devil for want of examples; and
+morality is not at a low ebb by reason of ignorance of what the
+true type of life is. But nowhere but in the full-orbed teaching
+of the New Testament will you find a motive strong enough to melt
+down all the obstinate hardness of the `northern iron' of the
+human will, and to make it plastic to His hand. If we can say, `He
+loved me and gave Himself for me' then the sum of all morality,
+the old commandment that `ye love one another' receives a new
+stringency, and a fresh motive as well as a deepened
+interpretation, when His love is our pattern. The one thing that
+will make men willing to be like Christ is their faith that Christ
+is their Sacrifice and their Saviour. And sure I am of this, that
+no form of mutilated Christianity, which leaves out or falteringly
+proclaims the truth that Christ died on the Cross for the sins of
+the world, will ever generate heat enough to mould men's wills, or
+kindle motives powerful enough to lead to a life of growing
+imitation of and resemblance to Him. The dial may be all right,
+the hours most accurately marked in their proper places, every
+minute registered on the circle, the hands may be all right,
+delicately fashioned, truly poised, but if there is no main-spring
+inside, dial and hands are of little use, and a Christianity which
+says, `Christ is the Teacher; do you obey Him?' is as impotent as
+the dial face with the broken main-spring. What we need, and what,
+thank God, in `the teaching' we have, is the pattern brought near
+to us, and the motive for imitating the pattern, set in motion by
+the great thought, `He loved me and gave Himself for me.'
+
+Still further, the teaching is a power to fashion life, inasmuch
+as it brings with it a gift which secures the transformation of
+the believer into the likeness of his Lord. Part of `the teaching'
+is the fact of Pentecost; part of the teaching is the fact of the
+Ascension; and the consequence of the Ascension and the sure
+promise of the Pentecost is that all who love Him, and wait upon
+Him, shall receive into their hearts the `Spirit of life in Christ
+Jesus' which shall make them free from the law of sin and
+death.
+
+So, dear friends, on the one hand, let us remember that our
+religion is meant to work, that we have nothing in our creed that
+should not be in our character, that all our \textit{credenda} are
+to be our \textit{agenda}; everything \textit{believed} to be
+something \textit{done}; and that if we content ourselves with the
+simple acceptance of the teaching, and make no effort to translate
+that teaching into life, we are hypocrites or self-deceivers.
+
+And, on the other hand, do not let us forget that religion is the
+soul of which morality is the body, and that it is impossible in
+the nature of things that you shall ever get a true, lofty, moral
+life which is not based upon religion. I do not say that men
+cannot be sure of the outlines of their duty without Christianity,
+though I am free to confess that I think it is a very maimed and
+shabby version of human duty, which is supplied, minus the special
+revelation of that duty which Christianity makes; but my point is,
+that the knowledge will not work without the Gospel.
+
+The Christian type of character is a distinct and manifestly
+separate thing from the pagan heroism or from the virtues and the
+righteousnesses of other systems. Just as the musician's ear can
+tell, by half a dozen bars, whether that strain was Beethoven's,
+or Handel's, or Mendelssohn's, just as the trained eye can see
+Raffaelle's magic in every touch of his pencil, so Christ, the
+Teacher, has a style; and all the scholars of His school carry
+with them a certain mark which tells where they got their
+education and who is their Master, if they are scholars indeed.
+And that leads me to the last word.
+
+III. This mould demands obedience.
+
+By the very necessity of things it is so. If the `teaching' was
+but a teaching of abstract truths it would be enough to assent to
+them. I believe that the three angles of a triangle are equal to
+two right angles, and I have done my duty by that proposition when
+I have said `Yes! it is so.' But the `teaching' which Jesus Christ
+gives and \textit{is}, needs a good deal more than that. By the
+very nature of the teaching, assent drags after it submission. You
+can please yourself whether you let Jesus Christ into your minds
+or not, but if you do let Him in, He will be Master. There is no
+such thing as taking Him in and not obeying.
+
+And so the requirement of the Gospel which we call faith has in it
+quite as much of the element of obedience as of the element of
+trust. And the presence of that element is just what makes the
+difference between a sham and a real faith. `Faith which has not
+works is dead, being alone.' A faith which is all trust and no
+obedience is neither trust nor obedience.
+
+And that is why so many of us do not care to yield ourselves to
+the faith that is in Jesus Christ. If it simply came to us and
+said, `If you will trust Me you will get pardon,' I fancy there
+would be a good many more of us honest Christians than are so. But
+Christ comes and says, `Trust Me, follow Me, and take Me for your
+Master; and be like Me,' and one's will kicks, and one's passions
+recoil, and a thousand of the devil's servants within us prick
+their ears up and stiffen their backs in remonstrance and
+opposition. `Submit' is Christ's first word; submit by faith,
+submit in love.
+
+That heart obedience, which is the requirement of Christianity,
+means freedom. The Apostle draws a wonderful contrast in the
+context between the slavery to lust and sin, and the freedom which
+comes from obedience to God and to righteousness. Obey the Truth,
+and the Truth, in your obeying, shall make you free, for freedom
+is the willing submission to the limitations which are best. `I
+will walk at liberty for I keep Thy precepts.' Take Christ for
+your Master, and, being His servants, you are your own masters,
+and the world's to boot. For `all things are yours if ye are
+Christ's.' Refuse to bow your necks to that yoke which is easy,
+and to take upon your shoulders that burden which is light, and
+you do not buy liberty, though you buy licentiousness, for you
+become the slaves and downtrodden vassals of the world and the
+flesh and the devil, and while you promise yourselves liberty, you
+become the bondsmen of corruption. Oh! then, let us obey from the
+heart that mould of teaching to which we are delivered, and so
+obeying, we shall be free indeed.
+
+\chapter{`Thy Free Spirit'}
+\markright{ROMANS vii. 2}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free
+from the law of sin and death.'---\textsc{Romans} viii. 2.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+We have to distinguish two meanings of law. In the stricter sense,
+it signifies the authoritative expressions of the will of a ruler
+proposed for the obedience of man; in the wider, almost figurative
+sense, it means nothing more than the generalised expression of
+constant similar facts. For instance, objects attract one another
+in certain circumstances with a force which in the same
+circumstances is always the same. When that fact is stated
+generally, we get the law of gravitation. Thus the word comes to
+mean little more than a regular process. In our text the word is
+used in a sense much nearer the latter than the former of these
+two. `The law of sin and of death' cannot mean a series of
+commandments; it certainly does not mean the Mosaic law. It must
+either be entirely figurative, taking sin and death as two great
+tyrants who domineer over men; or it must mean the continuous
+action of these powers, the process by which they work. These two
+come substantially to the same idea. The law of sin and of death
+describes a certain constancy of operation, uniform and fixed,
+under the dominion of which men are struggling. But there is
+another constancy of operation, uniform and fixed too, a mighty
+antagonistic power, which frees from the dominion of the former:
+it is `the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.'
+
+I. The bondage.
+
+The Apostle is speaking about himself as he was, and we have our
+own consciousness to verify his transcript of his own personal
+experience. Paul had found that, by an inexorable iron sequence,
+sin worked in himself the true death of the soul, in separation
+from God, in the extinction of good and noble capacities, in the
+atrophying of all that was best in himself, in the death of joy
+and peace. And this iron sequence he, with an eloquent paradox,
+calls a `law,' though its very characteristic is that it is
+lawless transgression of the true law of humanity. He so describes
+it, partly, because he would place emphasis on its dominion over
+us. Sin rules with iron sway; men madly obey it, and even when
+they think themselves free, are under a bitter tyranny. Further,
+he desires to emphasise the fact that sin and death are parts of
+one process which operates constantly and uniformly. This dark
+anarchy and wild chaos of disobedience and transgression has its
+laws. All happens there according to rule. Rigid and inevitable as
+the courses of the stars, or the fall of the leaf from the tree,
+is sin hurrying on to its natural goal in death. In this fatal
+dance, sin leads in death; the one fair spoken and full of
+dazzling promises, the other in the end throws off the mask, and
+slays. It is true of all who listen to the tempting voice, and the
+deluded victim `knows not that the dead are there, and that her
+guests are in the depth of hell.'
+
+II. The method of deliverance.
+
+The previous chapter sounded the depths of human impotence, and
+showed the tragic impossibility of human efforts to strip off the
+poisoned garment. Here the Apostle tells the wonderful story of
+how he himself was delivered, in the full rejoicing confidence
+that what availed for his emancipation would equally avail for
+every captived soul. Because he himself has experienced a divine
+power which breaks the dreadful sequence of sin and of death, he
+knows that every soul may share in the experience. No mere outward
+means will be sufficient to emancipate a spirit; no merely
+intellectual methods will avail to set free the passions and
+desires which have been captured by sin. It is vain to seek
+deliverance from a perverted will by any republication, however
+emphatic, of a law of duty. Nothing can touch the necessities of
+the case but a gift of power which becomes an abiding influence in
+us, and develops a mightier energy to overcome the evil tendencies
+of a sinful soul.
+
+That communicated power must impart life. Nothing short of a
+Spirit of life, quick and powerful, with an immortal and intense
+energy, will avail to meet the need. Such a Spirit must give the
+life which it possesses, must quicken and bring into action
+dormant powers in the spirit that it would free. It must implant
+new energies and directions, new motives, desires, tastes, and
+tendencies. It must bring into play mightier attractions to
+neutralise and deaden existing ones; as when to some chemical
+compound a substance is added which has a stronger affinity for
+one of the elements, a new thing is made.
+
+Paul's experience, which he had a right to cast into general terms
+and potentially to extend to all mankind, had taught him that such
+a new life for such a spirit had come to him by union with Jesus
+Christ. Such a union, deep and mystical as it is, is, thank God,
+an experience universal in all true Christians, and constitutes
+the very heart of the Gospel which Paul rejoiced to believe was
+entrusted to his hands for the world. His great message of `Christ
+in us' has been wofully curtailed and mangled when his other
+message of `Christ for us' has been taken, as it too often has
+been, to be the whole of his Gospel. They who take either of these
+inseparable elements to be the whole, rend into two imperfect
+halves the perfect oneness of the Gospel of Christ.
+
+We are often told that Paul was the true author of Christian
+doctrine, and are bidden to go back from him to Jesus. If we do
+so, we hear His grave sweet voice uttering in the upper-room the
+deep words, `I am the Vine, ye are the branches'; and, surely,
+Paul is but repeating, without metaphor, what Christ, once for
+all, set forth in that lovely emblem, when he says that `the law
+of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of
+sin and of death.' The branches in their multitude make the Vine
+in its unity, and the sap which rises from the deep root through
+the brown stem, passes to every tremulous leaf, and brings bloom
+and savour into every cluster. Jesus drew His emblem from the
+noblest form of vegetative life; Paul, in other places, draws his
+from the highest form of bodily life, when he points to the many
+members in one body, and the Head which governs all, and says, `So
+also is Christ.' In another place he points to the noblest form of
+earthly love and unity. The blessed fellowship and sacred oneness
+of husband and wife are an emblem sweet, though inadequate, of the
+fellowship in love and unity of spirit between Christ and His
+Church.
+
+And all this mysterious oneness of life has an intensely practical
+side. In Jesus, and by union with Him, we receive a power that
+delivers from sin and arrests the stealthy progress of sin's
+follower, death. Love to Him, the result of fellowship with Him,
+and the consequence of life received from Him, becomes the motive
+which makes the redeemed heart delight to do His will, and takes
+all the power out of every temptation. We are in Him, and He in
+us, on condition, and by means, of our humble faith; and because
+my faith thus knits me to Him it is `the victory that overcomes
+the world' and breaks the chains of many sins. So this communion
+with Jesus Christ is the way by which we shall increase that
+triumphant spiritual life, which is the only victorious antagonist
+of the else inevitable consequence which declares that the `soul
+that sinneth it shall die,' and die even in sinning.
+
+III. The process of the deliverance.
+
+Following the R.\ V.\ we read `made me free,' not `hath made me.'
+The reference is obviously, as the Greek more clearly shows, to a
+single historical event, which some would take to be the Apostle's
+baptism, but which is more properly supposed to be his conversion.
+His strong bold language here does not mean that he claims to be
+sinless. The emancipation is effected, although it is but begun.
+He holds that at that moment when Jesus appeared to him on the
+road to Damascus, and he yielded to Him as Lord, his deliverance
+was real, though not complete. He was conscious of a real change
+of position in reference to that law of sin and of death. Paul
+distinguishes between the true self and the accumulation of
+selfish and sensual habits which make up so much of ourselves. The
+deeper and purer self may be vitalised in will and heart, and set
+free even while the emancipation is not worked out in the life.
+The parable of the leaven applies in the individual renewal; and
+there is no fanaticism, and no harm, in Paul's point of view, if
+only it be remembered that sins by which passion and externals
+overbear my better self are mine in responsibility and in
+consequences. Thus guarded, we may be wholly right in thinking of
+all the evils which still cleave to the renewed Christian soul as
+not being part of it, but destined to drop away.
+
+And this bold declaration is to be vindicated as a prophetic
+confidence in the supremacy and ultimate dominion of the new power
+which works even through much antagonism in an imperfect
+Christian. Paul, too, calls `things that are not as though they
+were.' If my spirit of life is the `Spirit of life in Christ,' it
+will go on to perfection. It is Spirit, therefore it is informing
+and conquering the material; it is a divine Spirit, therefore it
+is omnipotent; it is the Spirit of life, leading in and imparting
+life like itself, which is kindred with it and is its source; it
+is the Spirit of life in Christ, therefore leading to life like
+His, bringing us to conformity with Him because the same causes
+produce the same effects; it is a life in Christ having a law and
+regular orderly course of development. So, just as if we have the
+germ we may hope for fruit, and can see the infantile oak in the
+tightly-shut acorn, or in the egg the creature which shall
+afterwards grow there, we have in this gift of the Spirit, the
+victory. If we have the cause, we have the effects implicitly
+folded in it; and we have but to wait further development.
+
+The Christian life is to be one long effort, partial, and gradual,
+to unfold the freedom possessed. Paul knew full well that his
+emancipation was not perfect. It was, probably, after this
+triumphant expression of confidence that he wrote, `Not as though
+I had already attained, either were already perfect.' The first
+stage is the gift of power, the appropriation and development of
+that power is the work of a life; and it ought to pass through a
+well-marked series and cycle of growing changes. The way to
+develop it is by constant application to the source of all
+freedom, the life-giving Spirit, and by constant effort to conquer
+sins and temptations. There is no such thing in the Christian
+conflict as a painless development. We must mortify the deeds of
+the body if we are to live in the Spirit. The Christian progress
+has in it the nature of a crucifixion. It is to be effort,
+steadily directed for the sake of Christ, and in the joy of His
+Spirit, to destroy sin, and to win practical holiness. Homely
+moralities are the outcome and the test of all pretensions to
+spiritual communion.
+
+We are, further, to perfect holiness in the fear of the Lord, by
+`waiting for the Redemption,' which is not merely passive waiting,
+but active expectation, as of one who stretches out a welcoming
+hand to an approaching friend. Nor must we forget that this
+accomplished deliverance is but partial whilst upon earth. `The
+body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of
+righteousness.' But there may be indefinite approximation to
+complete deliverance. The metaphors in Scripture under which
+Christian progress is described, whether drawn from a conflict or
+a race, or from a building, or from the growth of a tree, all
+suggest the idea of constant advance against hindrances, which
+yet, constant though it is, does not reach the goal here. And this
+is our noblest earthly condition---not to be pure, but to be
+tending towards it and conscious of impurity. Hence our tempers
+should be those of humility, strenuous effort, firm hope. We are
+as slaves who have escaped, but are still in the wilderness, with
+the enemies' dogs baying at our feet; but we shall come to the
+land of freedom, on whose sacred soil sin and death can never
+tread.
+
+\chapter{Christ Condemning Sin}
+\markright{ROMANS viii. 3}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the
+flesh, God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh,
+and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.'---\textsc{Romans} viii.
+3.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+In the first verse of this chapter we read that `There is no
+condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.' The reason of that
+is, that they are set free from the terrible sequence of cause and
+effect which constitutes `the law of sin and death'; and the
+reason why they are freed from that awful sequence by the power of
+Christ is, because He has `condemned sin in the flesh.' The
+occurrence of the two words `condemnation' (ver.\ 1) and
+`condemned' (ver.\ 3) should be noted. Sin is personified as
+dwelling in the flesh, which expression here means, not merely the
+body, but unregenerate human nature. He has made his fortress
+there, and rules over it all. The strong man keeps his house and
+his goods are in peace. He laughs to scorn the attempts of laws
+and moralities of all sorts to cast him out. His dominion is death
+to the human nature over which he tyrannises. Condemnation is
+inevitable to the men over whom he rules. They or he must perish.
+If he escape they die. If he could be slain they might live.
+Christ comes, condemns the tyrant, and casts him out. So, he being
+condemned, we are acquitted; and he being slain there is no death
+for us. Let us try to elucidate a little further this great
+metaphor by just pondering the two points prominent in it---Sin
+tyrannising over human nature and resisting all attempts to
+overcome it, and Christ's condemnation and casting out of the
+tyrant.
+
+I. Sin tyrannising over human nature, and resisting all attempts
+to overcome it.
+
+Paul is generalising his own experience when he speaks of the
+condemnation of an intrusive alien force that holds unregenerate
+human nature in bondage. He is writing a page of his own
+autobiography, and he is sure that all the rest of us have like
+pages in ours. Heart answereth unto heart as in a mirror. If each
+man is a unity, the poison must run through all his veins and
+affect his whole nature. Will, understanding, heart, must all be
+affected and each in its own way by the intruder; and if men are a
+collective whole, each man's experience is repeated in his
+brother's.
+
+The Apostle is equally transcribing his own experience when in the
+text he sadly admits the futility of all efforts to shake the
+dominion of sin. He has found in his own case that even the
+loftiest revelation in the Mosaic law utterly fails in the attempt
+to condemn sin. This is true not only in regard to the Mosaic law
+but in regard to the law of conscience, and to moral teachings of
+any kind. It is obvious that all such laws do condemn sin in the
+sense that they solemnly declare God's judgment about it, and His
+sentence on it; but in the sense of real condemnation, or casting
+out, and depriving sin of its power, they all are impotent. The
+law may deter from overt acts or lead to isolated acts of
+obedience; it may stir up antagonism to sin's tyranny, but after
+that it has no more that it can do. It cannot give the purity
+which it proclaims to be necessary, nor create the obedience which
+it enjoins. Its thunders roll terrors, and no fruitful rain
+follows them to soften the barren soil. There always remains an
+unbridged gulf between the man and the law.
+
+And this is what Paul points to in saying that it `was weak
+through the flesh.' It is good in itself, but it has to work
+through the sinful nature. The only powers to which it can appeal
+are those which are already in rebellion. A discrowned king whose
+only forces to conquer his rebellious subjects are the rebels
+themselves, is not likely to regain his crown. Because law brings
+no new element into our humanity, its appeal to our humanity has
+little more effect than that of the wind whistling through an
+archway. It appeals to conscience and reason by a plain
+declaration of what is right; to will and understanding by an
+exhibition of authority; to fears and prudence by plainly setting
+forth consequences. But what is to be done with men who know what
+is right but have no wish to do it, who believe that they ought
+but will not, who know the consequences but `choose rather the
+pleasures of sin for a season,' and shuffle the future out of
+their minds altogether? This is the essential weakness of all law.
+The tyrant is not afraid so long as there is no one threatening
+his reign, but the unarmed herald of a discrowned king. His
+citadel will not surrender to the blast of the trumpet blown from
+Sinai.
+
+II. Christ's condemnation and casting out of the tyrant.
+
+The Apostle points to a triple condemnation.
+
+`In the likeness of sinful flesh,' Jesus condemns sin by His own
+perfect life. That phrase, `the likeness of the flesh of sin,'
+implies the real humanity of Jesus, and His perfect sinlessness;
+and suggests the first way in which He condemns sin in the flesh.
+In His life He repeats the law in a higher fashion. What the one
+spoke in words the other realised in `loveliness of perfect
+deeds'; and all men own that example is the mightiest preacher of
+righteousness, and that active goodness draws to itself reverence
+and sways men to imitate. But that life lived in human nature
+gives a new hope of the possibilities of that nature even in us.
+The dream of perfect beauty `in the flesh' has been realised. What
+the Man Christ Jesus was, He was that we may become. In the very
+flesh in which the tyrant rules, Jesus shows the possibility and
+the loveliness of a holy life.
+
+But this, much as it is, is not all. There is another way in which
+Christ condemns sin in the flesh, and that is by His perfect
+sacrifice. To this also Paul points in the phrase, `the flesh of
+sin.' The example of which we have been speaking is much, but it
+is weak for the very same reason for which law is weak---that it
+operates only through our nature as it is; and that is not enough.
+Sin's hold on man is twofold---one that it has perverted his
+relation to God, and another that it has corrupted his nature.
+Hence there is in him a sense of separation from God and a sense
+of guilt. Both of these not only lead to misery, but positively
+tend to strengthen the dominion of sin. The leader of the
+mutineers keeps them true to him by reminding them that the mutiny
+laws decree death without mercy. Guilt felt may drive to
+desperation and hopeless continuance in wrong. The cry, `I am so
+bad that it is useless to try to be better,' is often heard. Guilt
+stifled leads to hardening of heart, and sometimes to desire and
+riot. Guilt slurred over by some easy process of absolution may
+lead to further sin. Similarly separation from God is the root of
+all evil, and thoughts of Him as hard and an enemy, always lead to
+sin. So if the power of sin in the past must be cancelled, the
+sense of guilt must be removed, and the wall of partition between
+man and God thrown down. What can law answer to such a demand? It
+is silent; it can only say, `What is written is written.' It has
+no word to speak that promises `the blotting out of the
+handwriting that is against us'; and through its silence one can
+hear the mocking laugh of the tyrant that keeps his castle.
+
+But Christ has come `for sin'; that is to say His Incarnation and
+Death had relation to, and had it for their object to remove,
+human sin. He comes to blot out the evil, to bring God's pardon.
+The recognition of His sacrifice supplies the adequate motive to
+copy His example, and they who see in His death God's sacrifice
+for man's sin, cannot but yield themselves to Him, and find in
+obedience a delight. Love kindled at His love makes likeness and
+transmutes the outward law into an inward `spirit of life in
+Christ Jesus.'
+
+Still another way by which God `condemns sin in the flesh' is
+pointed to by the remaining phrase of our text, `sending His own
+Son.' In the beginning of this epistle Jesus is spoken of as
+`being declared to be the Son of God with power according to the
+Spirit of holiness'; and we must connect that saying with our
+text, and so think of Christ's bestowal of His perfect gift to
+humanity of the Spirit which sanctifies as being part of His
+condemnation of sin in the flesh. Into the very region where the
+tyrant rules, the Son of God communicates a new nature which
+constitutes a real new power. The Spirit operates on all our
+faculties, and redeems them from the bondage of corruption. All
+the springs in the land are poisoned; but a new one, limpid and
+pure, is opened. By the entrance of the Spirit of holiness into a
+human spirit, the usurper is driven from the central fortress: and
+though he may linger in the outworks and keep up a guerilla
+warfare, that is all that he can do. We never truly apprehend
+Christ's gift to man until we recognise that He not merely `died
+for our sins,' but lives to impart the principle of holiness in
+the gift of His Spirit. The dominion of that imparted Spirit is
+gradual and progressive. The Canaanite may still be in the land,
+but a growing power, working in and through us, is warring against
+all in us that still owns allegiance to that alien power, and
+there can be no end to the victorious struggle until the whole
+body, soul, and spirit, be wholly under the influence of the
+Spirit that dwelleth in us, and nothing shall hurt or destroy in
+what shall then be all God's holy mountain.
+
+Such is, in the most general terms, the statement of what Christ
+does `for us'; and the question comes to be the all-important one
+for each, Do I let Him do it for me? Remember the alternative.
+There must either be condemnation for us, or for the sin that
+dwelleth in us. There is no condemnation for them who are in
+Christ Jesus, because there is condemnation for the sin that
+dwells in them. It must he slain, or it will slay us. It must be
+cast out, or it will cast us out from God. It must be separated
+from us, or it will separate us from Him. We need not be
+condemned, but if it be not condemned, then we shall be.
+
+\chapter{The Witness of the Spirit}
+\markright{ROMANS viii. 18}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are
+the children of God.'---\textsc{Romans} viii. 18.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The sin of the world is a false confidence, a careless, complacent
+taking for granted that a man is a Christian when he is not. The
+fault, and sorrow, and weakness of the Church is a false
+diffidence, an anxious fear whether a man be a Christian when he
+is. There are none so far away from false confidence as those who
+tremble lest they be cherishing it. There are none so inextricably
+caught in its toils as those who are all unconscious of
+\textit{its} existence and of \textit{their} danger. The two
+things, the false confidence and the false diffidence, are perhaps
+more akin to one another than they look at first sight. Their
+opposites, at all events---the true confidence, which is faith in
+Christ; and the true diffidence, which is utter distrust of
+myself---are identical. But there may sometimes be, and there
+often is, the combination of a real confidence and a false
+diffidence, the presence of faith, and the doubt whether it be
+present. Many Christians go through life with this as the
+prevailing temper of their minds---a doubt sometimes arising
+almost to agony, and sometimes dying down into passive patient
+acceptance of the condition as inevitable---a doubt whether, after
+all, they be not, as they say, `deceiving themselves'; and in the
+perverse ingenuity with which that state of mind is constantly
+marked, they manage to distil for themselves a bitter vinegar of
+self-accusation out of grand words in the Bible, that were meant
+to afford them but the wine of gladness and of consolation.
+
+Now this great text which I have ventured to take---not with the
+idea that I can exalt it or say anything worthy of it, but simply
+in the hope of clearing away some misapprehensions---is one that
+has often and often tortured the mind of Christians. They say of
+themselves, `I know nothing of any such evidence: I am not
+conscious of any Spirit bearing witness with my spirit.' Instead
+of looking to other sources to answer the question whether they
+are Christians or not---and then, having answered it, thinking
+thus, `That text asserts that \textit{all} Christians have this
+witness, therefore certainly I have it in some shape or other,'
+they say to themselves, `I do not feel anything that corresponds
+with my idea of what such a grand, supernatural voice as the
+witness of God's Spirit in my spirit must needs be; and therefore
+I doubt whether I am a Christian at all.' I should be thankful if
+the attempt I make now to set before you what seems to me to be
+the true teaching of the passage, should be, with God's help, the
+means of lifting some little part of the burden from some hearts
+that are right, and that only long to know that they are, in order
+to be at rest.
+
+`The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are
+the children of God.' The general course of thought which I wish
+to leave with you may be summed up thus: Our cry `Father' is the
+witness that we are sons. That cry is not simply ours, but it is
+the voice of God's Spirit. The divine Witness in our spirits is
+subject to the ordinary influences which affect our spirits.
+
+Let us take these three thoughts, and dwell on them for a little
+while.
+
+I. Our cry `Father' is the witness that we are sons.
+
+Mark the terms of the passage: `The Spirit itself beareth witness
+\textit{with} our spirit---.' It is not so much a revelation made
+to my spirit, considered as the recipient of the testimony, as a
+revelation made in or with my spirit considered as co-operating in
+the testimony. It is not that my spirit says one thing, bears
+witness that I am a child of God; and that the Spirit of God comes
+in by a distinguishable process, with a separate evidence, to say
+Amen to my persuasion; but it is that there is one testimony which
+has a conjoint origin---the origin from the Spirit of God as true
+source, and the origin from my own soul as recipient and
+co-operant in that testimony. From the teaching of this passage,
+or from any of the language which Scripture uses with regard to
+the inner witness, it is not to be inferred that there will rise
+up in a Christian's heart, from some origin consciously beyond the
+sphere of his own nature, a voice with which he has nothing to do;
+which at once, by its own character, by something peculiar and
+distinguishable about it, by something strange in its nature, or
+out of the ordinary course of human thinking, shall certify itself
+to be not his voice at all, but \textit{God's} voice. That is not
+the direction in which you are to look for the witness of God's
+Spirit. It is evidence borne, indeed, by the Spirit of God; but it
+is evidence borne not only to our spirit, but through it, with it.
+The testimony is one, the testimony of a man's own emotion, and
+own conviction, and own desire, the cry, Abba, Father! So far,
+then, as the form of the evidence goes, you are not to look for it
+in anything ecstatic, arbitrary, parted off from your own
+experience by a broad line of demarcation; but you are to look
+into the experience which at first sight you would claim most
+exclusively for your own, and to try and find out whether
+\textit{there} there be not working with your soul, working
+through it, working beneath it, distinct from it but not
+distinguishable from it by anything but its consequences and its
+fruitfulness---a deeper voice than yours---a `still small
+voice,'---no whirlwind, nor fire, nor earthquake---but the voice
+of God speaking in secret, taking the voice and tones of your own
+heart and your own consciousness, and saying to you, `Thou art my
+child, inasmuch as, operated by My grace, and Mine inspiration
+alone, there rises, tremblingly but truly, in thine own soul the
+cry, Abba, Father.'
+
+So much, then, for the form of this evidence---my own conviction.
+Then with regard to the substance of it: conviction of what? The
+text itself does not tell us what is the evidence which the Spirit
+bears, and by reason of which we have a right to conclude that we
+are the children of God. The previous verse tells us. I have
+partially anticipated what I have to say on that point, but it
+will bear a little further expansion. `Ye have not received the
+spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit
+of adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father.' `The Spirit itself,' by
+this means of our cry, Abba, Father, `beareth witness with our
+spirit, that we are the children of God.' The substance, then, of
+the conviction which is lodged in the human spirit by the
+testimony of the Spirit of God is not primarily directed to our
+relation or feelings to God, but to a far grander thing than
+that---to God's feelings and relation to us. Now I want you to
+think for one moment, before I pass on, how entirely different the
+whole aspect of this witness of the Spirit of which Christian men
+speak so much, and sometimes with so little understanding, becomes
+according as you regard it mistakenly as being the direct
+testimony to you that you are a child of God, or rightly as being
+the direct testimony to you that God is your Father. The two
+things seem to be the same, but they are not. In the one case, the
+false case, the mistaken interpretation, we are left to this, that
+a man has no deeper certainty of his condition, no better
+foundation for his hope, than what is to be drawn from the
+presence or absence of certain emotions within his own heart. In
+the other case, we are admitted into this `wide place,' that all
+which is our own is second and not first, and that the true basis
+of all our confidence lies not in the thought of what we are and
+feel to God, but in the thought of what God is and feels to us.
+And instead, therefore, of being left to labour for ourselves,
+painfully to search amongst the dust and rubbish of our own
+hearts, we are taught to sweep away all that crumbled, rotten
+surface, and to go down to the living rock that lies beneath it;
+we are taught to say, in the words of the book of Isaiah,
+`Doubtless Thou art our Father---we are all an unclean thing; our
+iniquities, like the wind, have carried us away'; there is nothing
+stable in us; our own resolutions, they are swept away like the
+chaff of the summer threshing-floor, by the first gust of
+temptation; but what of that?---`in those is continuance, and we
+shall be saved!' Ah, brethren! expand this thought of the
+conviction that God is my Father, as being the basis of all my
+confidence that I am His child, into its widest and grandest form,
+and it leads us up to the blessed old conviction, I am nothing, my
+holiness is nothing, my resolutions are nothing, my faith is
+nothing, my energies are nothing; I stand stripped, and barren,
+and naked of everything, and I fling myself out of myself into the
+merciful arms of my Father in heaven! There is all the difference
+in the world between searching for evidence of my sonship, and
+seeking to get the conviction of God's Fatherhood. The one is an
+endless, profitless, self-tormenting task; the other is the light
+and liberty, the glorious liberty, of the children of God.
+
+And so the \textit{substance} of the Spirit's evidence is the
+direct conviction based on the revelation of God's infinite love
+and fatherhood in Christ the Son, that God is my Father; from
+which direct conviction I come to the conclusion, the inference,
+the second thought, Then I may trust that I am His son. But why?
+Because of anything in me? No: because of Him. The very emblem of
+fatherhood and sonship might teach us that \textit{that} depends
+upon the Father's will and the Father's heart. The Spirit's
+testimony has for form my own conviction: and for substance my
+humble cry, `Oh Thou, my Father in heaven!' Brethren, is not that
+a far truer and nobler kind of thing to preach than saying, Look
+into your own heart for strange, extraordinary, distinguishable
+signs which shall mark you out as God's child---and which are
+proved to be His Spirit's, because they are separated from the
+ordinary human consciousness? Is it not far more blessed for us,
+and more honouring to Him who works the sign, when we say, that it
+is to be found in no out-of-rule, miraculous evidence, but in the
+natural (which is in reality supernatural) working of His Spirit
+in the heart which is its recipient, breeding there the conviction
+that God is my Father? And oh, if I am speaking to any to whom
+that text, with all its light and glory, has seemed to lift them
+up into an atmosphere too rare and a height too lofty for their
+heavy wings and unused feet, if I am speaking to any Christian man
+to whom this word has been like the cherubim and flaming sword,
+bright and beautiful, but threatening and repellent when it speaks
+of a Spirit that bears witness with our spirit---I ask you simply
+to take the passage for yourself, and carefully and patiently to
+examine it, and see if it be not true what I have been saying,
+that your trembling conviction---sister and akin as it is to your
+deepest distrust and sharpest sense of sin and unworthiness---that
+your trembling conviction of a love mightier than your own,
+everlasting and all-faithful, is indeed the selectest sign that
+God can give you that you \textit{are} His child. Oh, brethren and
+sisters! be confident; for it is not false confidence: be
+confident if up from the depths of that dark well of your own
+sinful heart there rises sometimes, through all the bitter waters,
+unpolluted and separate, a sweet conviction, forcing itself
+upward, that God hath love in His heart, and that God is
+\textit{my} Father. Be confident; `the Spirit itself beareth
+witness with your spirit.'
+
+II. And now, secondly, That cry is not simply ours, but it is the
+voice of God's Spirit.
+
+Our own convictions are ours because they are God's. Our own souls
+possess these emotions of love and tender desire going out to
+God---our own spirits possess them; but our own spirits did not
+originate them. They are ours by property; they are His by source.
+The spirit of a Christian man has no good thought in it, no true
+thought, no perception of the grace of God's Gospel, no holy desire,
+no pure resolution, which is not stamped with the sign of a higher
+origin, and is not the witness of God's Spirit in his spirit. The
+passage before us tells us that the sense of Fatherhood which is in
+the Christian's heart, and becomes his cry, comes from God's Spirit.
+This passage, and that in the Epistle to the Galatians which is
+almost parallel, put this truth very forcibly, when taken in
+connection. `Ye have received,' says the text before us, `the Spirit
+of adoption, whereby \textit{we} cry, Abba, Father.' The variation
+in the Epistle to the Galatians is this: `Because ye are sons, God
+hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts,
+\textit{crying} (the Spirit crying), Abba, Father.' So in the one
+text, the cry is regarded as the voice of the believing heart; and
+in the other the same cry is regarded as the voice of God's Spirit.
+And these two things are both true; the one would want its
+foundation if it were not for the other; the cry of the Spirit is
+nothing for me unless it be appropriated by me. I do not need to
+plunge here into metaphysical speculation of any sort, but simply to
+dwell upon the plain practical teaching of the Bible---a teaching
+verified, I believe, by every Christian's experience, if he will
+search into it---that everything in him which makes the Christian
+life, is not his, but is God's by origin, and his only by gift and
+inspiration. And the whole doctrine of my text is built on this one
+thought---without the Spirit of God in your heart, you never can
+recognise God as your Father. That in us which runs, with love, and
+childlike faith, and reverence, to the place `where His honour
+dwelleth,' that in us which says `Father,' is kindred with God, and
+is not the simple, unhelped, unsanctified human nature. There is no
+ascent of human desires above their source. And wherever in a heart
+there springs up heavenward a thought, a wish, a prayer, a trembling
+confidence, it is because that came down first from heaven, and
+rises to seek its level again. All that is divine in man comes from
+God. All that tends towards God in man is God's voice in the human
+heart; and were it not for the possession and operation, the
+sanctifying and quickening, of a living divine Spirit granted to us,
+our souls would for ever cleave to the dust and dwell upon earth,
+nor ever rise to God and live in the light of His presence. Every
+Christian, then, may be sure of this, that howsoever feeble may be
+the thought and conviction in his heart of God's Fatherhood,
+\textit{he} did not work it, he received it only, cherished it,
+thought of it, watched over it, was careful not to quench it; but in
+origin it was God's, and it is now and ever the voice of the Divine
+Spirit in the child's heart.
+
+But, my friends, if this principle be true, it does not apply only
+to this one single attitude of the believing soul when it cries,
+Abba, Father; it must be widened out to comprehend the whole of a
+Christian's life, outward and inward, which is not sinful and
+darkened with actual transgression. To all the rest of his being,
+to everything in heart and life which is right and pure, the same
+truth applies. `The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit'
+in every perception of God's word which is granted, in every
+revelation of His counsel which dawns upon our darkness, in every
+aspiration after Him which lifts us above the smoke and dust of
+this dim spot, in every holy resolution, in every thrill and throb
+of love and desire. Each of these is mine---inasmuch as in my
+heart it is experienced and transacted; it is mine, inasmuch as I
+am not a mere dead piece of matter, the passive recipient of a
+magical and supernatural grace; but it is God's; and therefore,
+and therefore only, has it come to be mine!
+
+And if it be objected, that this opens a wide door to all manner
+of delusion, and that there is no more dangerous thing than for a
+man to confound his own thoughts with the operations of God's
+Spirit, let me just give you (following the context before us) the
+one guarantee and test which the Apostle lays down. He says,
+`There is a witness from God in your spirits.' You may say, That
+witness, if it come in the form of these convictions in my own
+heart, I may mistake and falsely read. Well, then, here is an
+outward guarantee. `As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they
+are the sons of God'; and so, on the regions both of heart and of
+life the consecrating thought,---God's work, and God's Spirit's
+work---is stamped. The heart with its love, the head with its
+understanding, the conscience with its quick response to the law
+of duty, the will with its resolutions,---these are all, as
+sanctified by Him, the witness of His Spirit; and the life with
+its strenuous obedience, with its struggles against sin and
+temptation, with its patient persistence in the quiet path of
+ordinary duty, as well as with the times when it rises into heroic
+stature of resignation or allegiance, the martyrdom of death and
+the martyrdom of life, this too is all (in so far as it is pure
+and right) the work of that same Spirit. The test of the inward
+conviction is the outward life; and they that have the witness of
+the Spirit within them have the light of their life lit by the
+Spirit of God, whereby they may read the handwriting on the heart,
+and be sure that it is God's and not their own.
+
+III. And now, lastly, this divine Witness in our spirits is
+subject to the ordinary influences which affect our spirits.
+
+The notion often prevails that if there be in the heart this
+divine witness of God's Spirit, it must needs be perfect, clearly
+indicating its origin by an exemption from all that besets
+ordinary human feelings, that it must be a strong, uniform, never
+flickering, never darkening, and perpetual light, a kind of vestal
+fire burning always on the altar of the heart! The passage before
+us, and all others that speak about the matter, give us the
+directly opposite notion. The Divine Spirit, when it enters into
+the narrow room of the human spirit, condescends to submit itself,
+not wholly, but to such an extent as practically for our present
+purpose \textit{is} wholly to submit itself to the ordinary laws
+and conditions and contingencies which befall and regulate our own
+human nature. Christ came into the world divine: He was `found in
+fashion as a man,' in form a servant; the humanity that He wore
+limited (if you like), regulated, modified, the manifestation of
+the divinity that dwelt in it. And not otherwise is the operation
+of God's Holy Spirit when it comes to dwell in a human heart.
+There too, working through man, \textit{it} `is found in fashion
+as a man'; and though the origin of the conviction be of God, and
+though the voice in my heart be not only my voice, but God's voice
+there, it will obey those same laws which make human thoughts and
+emotions vary, and fluctuate, flicker and flame up again, burn
+bright and burn low, according to a thousand circumstances. The
+witness of the Spirit, if it were yonder in heaven, would shine
+like a perpetual star; the witness of the Spirit, here in the
+heart on earth, burns like a flickering flame, never to be
+extinguished, but still not always bright, wanting to be trimmed,
+and needing to be guarded from rude blasts. Else, brother, what
+does an Apostle mean when he says to you and me, `Quench not the
+Spirit'? what does he mean when he says to us, `Grieve not the
+Spirit'? What does the whole teaching which enjoins on us, `Let
+your loins be girded about, and your lights burning,' and `What I
+say to you, I say to all, Watch!' mean, unless it means this, that
+God-given as (God be thanked!) that conviction of Fatherhood is,
+it is not given in such a way as that, irrespective of our
+carefulness, irrespective of our watching, it shall burn on---the
+same and unchangeable? The Spirit's witness comes from God,
+therefore it is veracious, divine, omnipotent; but the Spirit's
+witness from God is in man, therefore it may be wrongly read, it
+may be checked, it may for a time be kept down, and prevented from
+showing itself to be what it is.
+
+And the practical conclusion that comes from all this, is just the
+simple advice to you all: Do not wonder, in the first place, if
+that evidence of which we speak, vary and change in its clearness
+and force in your own hearts. `The flesh lusteth against the
+spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.' Do not think that it
+cannot be genuine, because it is changeful. There is a sun in the
+heavens, but there are heavenly lights too that wax and wane; they
+\textit{are} lights, they \textit{are} in the heavens though they
+change. You have no reason, Christian man, to be discouraged, cast
+down, still less despondent, because you find that the witness of
+the Spirit changes and varies in your heart. Do not despond
+because it does; watch it, and guard it, lest it do; live in the
+contemplation of the Person and the fact that calls it forth, that
+it may not. You will never `brighten your evidences' by polishing
+at them. To polish the mirror ever so assiduously does not secure
+the image of the sun on its surface. The only way to do that is to
+carry the poor bit of glass out into the sunshine. It will shine
+then, never fear. It is weary work to labour at self-improvement
+with the hope of drawing from our own characters evidences that we
+are the sons of God. To have the heart filled with the light of
+Christ's love to us is the only way to have the whole being full
+of light. If you would have clear and irrefragable, for a
+perpetual joy, a glory and a defence, the unwavering confidence,
+`I am Thy child,' go to God's throne, and lie down at the foot of
+it, and let the first thought be, `My Father in heaven,' and
+\textit{that} will brighten, that will stablish, that will make
+omnipotent in your life the witness of the Spirit that you are the
+child of God.
+
+\chapter{Sons and Heirs}
+\markright{ROMANS viii. 17}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`If children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with
+Christ.'---\textsc{Romans} viii. 17.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+God Himself is His greatest gift. The loftiest blessing which we
+can receive is that we should be heirs, possessors of God. There
+is a sublime and wonderful mutual possession of which Scripture
+speaks much wherein the Lord is the inheritance of Israel, and
+Israel is the inheritance of the Lord. `The Lord hath taken you to
+be to Him a people of inheritance,' says Moses; `Ye are a people
+for a possession,' says Peter. And, on the other hand, `The Lord
+is the portion of my inheritance,' says David; `Ye are heirs of
+God,' echoes Paul. On earth and in heaven the heritage of the
+children of the Lord is God Himself, inasmuch as He is with them
+for their delight, in them to make them `partakers of the divine
+nature,' and for them in all His attributes and actions.
+
+This being clearly understood at the outset, we shall be prepared
+to follow the Apostle's course of thought while he points out the
+conditions upon which the possession of that inheritance depends.
+It is children of God who are heirs of God. It is by union with
+Christ Jesus, the Son, to whom the inheritance belongs, that they
+who believe on His name receive power to become the sons of God,
+and with that power the possession of the inheritance. Thus, then,
+in this condensed utterance of the text there appear a series of
+thoughts which may perhaps be more fully unfolded in some such
+manner as the following, that there is no inheritance without
+sonship, that there is no sonship without a spiritual birth, that
+there is no spiritual birth without Christ, and that there is no
+Christ for us without faith.
+
+I. First, then, the text tells us, no inheritance without
+sonship.
+
+In general terms, spiritual blessings can only be given to those
+who are in a certain spiritual condition. Always and necessarily
+the capacity or organ of reception precedes and determines the
+bestowment of blessings. The light falls everywhere, but only the
+eye drinks it in. The lower orders of creatures are shut out from
+all participation in the gifts which belong to the higher forms of
+life, simply because they are so made and organised as that these
+cannot find entrance into their nature. They are, as it were,
+walled up all round; and the only door they have to communicate
+with the outer world is the door of sense. Man has higher gifts
+simply because he has higher capacities. All creatures are plunged
+in the same boundless ocean of divine beneficence and bestowment,
+and into each there flows just that, and no more, which each, by
+the make and constitution that God has given it, is capable of
+receiving. In the man there are more windows and doors opened out
+than in the animal He is capable of receiving intellectual
+impulses, spiritual emotions; he can think, and feel, and desire,
+and will, and resolve: and so he stands on a higher level than the
+beast below him.
+
+Not otherwise is it in regard to God's kingdom, `which is
+righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.' The gift and
+blessing of salvation is primarily a spiritual gift, and only
+involves outward consequences secondarily and subordinately. It
+mainly consists in the heart being at peace with God, in the whole
+soul being filled with divine affections, in the weight and
+bondage of transgression being taken away, and substituted by the
+impulse and the life of the new love. Therefore, neither God can
+give, nor man can receive, that gift upon any other terms, than
+just this, that the heart and nature be fitted and adapted for it.
+Spiritual blessings require a spiritual capacity for the reception
+of them; or, as my text says, you cannot have the inheritance
+unless you are sons. If salvation consisted simply in a change of
+place; if it were merely that by some expedient or arrangement, an
+outward penalty, which was to fall or not to fall at the will of
+an arbitrary judge, were prevented from coming down, why then, it
+would be open to Him who held the power of letting the sword fall,
+to decide on what terms He might choose to suspend its infliction.
+But inasmuch as God's deliverance is not a deliverance from a mere
+arbitrary and outward punishment: inasmuch as God's salvation,
+though it be deliverance from the penalty as well as from the
+guilt of sin, is by no means chiefly a deliverance from outward
+consequences, but mainly a removal of the nature and disposition
+that makes these outward consequences certain,---therefore a man
+cannot be saved, God's love cannot save him, God's justice will
+not save him, God's power stands back from saving him, upon any
+other condition than this that his soul shall be adapted and
+prepared for the reception and enjoyment of the blessing of a
+spiritual salvation.
+
+But the inheritance which my text speaks about is also that which
+a Christian hopes to receive and enter upon in heaven. The same
+principle precisely applies there. There is no inheritance of
+heaven without sonship; because all the blessings of that future
+life are of a spiritual character. The joy and the rapture and the
+glory of that higher and better life have, of course, connected
+with them certain changes of bodily form, certain changes of local
+dwelling, certain changes which could perhaps be granted equally
+to a man, of whatever sort he was. But, friends, it is not the
+golden harps, not the pavement of `glass mingled with fire,' not
+the cessation from work, not the still composure, and changeless
+indwelling, not the society even, that makes the heaven of heaven.
+All these are but the embodiments and rendering visible of the
+inward facts, a soul at peace with God in the depths of its being,
+an eye which gazes upon the Father, and a heart which wraps itself
+in His arms. Heaven is no heaven except in so far as it is the
+possession of God. That saying of the Psalmist is not an
+exaggeration, nor even a forgetting of the other elements of
+future blessedness, but it is a simple statement of the literal
+fact of the case, `I have none in heaven but Thee!' God is the
+heritage of His people. To dwell in His love, and to be filled
+with His light, and to walk for ever in the glory of His sunlit
+face, to do His will, and to bear His character stamped upon our
+foreheads---\textit{that} is the glory and the perfectness to
+which we are aspiring. Do not then rest in the symbols that show
+us, darkly and far off, what that future glory is. Do not forget
+that the picture is a shadow. Get beneath all these figurative
+expressions, and feel that whilst it may be true that for us in
+our present earthly state, there can be no higher, no purer, no
+more spiritual nor any truer representations of the blessedness
+which is to come, than those which couch it in the forms of
+earthly experience, and appeal to sense as the minister of
+delight---yet that all these things are representations, and not
+adequate presentations. The inheritance of the servants of the
+Lord is the Lord Himself, and they dwell in Him, and
+\textit{there} is their joy.
+
+Well then, if that be even partially true---admitting all that you
+may say about circumstances which go to make some portion of the
+blessedness of that future life---if it be true that God is the
+true blessing given by His Gospel upon earth, that He Himself is
+the greatest gift that can be bestowed, and that He is the true
+Heaven of heaven---what a flood of light does it cast upon that
+statement of my text, `If children, then heirs'; no inheritance
+without sonship! For who can possess God but they who love Him?
+who can love, but they who know His love? who can have Him working
+in their hearts a blessed and sanctifying change, except the souls
+that lie thankfully quiet beneath the forming touch of His
+invisible hand, and like flowers drink in the light of His face in
+their still joy? How can God dwell in any heart except a heart
+which has in it a love of purity? Where can He make His temple
+except in the `upright heart and pure'? How can there be
+fellowship betwixt Him and any one except the man who is a son
+because he hath received of the divine nature, and in whom that
+divine nature is growing up into a divine likeness? `What
+fellowship hath Christ with Belial?' is not only applicable as a
+guide for our practical life, but points to the principle on which
+God's inheritance belongs to God's sons alone. `Blessed are the
+pure in heart, for they shall see God'; and those only who love,
+and are children, to them alone does the Father come and does the
+Father belong.
+
+So much, then, for the first principle: No inheritance without
+sonship.
+
+II. Secondly, the text leads us to the principle that there is no
+sonship without a spiritual birth.
+
+The Apostle John in that most wonderful preface to his Gospel,
+where all deepest truths concerning the Eternal Being in itself
+and in the solemn march of His progressive revelations to the
+world are set forth in language simple like the words of a child
+and inexhaustible like the voice of a god, draws a broad
+distinction between the relation to the manifestations of God
+which every human soul by virtue of his humanity sustains, and
+that into which some, by virtue of their faith, enter. Every man
+is lighted by the true light because he is a man. They who believe
+in His name receive from Him the prerogative to become the sons of
+God. Whatever else may be taught in John's words, surely they do
+teach us this, that the sonship of which he speaks does not belong
+to man as man, is not a relation into which we are born by natural
+birth, that we \textit{become} sons after we \textit{are} men,
+that those who become sons do not include all those who are
+lighted by the Light, but consist of so many of that greater
+number as receive Him, and that such become sons by a divine act,
+the communication of a spiritual life, whereby they are born of
+God.
+
+The same Apostle, in his Epistles, where the widest love is
+conjoined with the most firmly drawn lines of moral demarcation
+between the great opposites---life, light, love---death, darkness,
+hate---contrasts in the most unmistakable antithesis the sons of
+God who are known for such because they do righteousness, and the
+world which knew not Christ, nor knows those who, dimly beholding,
+partially resemble Him. Nay, he goes further, and says in strange
+contradiction to the popular estimate of his character, but in
+true imitation of that Incarnate love which hated iniquity, `In
+this the children of God are manifested and the children of the
+devil'---echoing thus the words of Him whose pitying tenderness
+had sometimes to clothe itself in sharpest words, even as His hand
+of powerful love had once to grasp the scourge of small cords. `If
+God were your Father, ye would love Me: ye are of your father, the
+devil.'
+
+These are but specimens of a whole cycle of Scripture statements
+which in every form of necessary implication, and of direct
+statement, set forth the principle that he who is born again of
+the Spirit, and he only, is a son of God.
+
+Nothing in all this contradicts the belief that all men are the
+children of God, inasmuch as they are shaped by His divine hand
+and He has breathed into their nostrils the breath of life. They
+who hold that sonship is obtained on the condition which these
+passages seem to assert, do also rejoice to believe and to preach
+that the Father's love broods over every human heart as the
+dovelike Spirit over the primeval chaos. They rejoice to proclaim
+that Christ has come that all, that each, may receive the adoption
+of sons. They do not feel that their message to, nor their hope
+for, the world is less blessed, less wide, because while they call
+on all to come and take the things that are freely given to them
+of God, they believe that those only who do come and take possess
+the blessing. Every man may become a son and heir of God by faith
+in Jesus Christ.
+
+But notwithstanding all the mercies that belong to us all,
+notwithstanding the divine beneficence, which, like the air and
+the light, pervades all nature, and underlies all our lives,
+notwithstanding the universal adaptation and intention of Christ's
+work, notwithstanding the wooing of His tender voice and the
+unceasing beckoning of His love, it still remains true that there
+are men in the world, created by God, loved and cared for by Him,
+for whom Christ died, who might be, but are not, sons of God.
+
+Fatherhood! what does that word itself teach us? It speaks of the
+communication of a life, and the reciprocity of love. It rests upon
+a divine act, and it involves a human emotion. It involves that the
+father and the child shall have kindred life---the father bestowing
+and the child possessing a life which is derived; and because
+derived, kindred; and because kindred, unfolding itself in likeness
+to the father that gave it. And it requires that between the
+father's heart and the child's heart there shall pass, in blessed
+interchange and quick correspondence, answering love, flashing
+backwards and forwards, like the lightning that touches the earth
+and rises from it again. A simple appeal to your own consciousness
+will decide if that be the condition of all men. Are you, my
+brother, conscious of anything within you higher than the common
+life that belongs to you because you are an immortal soul? Can you
+say, `From God's hand I have received the granting and implantation
+of a new and better life?' Is your claim verified by this, that you
+are kindred with God in holy affections, in like purposes, loving
+what He loves, hating what He hates, doing what He wills, accepting
+what He sends, longing for Himself, and blessed in His presence? Is
+your sonship proved by the depth and sincerity, the simplicity and
+power, of your throbbing heart of love to your Father in heaven? Or
+are all these emotions empty words to you, things that are spoken in
+pulpits, but to which you have nothing in your life corresponding?
+Oh then, my friend, what am I to say to you? What but this? no
+sonship except by that spiritual birth; and if not such sonship,
+then the spirit of bondage. If not such sonship, why then, by all
+the tendencies of your nature, and by all the affinities of your
+moral being, if you are not holding of heaven, you are holding of
+hell; if you are not drawing your life, your character, your
+emotions, your affections, from the sacred well that lies up yonder,
+you are drawing them from the black one that lies down there. There
+are heaven, hell, and the earth that lies between, ever influenced
+either from above or from below. You are sons because born again, or
+slaves and `enemies by wicked works.' It is a grim alternative, but
+it is a fact.
+
+III. Thirdly, no spiritual birth without Christ.
+
+We have seen that the sonship which gives power of possessing the
+inheritance and which comes by spiritual birth, rests upon the
+giving of life, spiritual life, from God; and unfolds itself in
+certain holy characters, and affections, and desires, the
+throbbing of the whole soul in full accord and harmony with the
+divine character and will. Well then, it looks very clear that a
+man cannot make that new life for himself, cannot do it because of
+the habit of sin, and cannot do it because of the guilt and
+punishment of sin. If for sonship there must be a birth again,
+why, surely, the very symbol might convince you that such a
+process does not lie within our own power. There must come down a
+divine leaven into the mass of human nature, before this new being
+can be evolved in any one. There must be a gift of God. A divine
+energy must be the source and fountain of all holy and of all
+Godlike life. Christ comes, comes to make you and me live again as
+we never lived before; live possessors of God's love; live
+tenanted and ruled by a divine Spirit; live with affections in our
+hearts which \textit{we} never could kindle there; live with
+purposes in our souls which \textit{we} never could put there.
+
+And I want to urge this thought, that the centre point of the
+Gospel is this regeneration; because if we understand, as we are
+too much disposed to do, that the Gospel simply comes to make men
+live better, to work out a moral reformation,---why, there is no
+need for a Gospel at all. If the change were a simple change of
+habit and action on the part of men, we could do without a Christ.
+If the change simply involved a bracing ourselves up to behave
+better for the future, we could manage somehow or other about as
+well as or better than we have managed in the past. But if
+redemption be the giving of life from God; and if redemption be
+the change of position in reference to God's love and God's law as
+well, neither of these two changes can a man effect for himself.
+You cannot gather up the spilt water; you cannot any more gather
+up and re-issue the past life. The sin remains, the guilt remains.
+The inevitable law of God will go on its crashing way in spite of
+all penitence, in spite of all reformation, in spite of all
+desires after newness of life. There is but one Being who can make
+a change in our position in regard to God, and there is but one
+Being who can make the change by which man shall become a `new
+creature.' The Creative Spirit that shaped the earth must shape
+its new being in my soul; and the Father against whose law I have
+offended, whose love I have slighted, from whom I have turned
+away, must effect the alteration that I can never effect---the
+alteration in my position to His judgments and justice, and to the
+whole sweep of His government. No new birth without Christ; no
+escape from the old standing-place, of being `enemies to God by
+wicked works,' by anything that we can do: no hope of the
+inheritance unless the Lord and the Man, the `second Adam from
+heaven,' have come! He \textit{has} come, and He has `dwelt with
+us,' and He has worn this life of ours, and He has walked in the
+midst of this world, and He knows all about our human condition,
+and He has effected an actual change in the possible aspect of the
+divine justice and government to us; and He has carried in the
+golden urn of His humanity a new spirit and a new life which He
+has set down in the midst of the race; and the urn was broken on
+the cross of Calvary, and the water flowed out, and whithersoever
+that water comes there is life, and whithersoever it comes not
+there is death!
+
+IV. Last of all, no Christ without faith.
+
+It is not enough, brethren, that we should go through all these
+previous steps, if we then go utterly astray at the end, by
+forgetting that there is only one way by which we become partakers
+of any of the benefits and blessings that Christ has wrought out.
+It is much to say that for inheritance there must be sonship. It
+is much to say that for sonship there must be a divine
+regeneration. It is much to say that the power of this
+regeneration is all gathered together in Christ Jesus. But there
+are plenty of people that would agree to all that, who go off at
+that point, and content themselves with \textit{this} kind of
+thinking---that in some vague mysterious way, they know not how,
+in a sort of half-magical manner, the benefit of Christ's death
+and work comes to all in Christian lands, whether there be an act
+of faith or not! Now I am not going to talk theology at present,
+at this stage of my sermon; but what I want to leave upon all your
+hearts is this profound conviction,---Unless we are wedded to
+Jesus Christ by the simple act of trust in His mercy and His
+power, Christ is nothing to us. Do not let us, my friends, blink
+that deciding test of the whole matter. We may talk about Christ
+for ever; we may set forth aspects of His work, great and
+glorious. He may be to us much that is very precious; but the one
+question, the question of questions, on which everything else
+depends, is, Am I trusting to Him as my divine Redeemer? am I
+resting in Him as the Son of God? Some of us here now have a sort
+of nominal connection with Christ, who have a kind of imaginative
+connection with Him; traditional, ceremonial, by habit of thought,
+by attendance on public worship, and by I know not what other
+means. Ceremonies are nothing, notions are nothing, beliefs are
+nothing, formal participation in worship is nothing. Christ is
+everything to him that trusts Him. Christ is nothing but a judge
+and a condemnation to him who trusts Him not. And here is the
+turning-point, Am I resting upon that Lord for my salvation? If
+so, you can begin upon that step, the low one on which you can put
+your foot, the humble act of faith, and with the foot there, can
+climb up. If faith, then new birth; if new birth, then sonship; if
+sonship, then an heir of God, and a joint-heir with Christ.' But
+if you have not got your foot upon the lowest round of the ladder,
+you will never come within sight of the blessed face of Him who
+stands at the top of it, and who looks down to you at this moment,
+saying to you, `My child, \textit{wilt} thou not cry unto Me
+``Abba, Father?''\,'
+
+\chapter[Suffering with Christ... Glory with Christ]{Suffering with Christ, A Condition of Glory with Christ}
+\markright{ROMANS viii. 17}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`...Joint heirs with Christ: if so be that we suffer with Him,
+that we may be also glorified together.'---\textsc{Romans} viii.
+17.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+In the former part of this verse the Apostle tells us that in
+order to be heirs of God, we must become sons through and
+joint-heirs with Christ. He seems at first sight to add in these
+words of our text another condition to those already specified,
+namely, that of suffering with Christ.
+
+Now, of course, whatever may be the operation of suffering in
+fitting for the possession of the Christian inheritance, either
+here or in another world, the sonship and the sorrows do not stand
+on the same level in regard to that possession. The one is the
+indispensable condition of all; the other is but the means for the
+operation of the condition. The one---being sons, `joint-heirs
+with Christ,'---is the root of the whole matter; the other---the
+`suffering with Him,'---is but the various process by which from
+the root there come `the blade, and the ear, and the full corn in
+the ear.' Given the sonship---if it is to be worked out into power
+and beauty, there must be suffering with Christ. But unless there
+be sonship, there is no possibility of inheriting God; discipline
+and suffering will be of no use at all.
+
+The chief lesson which I wish to gather from this text now is that
+all God's sons must suffer with Christ; and in addition to this
+principle, we may complete our considerations by adding briefly,
+that the inheritance must be won by suffering, and that if we
+suffer with Him, we certainly shall receive the inheritance.
+
+I. First, then, sonship with Christ necessarily involves suffering
+with Him.
+
+I think that we entirely misapprehend the force of this passage
+before us, if we suppose it to refer principally or merely to the
+outward calamities, what you call trials and afflictions, which
+befall people, and see in it only the teaching, that the sorrows
+of daily life may have in them a sign of our being children of
+God, and some power to prepare us for the glory that is to come.
+There is a great deal more in the thought than that, brethren.
+This is not merely a text for people who are in affliction, but
+for all of us. It does not merely contain a law for a certain part
+of life, but it contains a law for the whole of life. It is not
+merely a promise that in all our afflictions Christ will be
+afflicted, but it is a solemn injunction that we seek to know `the
+fellowship of His sufferings, and be made conformable to the
+likeness of His death,' if we expect to be `found in the likeness
+of His Resurrection,' and to have any share in the community of
+His glory. In other words, the foundation of it is not that Christ
+shares in our sufferings; but that we, as Christians, in a deep
+and real sense do necessarily share and participate in Christ's.
+We `suffer with Him'; \textit{not} He suffers with us.
+
+Now, do not let us misunderstand each other, or the Apostle's
+teaching. Do not suppose that I am forgetting, or wishing you to
+account as of small importance, the awful sense in which Christ's
+suffering stands as a thing by itself and unapproachable, a
+solitary pillar rising up, above the waste of time, to which all
+men everywhere are to turn with the one thought, `I can do nothing
+like that; I need to do nothing like it; it has been done once,
+and once for all; and what I have to do is, simply to lie down
+before Him, and let the power and the blessings of that death and
+those sufferings flow into my heart.' The Divine Redeemer makes
+eternal redemption. The sufferings of Christ---the sufferings of
+His life, and the sufferings of His death---both because of the
+nature which bore them, and of the aspect which they wore in
+regard to us, are in their source, in their intensity, in their
+character, and consequences, unapproachable, incapable of
+repetition, and needing no repetition whilst the world shall
+stand. But then, do not let us forget that the very books and
+writers in the New Testament that preach most broadly Christ's
+sole, all-sufficient, eternal redemption for the world by His
+sufferings and death, turn round and say to us too, `\,``Be
+planted together in the likeness of His death''; you are
+``crucified to the world'' by the Cross of Christ; you are to
+``fill up that which is behind of the sufferings of Christ.''\,'
+He Himself speaks of our drinking of the cup that He drank of, and
+being baptized with the baptism that He was baptized with, if we
+desire to sit yonder on His throne, and share with Him in His
+glory.
+
+Now what do the Apostles, and what does Christ Himself, in that
+passage that I have quoted, mean, by such solemn words as these?
+Some people shrink from them, and say that it is trenching upon the
+central doctrine of the Gospel, when we speak about drinking of the
+cup which Christ drank of. They ask, Can it be? Yes, it can be, if
+you will think thus:---If a Christian has the Spirit and life of
+Christ in him, his career will be moulded, imperfectly but really,
+by the same Spirit that dwelt in his Lord; and similar causes will
+produce corresponding effects. The life of Christ which---divine,
+pure, incapable of copy and repetition---in one aspect has ended for
+ever for men, remains to be lived, in another view of it, by every
+Christian, who in like manner has to fight with the world; who in
+like manner has to resist temptation; who in like manner has to
+stand, by God's help, pure and sinless, in so far as the new nature
+of him is concerned, in the midst of a world that is full of evil.
+For were the sufferings of the Lord only the sufferings that were
+wrought upon Calvary? Were the sufferings of the Lord only the
+sufferings which came from the contradiction of sinners against
+Himself? Were the sufferings of the Lord only the sufferings which
+were connected with His bodily afflictions and pain, precious and
+priceless as they were, and operative causes of our redemption as
+they were? Oh no. Conceive of that perfect, sinless, really human
+life, in the midst of a system of things that is all full of
+corruption and of sin; coming ever and anon against misery, and
+wrong-doing, and rebellion; and ask yourselves whether part of His
+sufferings did not spring from the contact of the sinless Son of man
+with a sinful world, and the apparently vain attempt to influence
+and leaven that sinful world with care for itself and love for the
+Father. If there had been nothing more than that, yet Christ's
+sufferings as the Son of God in the midst of sinful men would have
+been deep and real. `O faithless generation, how long shall I be
+with you? how long shall I suffer you?' was wrung from Him by the
+painful sense of want of sympathy between His aims and theirs. `Oh
+that I had wings like a dove, for then I would fly away and be at
+rest,' must often be the language of those who are like Him in
+spirit, and in consequent sufferings.
+
+And then again, another branch of the `sufferings of Christ' is to
+be found in that deep and mysterious fact on which I durst not
+venture to speak beyond what the actual words of Scripture put into
+my lips---the fact that Christ wrought out His perfect obedience as
+a man, through temptation and by suffering. There was no sin
+\emph{within} Him, no tendency to sin, no yielding to the evil that
+assailed. `The Prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me.'
+But yet, when that dark Power stood by His side, and said, `If thou
+be the Son of God, cast Thyself down,' it was a real temptation and
+not a sham one. There was no wish to do it, no faltering for a
+moment, no hesitation. There was no rising up in that calm will of
+even a moment's impulse to do the thing that was presented;---but
+yet it was presented, and, when Christ triumphed, and the tempter
+departed for a season, there had been a temptation and there had
+been a conflict. And though obedience be a joy, and the doing of His
+Father's will was His delight, as it must needs be in pure and in
+purified hearts; yet obedience which is sustained in the face of
+temptation, and which never fails, though its path lead to bodily
+pains and the `contradiction of sinners,' may well be called
+suffering. We cannot speak of our Lord's obedience as the surrender
+of His own will to the Father's, with the implication that these two
+wills ever did or could move except in harmony. There was no place
+in Christ's obedience for that casting out of sinful self which
+makes our submission a surrender joined with suffering, but He knew
+temptation. Flesh, and sense, and the world, and the prince of this
+world, presented it to Him; and therefore His obedience too was
+suffering, even though to do the will of His Father was His meat and
+His drink, His sustenance and His refreshment.
+
+But then, let me remind you still further, that not only does the
+life of Christ, as sinless in the midst of sinful men, and the
+life of Christ, as sinless whilst yet there was temptation
+presented to it---assume the aspect of being a life of suffering,
+and become, in that respect, the model for us; but that also the
+Death of Christ, besides its aspect as an atonement and sacrifice
+for sin, the power by which transgression is put away and God's
+love flows out upon our souls, has another power given to it in
+the teaching of the New Testament. The Death of Christ is a type
+of the Christian's life, which is to be one long, protracted, and
+daily dying to sin, to self, to the world. The crucifixion of the
+old manhood is to be the life's work of every Christian, through
+the power of faith in that Cross by which `the world is crucified
+unto Me, and I unto the world.' That thought comes over and over
+again in all forms of earnest presentation in the Apostle's
+teaching. Do not slur it over as if it were a mere fanciful
+metaphor. It carries in its type a most solemn reality. The truth
+is, that, if a Christian, you have a double life. There is Christ,
+with His power, with His Spirit, giving you a nature which is pure
+and sinless, incapable of transgression, like His own. The new
+man, that which is born of God, sinneth not, cannot sin. But side
+by side with it, working through it, working in it, leavening it,
+indistinguishable from it to your consciousness, by anything but
+this that the one works righteousness and the other works
+transgression, there is the `old man,' `the flesh,' `the old
+Adam,' your own godless, independent, selfish, proud being. And
+the one is to slay the other! Ah, let me tell you, these
+words---crucifying, casting out the old man, plucking out the
+right eye, maiming self of the right hand, mortifying the deeds of
+the body---they are something very much deeper and more awful than
+poetical symbols and metaphors. They teach us this, that there is
+no growth without sore sorrow. Conflict, not progress, is the word
+that defines man's path from darkness into light. No holiness is
+won by any other means than this, that wickedness should be slain
+day by day, and hour by hour. In long lingering agony often, with
+the blood of the heart pouring out at every quivering vein, you
+are to cut right through the life and being of that sinful self;
+to do what the Word does, pierce to the dividing asunder of the
+thoughts and intents of the heart, and get rid by crucifying and
+slaying---a long process, a painful process---of your own sinful
+self. And not until you can stand up and say, `I live, yet not I,
+but Christ liveth in me,' have you accomplished that to which you
+are consecrated and vowed by your sonship---`being conformed unto
+the likeness of His death,' and `knowing the fellowship of His
+sufferings.'
+
+It is this process, the inward strife and conflict in getting rid
+of evil, which the Apostle designates here with the name of
+`suffering with Christ, that we may be also glorified together.'
+On this high level, and not upon the lower one of the
+consideration that Christ will help us to bear outward infirmities
+and afflictions, do we find the true meaning of all that Scripture
+teaching which says indeed, `Yes, our sufferings are
+\textit{His}'; but lays the foundation of it in this, `His
+sufferings are \textit{ours}.' It begins by telling us that Christ
+has done a work and borne a sorrow that no second can ever do.
+Then it tells us that Christ's life of obedience---which, because
+it \textit{was} a life of obedience, was a life of suffering, and
+brought Him into a condition of hostility to the men around
+Him---is to be repeated in us. It sets before us the Cross of
+Calvary, and the sorrows and pains that were felt there;---and it
+says to us, Christian men and women, if you want the power for
+holy living, have fellowship in that atoning death; and if you
+want the pattern of holy living, look at that Cross and feel, `I
+am crucified to the world by it; and the life that I live in the
+flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God.'
+
+Such considerations as these, however, do not necessarily exclude
+the other one (which we may just mention and dwell on for a
+moment), namely, that where there is this spiritual participation
+in the sufferings of Christ, and where His death is reproduced and
+perpetuated, as it were, in our daily mortifying ourselves in the
+present evil world---there Christ is with us in our afflictions.
+God forbid that I should try to strike away any word of
+consolation that has come, as these words of my text have come, to
+so many sorrowing hearts in all generations, like music in the
+night and like cold waters to a thirsty soul. We need not hold
+that there is no reference here to that comforting thought, `In
+all our affliction He is afflicted.' Brethren, you and I have,
+each of us---one in one way, and one in another, all in some way,
+all in the right way, none in too severe a way, none in too slight
+a way---to tread the path of sorrow; and is it not a blessed
+thing, as we go along through that dark valley of the shadow of
+death down into which the sunniest paths go sometimes, to come,
+amidst the twilight and the gathering clouds, upon tokens that
+Jesus has been on the road before us? They tell us that in some
+trackless lands, when one friend passes through the pathless
+forests, he breaks a twig ever and anon as he goes, that those who
+come after may see the traces of his having been there, and may
+know that they are not out of the road. Oh, when we are journeying
+through the murky night, and the dark woods of affliction and
+sorrow, it is something to find here and there a spray broken, or
+a leafy stem bent down with the tread of His foot and the brush of
+His hand as He passed, and to remember that the path He trod He
+has hallowed, and thus to find lingering fragrances and hidden
+strengths in the remembrance of Him as `in all points tempted like
+as we are,' bearing grief \textit{for} us, bearing grief
+\textit{with} us, bearing grief \textit{like} us.
+
+Oh, do not, do not, my brethren, keep these sacred thoughts of
+Christ's companionship in sorrow, for the larger trials of life.
+If the mote in the eye be large enough to annoy you, it is large
+enough to bring out His sympathy; and if the grief be too small
+for Him to compassionate and share, it is too small for you to be
+troubled by it. If you are ashamed to apply that divine thought,
+`Christ bears this grief with me,' to those petty molehills that
+you sometimes magnify into mountains, think to yourselves that
+then it is a shame for you to be stumbling over them. But on the
+other hand, never fear to be irreverent or too familiar in the
+thought that Christ is willing to bear, and help you to bear, the
+pettiest, the minutest, and most insignificant of the daily
+annoyances that may come to ruffle you. Whether it be a poison
+from one serpent sting, or whether it be poison from a million of
+buzzing tiny mosquitoes, if there be a smart, go to Him, and He
+will help you to endure it. He will do more, He will bear it with
+you, for if so be that we suffer with Him, He suffers with us, and
+our oneness with Christ brings about a community of possessions
+whereby it becomes true of each trusting soul in its relations to
+Him, that `all mine (joys and sorrows alike) are thine, and all
+thine are mine.'
+
+II. There remain some other considerations which may be briefly
+stated, in order to complete the lessons of this text. In the
+second place, this community of suffering is a necessary
+preparation for the community of glory.
+
+I name this principally for the sake of putting in a caution. The
+Apostle does not mean to tell us, of course, that if there were such
+a case as that of a man becoming a son of God, and having no
+occasion or opportunity afterwards, by brevity of life or other
+causes, for passing through the discipline of sorrow, his
+inheritance would be forfeited. We must always take such passages as
+this---which seem to make the discipline of the world an essential
+part of the preparing of us for glory---in conjunction with the
+other undeniable truth which completes them, that when a man has the
+love of God in his heart, however feebly, however newly, there and
+then he is fit for the inheritance. I think that Christian people
+make vast mistakes sometimes in talking about `being made meet for
+the inheritance of the saints in light,' about being `ripe for
+glory,' and the like. One thing at any rate is very certain, it is
+not the discipline that fits. That which fits goes before the
+discipline, and the discipline only develops the fitness. `God hath
+made us meet for the inheritance of the saints in light,' says the
+Apostle. That is a past act. The preparedness for heaven comes at
+the moment---if it be a momentary act---when a man turns to Christ.
+You may take the lowest and most abandoned form of human character,
+and in one moment (it is possible, and it is often the case) the
+entrance into that soul of the feeble germ of that new affection
+shall at once change the whole moral habitude of that man. Though it
+be true, then, that heaven is only open to those who are
+capable---by holy aspirations and divine desires---of entering into
+it, it is equally true that such aspirations and desires may be the
+work of an instant, and may be superinduced in a moment in a heart
+the most debased and the most degraded. `This day shalt thou be with
+Me in Paradise,'---\textit{fit} for the inheritance!
+
+And, therefore, let us not misunderstand such words as this text,
+and fancy that the necessary discipline, which we have to go
+through before we are ready for heaven, is necessary in anything
+like the same sense in which it is necessary that a man should
+have faith in Christ in order to be saved. The one may be
+dispensed with, the other cannot. A Christian at any period of his
+Christian experience, if it please God to take him, is fit for the
+kingdom. The life \textit{is} life, whether it be the budding
+beauty and feebleness of childhood, or the strength of manhood, or
+the maturity and calm peace of old age. But `add to your faith,'
+that `an entrance may be ministered unto you \textit{abundantly}.'
+Remember that though the root of the matter, the seed of the
+kingdom, may be in you; and that though, therefore, you have a
+right to feel that, at any period of your Christian experience, if
+it please God to take you out of this world, you are fit for
+heaven---yet in His mercy He is leaving you here, training you,
+disciplining you, cleansing you, making you to be polished shafts
+in His quiver; and that all the glowing furnaces of fiery trial
+and all the cold waters of affliction are but the preparation
+through which the rough iron is to be passed before it becomes
+tempered steel, a shaft in the Master's hand.
+
+And so learn to look upon all trial as being at once the seal of
+your sonship, and the means by which God puts it within your power
+to win a higher place, a loftier throne, a nobler crown, a closer
+fellowship with Him `who hath suffered, being tempted,' and who
+will receive into His own blessedness and rest them that are
+tempted. `The child, though he be an heir, differeth nothing from
+a servant, though he be lord of all; but is under tutors and
+governors.' God puts us in the school of sorrow under that stern
+tutor and governor here, and gives us the opportunity of
+`suffering with Christ,' that by the daily crucifixion of our old
+nature, by the lessons and blessings of outward calamities and
+change, there may grow up in us a still nobler and purer, and
+perfecter divine life; and that we may so be made capable---more
+capable, and capable of more---of that inheritance for which the
+only necessary thing is the death of Christ, and the only fitness
+is faith in His name.
+
+III. Finally, that inheritance is the necessary result of the
+suffering that has gone before.
+
+The suffering results from our union with Christ. That union must
+needs culminate in glory. It is not only because the joy hereafter
+seems required in order to vindicate God's love to His children,
+who here reap sorrow from their sonship, that the discipline of
+life cannot but end in blessedness. That ground of mere
+compensation is a low one on which to rest the certainty of future
+bliss. But the inheritance is sure to all who here suffer with
+Christ, because the one cause---union with the Lord---produces
+both the present result of fellowship in His sorrows, and the
+future result of joy in His joy, of possession of His possessions.
+The inheritance is sure because Christ possesses it now. The
+inheritance is sure because earth's sorrows not merely require to
+be repaid by its peace, but because they have an evident design to
+fit us for it, and it would be destructive to all faith in God's
+wisdom, and God's knowledge of His own purposes, not to believe
+that what He has wrought us for will be given to us. Trials have
+no meaning, unless they are means to an end. The end is the
+inheritance, and sorrows here, as well as the Spirit's work here,
+are the earnest of the inheritance. Measure the greatness of the
+glory by what has preceded it. God takes all these years of life,
+and all the sore trials and afflictions that belong inevitably to
+an earthly career, and works them in, into the blessedness that
+\textit{shall} come. If a fair measure of the greatness of any
+result of productive power be the length of time that was taken
+for getting it ready, we can dimly conceive what that joy must be
+for which seventy years of strife and pain and sorrow are but a
+momentary preparation; and what must be the weight of that glory
+which is the counterpoise and consequence to the afflictions of
+this lower world. The further the pendulum swings on the one side,
+the further it goes up on the other. The deeper God plunges the
+comet into the darkness out yonder, the closer does it come to the
+sun at its nearest distance, and the longer does it stand basking
+and glowing in the full blaze of the glory from the central orb.
+So in \textit{our} revolution, the measure of the distance from
+the farthest point of our darkest earthly sorrow, \textit{to} the
+throne, may help us to the measure of the closeness of the bright,
+perfect, perpetual glory above, when we are \textit{on} the
+throne: for if so be that we are sons, we \textit{must} suffer
+with Him; if so be that we suffer, we \textit{must} be glorified
+together!
+
+\chapter{The Revelation of Sons}
+\markright{ROMANS viii. 19}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the
+manifestation of the sons of God.'---\textsc{Romans} viii. 19.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The Apostle has been describing believers as `sons' and `heirs.'
+He drops from these transcendent heights to contrast their present
+apparent condition with their true character and their future
+glory. The sad realities of suffering darken his lofty hopes, even
+although these sad realities are to his faith tokens of
+joint-heirship with Jesus, and pledges that if our inheritance is
+here manifested by suffering with him, that very fact is a
+prophecy of common glory hereafter. He describes that future as
+the revealing of a glory, to which the sufferings of this present
+time are not worthy to be compared; and then, in our text he
+varies the application of that thought of revealing and thinks of
+the subjects of it as being the `sons of God.' They will be
+revealed when the glory which they have as joint-heirs with Christ
+is revealed in them. They walk, as it were, compassed with mist
+and cloud, but the splendour which will fall on them will scatter
+the envious darkness, and `when Christ who is our life shall
+appear, then shall His co-heirs also appear with Him in
+glory.'
+
+We may consider---
+
+I. The present veil over the sons of God.
+
+There is always a difference between appearance and reality,
+between the ideal and its embodiments. For all men it is true that
+the full expression of oneself is impossible. Each man's deeds
+fall short of disclosing the essential self in the man. Every will
+is hampered by the fleshly screen of the body. `I would that my
+tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me,' is the yearning
+of every heart that is deeply moved. Contending principles
+successively sway every personality and thwart each other's
+expression. For these, and many other reasons, the sum-total of
+every life is but a shrouded representation of the man who lives
+it; and we, all of us, after all efforts at self-revelation,
+remain mysteries to our fellows and to ourselves. All this is
+eminently true of the sons of God. They have a life-germ hidden in
+their souls, which in its very nature is destined to fill and
+expand their whole being, and to permeate with its triumphant
+energy every corner of their nature. But it is weak and often
+overborne by its opposite. The seed sown is to grow in spite of
+bad weather and a poor soil and many weeds, and though it is
+destined to overcome all these, it may to-day only be able to show
+on the surface a little patch of pale and struggling growth. When
+we think of the cost at which the life of Christ was imparted to
+men, and of the divine source from which it comes, and of the
+sedulous and protracted discipline through which it is being
+trained, we cannot but conclude that nothing short of its
+universal dominion over all the faculties of its imperfect
+possessors can be the goal of its working. Hercules in his cradle
+is still Hercules, and strangles snakes. Frost and sun may
+struggle in midwinter, and the cold may seem to predominate, but
+the sun is steadily enlarging its course in the sky, and
+increasing the fervour of its beams, and midsummer day is as sure
+to dawn as the shortest day was.
+
+The sons of God, even more truly than other men, have contending
+principles fighting within them. It was the same Apostle who with
+oaths denied that he `knew the man,' and in a passion of clinging
+love and penitence fell at His feet; but for the mere onlooker it
+would be hard to say which was the true man and which would
+conquer. The sons of God, like other men, have to express
+themselves in words which are never closely enough fitted to their
+thoughts and feelings. David's penitence has to be contented with
+groans which are not deep enough; and John's calm raptures on his
+Saviour's breast can only be spoken by shut eyes and silence. The
+sons of God never fully correspond to their character, but always
+fall somewhat beneath their desire, and must always be somewhat
+less than their intention. The artist never wholly embodies his
+conception. It is only God who `rests from His works' because the
+works fully embody His creative design and fully receive the
+benediction of His own satisfaction with them.
+
+From all such thoughts there arises a piece of plain practical
+wisdom, which warns Christian men not to despond or despair if
+they do not find themselves living up to their ideal. The sons of
+God are `veiled' because the world's estimate of them is untrue.
+The old commonplace that the world knows nothing of its greatest
+men is verified in the opinions which it holds about the sons of
+God. It is not for their Christianity that they get any of the
+world's honours and encomiums, if such fall to their share. They
+are \textit{un}known and yet \textit{well}-known. They live for
+the most part veiled in obscurity. `The light shineth in darkness,
+and the darkness comprehendeth it not.' They are God's hidden
+ones. If they are wise, they will look for no recognition nor
+eulogy from the world, and will be content to live, as unknown by
+the princes of this world as was the Lord of glory, whom they slew
+because their dim eyes could not see the flashing of the glory
+`through the veil, that is to say, His flesh.' But no
+consciousness of imperfection in our revelation of an indwelling
+Christ must ever be allowed to diminish our efforts to live out
+the life that is in us, and to shine as lights in the world; nor
+must the consciousness that we walk as `veiled,' lead us to add to
+the thick folds the criminal one of voluntary silence and cowardly
+hiding in dumb hearts the secret of our lives.
+
+II. The unveiling of the sons of God.
+
+That unveiling is in the text represented as coming along with the
+glory which shall be revealed to usward, and as being
+contemporaneous with the deliverance of the creation itself from
+the bondage of corruption, and its passing into the liberty of the
+glory of the children of God. It coincides with the vanishing of
+the pain in which the whole creation now groans and travails, and
+with the adoption---that is, the redemption of our body. Then hope
+will be seen and will pass into still fruition. All this points to
+the time when Jesus Christ is revealed, and His servants are
+revealed with Him in glory. That revelation brings with it of
+necessity the manifestation of the sons of God for what they
+are---the making visible in the life of what God sees them to
+be.
+
+That revelation of the sons of God is the result of the entire
+dominion and transforming supremacy of the Spirit of God in them.
+In the whole sweep of their consciousness there will in that day
+be nothing done from other motives; there will be no sidelights
+flashing in and disturbing the perfect illumination from the
+candle of the Lord set on high in their being; there will be no
+contradictions in the life. It will be one and simple, and
+therefore perfectly intelligible. Such is the destined issue of
+the most imperfect Christian life. The Christian man who has in
+his experience to-day the faintest and most interrupted operation
+of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has therein a pledge of
+immortality, because nothing short of an endless life of
+progressive and growing purity will be adequate to receive and
+exemplify the power which can never terminate until it is made
+like Him and perfectly seeing Him as He is.
+
+But that unveiling further guarantees the possession of fully
+adequate means of expression. The limitations and imperfections of
+our present bodily life will all drop away in putting on `the body
+of glory' which shall be ours. The new tongue will perfectly utter
+the new knowledge and rapture of the new life; new hands will
+perfectly realise our ideals; and on every forehead will be
+stamped Christ's new name.
+
+That unveiling will be further realised by a divine act indicating
+the characters of the sons of God by their position. Earth's
+judgments will be reversed by that divine voice, and the great
+promise, which through weary ages has shone as a far-off
+star,---`I will set him on high because he hath known my
+name'---will then be known for the sun near at hand. Many names
+loudly blown through the world's trumpet will fall silent then.
+Many stars will be quenched, but `they that be wise shall shine as
+the brightness of the firmament.'
+
+That revelation will be more surprising to no one than to those
+who are its subjects, when they see themselves mirrored in that
+glass, and so unlike what they are here. Their first impulse will
+be to wonder at the form they see, and to ask, almost with
+incredulity, `Lord, is it I?' Nor will the wonder be less when
+they recognise many whom they knew not. The surprises when the
+family of God is gathered together at last will be great. The
+Israel of Captivity lifts up her wondering eyes as she sees the
+multitudes flocking to her side as the doves to their windows,
+and, half-ashamed of her own narrow vision, exclaims, `I was left
+alone; these, where had they been?' Let us rejoice that in the day
+when the sons of God are revealed, many hidden ones from many dark
+corners will sit at the Father's table. That revelation will be
+made to the whole universe; we know not how, but we know that it
+shall be; and, as the text tells us, that revelation of the sons
+of God is the hope for which `the earnest expectation of the
+creature waits' through the weary ages.
+
+\chapter{The Redemption of the Body}
+\markright{ROMANS viii. 23}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`The adoption, to wit, the redemption of our
+body.'---\textsc{Romans} viii. 23.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+In a previous verse Paul has said that all true Christians have
+received `the Spirit of adoption.' They become sons of God through
+Christ the Son. They receive a new spiritual and divine life from
+God through Christ, and that life is like its source. In so far as
+that new life vitalises and dominates their nature, believers have
+received `the Spirit of adoption,' and by it they cry `Abba,
+Father.' But the body still remains a source of weakness, the seat
+of sin. It is sluggish and inapt for high purposes; it still
+remains subject to `the law of sin and death'; and so is not like
+the Father who breathed into it the breath of life. It remains in
+bondage, and has not yet received the adoption. This text, in
+harmony with the Apostle's whole teaching, looks forward to a
+change in the body and in its relations to the renewed spirit, as
+the crown and climax of the work of redemption, and declares that
+till that change is effected, the condition of Christian men is
+imperfect, and is a waiting, and often a groaning.
+
+In dealing with some of the thoughts that arise from this text, we
+note---
+
+I. That a future bodily life is needed in order to give
+definiteness and solidity to the conception of immortality.
+
+Before the Gospel came men's belief in a future life was vague and
+powerless, mainly because it had no Gospel of the Resurrection,
+and so nothing tangible to lay hold on. The Gospel has made the
+belief in a future state infinitely easier and more powerful,
+mainly because of the emphasis with which it has proclaimed an
+actual resurrection and a future bodily life. Its great proof of
+immortality is drawn, not merely from ethical considerations of
+the manifest futility of earthly life which has no sequel beyond
+the grave, nor from the intuitions and longings of men's souls,
+but from the historical fact of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ,
+and of His Ascension in bodily form into heaven. It proclaims
+these two facts as parts of His experience, and asserts that when
+He rose from the dead and ascended up on high, He did so as `the
+first-born among many brethren,' their forerunner and their
+pattern. It is this which gives the Gospel its power, and thus
+transforms a vague and shadowy conception of immortality into a
+solid faith, for which we have already an historical guarantee.
+Stupendous mysteries still veil the nature of the resurrection
+process, though these are exaggerated into inconceivabilities by
+false notions of what constitutes personal identity; but if the
+choice lies between accepting the Christian doctrine of a
+resurrection and the conception of a finite spirit disembodied and
+yet active, there can be no doubt as to which of these two is the
+more reasonable and thinkable. Body, soul, and spirit make the
+complete triune man.
+
+The thought of the future life as a bodily life satisfies the
+longings of the heart. Much natural shrinking from death comes
+from unwillingness to part company with an old companion and
+friend. As Paul puts it in 2nd Corinthians, `Not for that we would
+be unclothed, but clothed upon.' All thoughts of the future which
+do not give prominence to the idea of a bodily life open up but a
+ghastly and uninviting mode of existence, which cannot but repel
+those who are accustomed to the fellowship of their bodies, and
+they feel that they cannot think of themselves as deprived of that
+which was their servant and instrument, through all the years of
+their earthly consciousness.
+
+II. `The body that shall be' is an emancipated body.
+
+The varied gifts of the Spirit bestowed upon the Christian Church
+served to quicken the hope of the yet greater gifts of that
+indwelling Spirit which were yet to come. Chief amongst these our
+text considers the transformation of the earthly into a spiritual
+body. This transformation our text regards as being the
+participation by the body in the redemption by which Christ has
+bought us with the great price of His blood. We have to interpret
+the language here in the light of the further teaching of Paul in
+the great Resurrection chapter of 1st Corinthians, which
+distinctly lays stress, not on the identity of the corporeal frame
+which is laid in the grave with `the body of glory,' but upon the
+entire contrast between the `natural body,' which is fit organ for
+the lower nature, and is informed by it, and the `spiritual body,'
+which is fit organ for the spirit. We have to interpret `the
+resurrection of the body' by the definite apostolic declaration,
+`Thou sowest not that body that shall be... but God giveth it a
+body as it hath pleased Him'; and we have to give full weight to
+the contrasts which the Apostle draws between the characteristics
+of that which is `sown' and of that which is `raised.' The one is
+`sown in corruption and raised in incorruption.' Natural decay is
+contrasted with immortal youth. The one is `sown in dishonour,'
+the other is `raised in glory.' That contrast is ethical, and
+refers either to the subordinate position of the body here in
+relation to the spirit, or to the natural sense of shame, or to
+the ideas of degradation which are attached to the indulgence of
+the appetites. The one is `sown in weakness,' the other is `raised
+in power'; the one is `sown a natural body,' the other is `raised
+a spiritual body.' Is not Paul in this whole series of contrasts
+thinking primarily of the vision which he saw on the road to
+Damascus when the risen Christ appeared before him? And had not
+the years which had passed since then taught him to see in the
+ascended Christ the prophecy and the pattern of what His servants
+should become? We have further to keep in view Paul's other
+representation in 2nd Corinthians v., where he strongly puts the
+contrast between the corporeal environment of earth and `the body
+of glory,' which belongs to the future life, in his two images:
+`the earthly house of this tabernacle'---a clay hut which lasts
+but for a time,---and `the building of God, the house not made
+with hands and eternal.' The body is an occasion of separation
+from the Lord.
+
+These considerations may well lead us to, at least, general
+outlines on which a confident and peaceful hope may fix. For
+example, they lead us to the thought that that redeemed body is no
+more subject to decay and death, is no more weighed upon by
+weakness and weariness, has no work beyond its strength, needs no
+sustenance by food, and no refreshment of sleep. `The Lamb which
+is in the midst of the throne shall feed them,' suggests strength
+constantly communicated by a direct divine gift. And from all
+these negative characteristics there follows that there will be in
+that future bodily life no epochs of age marked by bodily changes.
+The two young men who were seen sitting in the sepulchre of Jesus
+had lived before Adam, and would seem as young if we saw them
+to-day.
+
+Similarly the redeemed body will be a more perfect instrument for
+communication with the external universe. We know that the present
+body conditions our knowledge, and that our senses do not take
+cognisance of all the qualities of material things. Microscopes
+and telescopes have enlarged our field of vision, and have brought
+the infinitely small and the infinitely distant within our range.
+Our ear hears vibrations at a certain rate per second, and no
+doubt if it were more delicately organised we could hear sounds
+where now is silence. Sometimes the creatures whom we call
+`inferior' seem to have senses that apprehend much of which we are
+not aware. Balaam's ass saw the obstructing angel before Balaam
+did. Nor is there any reason to suppose that all the powers of the
+mind find tools to work with in the body. It is possible that that
+body which is the fit instrument of the spirit may become its
+means of knowing more deeply, thinking more wisely, understanding
+more swiftly, comprehending more widely, remembering more firmly
+and judging more soundly. It is possible that the contrast between
+then and now may be like the contrast between telegraph and slow
+messenger in regard to the rapidity, between photograph and poor
+daub in regard to the truthfulness, between a full-orbed circle
+and a fragmentary arc in regard to the completeness of the
+messages which the body brings to the indwelling self.
+
+But, once more, the body unredeemed has appetites and desires
+which may lead to their own satisfaction, which do lead to sordid
+cares and weary toil. `The flesh lusts against the spirit and the
+spirit against the flesh.' The redeemed body will have in it
+nothing to tempt and nothing to clog, but will be a helper to the
+spirit and a source of strength. Glorious work of God as the body
+is, it has its weaknesses, its limitations, and its tendencies to
+evil. We must not be tempted into brooding over unanswered
+questions as to `How do the dead rise, and with what body do they
+come?' But we can lift our eyes to the mountain-top where Jesus
+went up to pray. `And as He prayed the fashion of His countenance
+was altered, and His raiment became white and dazzling'; and He
+was capable of entering into the Shekinah cloud and holding
+fellowship therein with the Father, who attested His Sonship and
+bade us listen to His voice. And we can look to Olivet and follow
+the ascending Jesus as He lets His benediction drop on the
+upturned faces of His friends, until He again passes into the
+Shekinah cloud, and leaving the world, goes to the Father. And
+from both His momentary transfiguration and His permanent
+Ascension we can draw the certain assurance that `He shall fashion
+anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the
+body of His glory, according to the working whereby He is able
+even to subdue all things unto Himself.'
+
+III. The redeemed body is a consequence of Christ's indwelling
+Spirit.
+
+It is no natural result of death or resurrection, but is the
+outcome of the process begun on earth, by which, `through faith
+and the righteousness of faith,' the spirit is life. The context
+distinctly enforces this view by its double use of `adoption,'
+which in one aspect has already been received, and is manifested
+by the fact that `now are we the sons of God,' and in another
+aspect is still `waited' for. The Christian man in his regenerated
+spirit has been born again; the Christian man still waits for the
+completion of that sonship in a time when the regenerated spirit
+will no longer dwell in the clay cottage of `this tabernacle,' but
+will inhabit a congruous dwelling in `the building of God not made
+with hands, eternal in the heavens.'
+
+Scripture is too healthy and comprehensive to be contented with a
+merely spiritual regeneration, and is withal too spiritual to be
+satisfied with a merely material heaven. It gives full place to
+both elements, and yet decisively puts all belonging to the latter
+second. It lays down the laws that for a complete humanity there
+must be body as well as spirit; that there must be a
+correspondence between the two, and as is the spirit so must the
+body be, and further, that the process must begin at the centre
+and work outwards, so that the spirit must first be transformed,
+and then the body must be participant of the transformation.
+
+All that Scripture says about `rising in glory' is said about
+believers. It is represented as a spiritual process. They who have
+the Spirit of God in their spirits because they have it receive
+the glorified body which is like their Saviour's. It is not enough
+to die in order to `rise glorious.' `If the Spirit of Him that
+raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up
+Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His
+Spirit that dwelleth in you.' The resurrection is promised for all
+mankind, but it may be a resurrection in which there shall be
+endless living and no glory, nor any beauty and no blessedness.
+But the body may be `sown in weakness,' and in weakness raised; it
+may be `sown in dishonour' and in dishonour raised; it may be sown
+dead, and raised a living death. `Many of them that sleep in the
+dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some
+to shame and everlasting contempt.' Does that mean nothing? `They
+that have done evil to the resurrection of condemnation.' Does
+that mean nothing? There are dark mysteries in these and similar
+words of Scripture which should make us all pause and solemnly
+reflect. The sole way which leads to the resurrection of glory is
+the way of faith in Jesus Christ. If we yield ourselves to Him, He
+will plant His Spirit in our spirits, will guide and growingly
+sanctify us through life, will deliver us by the indwelling of the
+Spirit of life in Him from the law of sin and death. Nor will His
+transforming power cease till it has pervaded our whole being with
+its fiery energy, and we stand at the last men like Christ,
+redeemed in body, soul, and spirit, `according to the mighty
+working whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself.'
+
+\chapter{The Interceding Spirit}
+\markright{ROMANS viii. 26}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`The Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which
+cannot be uttered.'---\textsc{Romans} viii. 26.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+Pentecost was a transitory sign of a perpetual gift. The tongues
+of fire and the rushing mighty wind, which were at first the most
+conspicuous results of the gifts of the Spirit, tongues, and
+prophecies, and gifts of healing, which were to the early Church
+itself and to onlookers palpable demonstrations of an indwelling
+power, were little more lasting than the fire and the wind. Does
+anything remain? This whole great chapter is Paul's triumphant
+answer to such a question. The Spirit of God dwells in every
+believer as the source of his true life, is for him `the Spirit of
+adoption' and witnesses with his spirit that he is a child of God,
+and a joint-heir with Christ. Not only does that Spirit co-operate
+with the human spirit in this witness-bearing, but the verse, of
+which our text is a part, points to another form of co-operation:
+for the word rendered in the earlier part of the verse `helpeth'
+in the original suggests more distinctly that the Spirit of God in
+His intercession for us works in association with us.
+
+First, then---
+
+I. The Spirit's intercession is not carried on apart from us.
+
+Much modern hymnology goes wrong in this point, that it represents
+the Spirit's intercession as presented in heaven rather than as
+taking place within the personal being of the believer. There is a
+broad distinction carefully observed throughout Scripture between
+the representations of the work of Christ and that of the Spirit
+of Christ. The former in its character and revelation and
+attainment was wrought upon earth, and in its character of
+intercession and bestowment of blessings is discharged at the
+right hand of God in heaven; the whole of the Spirit's work, on
+the other hand, is wrought in human spirits here. The context
+speaks of intercession expressed in `groanings which cannot be
+uttered,' and which, unexpressed though they are, are fully
+understood `by Him who searches the heart.' Plainly, therefore,
+these groanings come from human hearts, and as plainly are the
+Divine Spirit's voicing them.
+
+II. The Spirit's intercession in our spirits consists in our own
+divinely-inspired longings.
+
+The Apostle has just been speaking of another groaning within
+ourselves, which is the expression of `the earnest expectation' of
+`the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body'; and he says
+that that longing will be the more patient the more it is full of
+hope. This, then, is Paul's conception of the normal attitude of a
+Christian soul; but that attitude is hard to keep up in one's own
+strength, because of the distractions of time and sense which are
+ever tending to disturb the continuity and fixity of that onward
+look, and to lead us rather to be satisfied with the gross, dull
+present. That redemption of the body, with all which it implies
+and includes, ought to be the supreme object to which each
+Christian heart should ever be turning, and Christian prayers
+should be directed. But our own daily experience makes us only too
+sure that such elevation above, and remoteness from earthly
+thoughts, with all their pettinesses and limitations, is
+impossible for us in our own strength. As Paul puts it here, `We
+know not what to pray for'; nor can we fix and focus our desires,
+nor present them `as we ought.' It is to this weakness and
+incompleteness of our desires and prayers that the help of the
+Spirit is directed. He strengthens our longings by His own direct
+operation. The more vivid our anticipations and the more steadfast
+our hopes, and the more our spirits reach out to that future
+redemption, the more are we bound to discern something more than
+human imaginings in them, and to be sure that such visions are too
+good not to be true, too solid to be only the play of our own
+fancy. The more we are conscious of these experiences as our own,
+the more certain we shall be that in them it is not we that speak,
+but `the Spirit of the Father that speaketh in us.'
+
+III. These divinely-inspired longings are incapable of full
+expression.
+
+They are shallow feelings that can be spoken. Language breaks down
+in the attempt to express our deepest emotions and our truest
+love. For all the deepest things in man, inarticulate utterance is
+the most self-revealing. Grief can say more in a sob and a tear
+than in many weak words; love finds its tongue in the light of an
+eye and the clasp of a hand. The groanings which rise from the
+depths of the Christian soul cannot be forced into the narrow
+frame-work of human language; and just because they are
+unutterable are to be recognised as the voice of the Holy
+Spirit.
+
+But where amidst the Christian experience of to-day shall we find
+anything in the least like these unutterable longings after the
+redemption of the body which Paul here takes it for granted are
+the experience of all Christians? There is no more startling
+condemnation of the average Christianity of our times than the
+calm certainty with which through all this epistle the Apostle
+takes it for granted that the experience of the Roman Christians
+will universally endorse his statements. Look for a moment at what
+these statements are. Listen to the briefest summary of them: `We
+cry, Abba, Father'; `We are children of God'; `We suffer with Him
+that we may be glorified with Him'; `Glory shall be revealed to
+usward'; `We have the first-fruits of the Spirit'; `We ourselves
+groan within ourselves'; `By hope were we saved'; `We hope for
+that which we see not'; `Then do we with patience wait for it';
+`We know that to them that love God all things work together for
+good'; `In all these things we are more than conquerors'; `Neither
+death nor life... nor any other creature shall be able to separate
+us from the love of God.' He believed that in these rapturous and
+triumphant words he was gathering together the experience of every
+Roman Christian, and would evoke from their lips a confident
+`Amen.' Where are the communities to-day in whose hearing these
+words could be reiterated with the like assurance? How few among
+us there are who know anything of these `groanings which cannot be
+uttered!' How few among us there are whose spirits are stretching
+out eager desires towards the land of perpetual summer, like
+migratory birds in northern latitudes when the autumn days are
+shortening and the temperature is falling!
+
+But, however we must feel that our poor experience falls far short
+of the ideal in our text, an ideal which was to some extent
+realised in the early Christian Church, we must beware of taking
+the imperfections of our experience as any evidence of the
+unreality of our Christianity. They are a proof that we have
+limited and impeded the operation of the Spirit within us. They
+teach us that He will not intercede `with groanings which cannot
+be uttered' unless we let Him speak through our voices. Therefore,
+if we find that in our own consciousness there is little to
+correspond to those unuttered groanings, we should take the
+warning: `Quench not the Spirit.' `Grieve not the Holy Spirit of
+God in whom ye were sealed unto the day of redemption.'
+
+IV. The unuttered longings are sure to be answered.
+
+He that searcheth the heart knows the meaning of the Spirit's
+unspoken prayers; and looking into the depths of the human spirit
+interprets its longings, discriminating between the mere human and
+partial expression and the divinely-inspired desire which may be
+unexpressed. If our prayers are weak, they are answered in the
+measure in which they embody in them, though perhaps mistaken by
+us, a divine longing. Apparent disappointment of our petitions may
+be real answers to our real prayer. It was because Jesus loved
+Mary and Martha and Lazarus that He abode still in the same place
+where He was, to let Lazarus die that He might be raised again.
+That was the true answer to the sisters' hope of His immediate
+coming. God's way of giving to us is to breathe within us a
+desire, and then to answer the desire inbreathed. So, longing is
+the prophecy of fulfilment when it is longing according to the
+will of God. They who `hunger and thirst after righteousness' may
+ever be sure that their bread shall be given them, and their water
+will be made sure. The true object of our desires is often not
+clear to us, and so we err in translating it into words. Let us be
+thankful that we pray to a God who can discern the prayer within
+the prayer, and often gives the substance of our petitions in the
+very act of refusing their form.
+
+\chapter{The Gift That Brings All Gifts}
+\markright{ROMANS viii. 32}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`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?'---\textsc{Romans} viii. 32.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+We have here an allusion to, if not a distinct quotation from, the
+narrative in Genesis, of Abraham's offering up of Isaac. The same
+word which is employed in the Septuagint version of the Old
+Testament, to translate the Hebrew word rendered in our Bible as
+`withheld,' is employed here by the Apostle. And there is
+evidently floating before his mind the thought that, in some
+profound and real sense, there is an analogy between that wondrous
+and faithful act of giving up and the transcendent and stupendous
+gift to the world, from God, of His Son.
+
+If we take that point of view, the language of my text rises into
+singular force, and suggests many very deep thoughts, about which,
+perhaps, silence is best. But led by that analogy, let us deal
+with these words.
+
+I. Consider this mysterious act of divine surrender.
+
+The analogy seems to suggest to us, strange as it may be, and
+remote from the cold and abstract ideas of the divine nature which
+it is thought to be philosophical to cherish, that something
+corresponding to the pain and loss that shadowed the patriarch's
+heart flitted across the divine mind when the Father sent the Son
+to be the Saviour of the world. Not merely to give, but to give
+up, is the highest crown and glory of love, as we know it. And who
+shall venture to say that we so fully apprehend the divine nature
+as to be warranted in declaring that some analogy to that is
+impossible for Him? Our language is, `I will not offer unto God
+that which doth cost me nothing.' Let us bow in silence before the
+dim intimation that seems to flicker out of the words of my text,
+that so He says to us, `I will not offer unto you that which doth
+cost Me nothing.' `He \textit{spared} not His own Son'; withheld
+Him not from us.
+
+But passing from that which, I dare say, many of you may suppose
+to be fanciful and unwarranted, let us come upon the surer ground
+of the other words of my text. And notice how the reality of the
+surrender is emphasised by the closeness of the bond which, in the
+mysterious eternity, knits together the Father and the Son. As
+with Abraham, so in this lofty example, of which Abraham and Isaac
+were but as dim, wavering reflections in water, the Son is His own
+Son. It seems to me impossible, upon any fair interpretation of
+the words before us, to refrain from giving to that epithet here
+its very highest and most mysterious sense. It cannot be any mere
+equivalent for Messiah, it cannot merely mean a man who was like
+God in purity of nature and in closeness of communion. For the
+force of the analogy and the emphasis of that word which is even
+more emphatic in the Greek than in the English `His \textit{own}
+Son,' point to a community of nature, to a uniqueness and
+singleness of relation, to a closeness of intimacy, to which no
+other is a parallel. And so we have to estimate the measure of the
+surrender by the tenderness and awfulness of the bond. `Having one
+Son, His well-beloved, He sent Him.'
+
+Notice, again, how the greatness of the surrender is made more
+emphatic by the contemplation of it in its double negative and
+positive aspect, in the two successive clauses. `He spared not His
+Son, but delivered Him up,' an absolute, positive giving of Him
+over to the humiliation of the life and to the mystery of the
+death.
+
+And notice how the tenderness and the beneficence that were the
+sole motive of the surrender are lifted into light in the last
+words, `for us all.' The single, sole reason that bowed, if I may
+so say, the divine purpose, and determined the mysterious act, was
+a pure desire for our blessing. No definition is given as to the
+manner in which that surrender wrought for our good. The Apostle
+does not need to dwell upon that. His purpose is to emphasise the
+entire unselfishness, the utter simplicity of the motive which
+moved the divine will. One great throb of love to the whole of
+humanity led to that transcendent surrender, before which we can
+only bow and say, `Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable
+gift.'
+
+And now, notice how this mysterious act is grasped by the Apostle
+here as what I may call the illuminating fact as to the whole
+divine nature. From it, and from it alone, there falls a blaze of
+light on the deepest things in God. We are accustomed to speak of
+Christ's perfect life of unselfishness, and His death of pure
+beneficence, as being the great manifestation to us all that in
+His heart there is an infinite fountain of love to us. We are,
+further, accustomed to speak of Christ's mission and death as
+being the revelation to us of the love of God as well as of the
+Man Christ Jesus, because we believe that `God was in Christ
+reconciling the world,' and that He has so manifested and revealed
+the very nature of divinity to us, in His life and in His person,
+that, as He Himself says, `He that hath seen Me hath seen the
+Father.' And every conclusion that we draw as to the love of
+Christ is, \textit{ipso facto}, a conclusion as to the love of
+God. But my text looks at the matter from rather a different point
+of view, and bids us see, in Christ's mission and sacrifice, the
+great demonstration of the love of God, not only because `God was
+in Christ,' but because the Father's will, conceived of as
+distinct from, and yet harmonious with, the will of the Son, gives
+Him up for us. And we have to say, not only that we see the love
+of God in the love of Christ, but `God so loved the world that He
+sent His only begotten Son' that we might have life through
+Him.
+
+These various phases of the love of Christ as manifesting the
+divine love, may not be capable of perfect harmonising in our
+thoughts, but they do blend into one, and by reason of them all,
+`God commendeth His love toward us in that while we were yet
+sinners, Christ died for us.' We have to think not only of Abraham
+who gave up, but of the unresisting, innocent Isaac, bearing on
+his shoulders the wood for the burnt offering, as the Christ bore
+the Cross on His, and suffering himself to be bound upon the pile,
+not only by the cords that tied his limbs, but by the cords of
+obedience and submission, and in both we have to bow before the
+Apocalypse of divine love.
+
+II. So, secondly, look at the power of this divine surrender to
+bring with it all other gifts.
+
+`How shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?' The
+Apostle's triumphant question requires for its affirmative answer
+only the belief in the unchangeableness of the Divine heart, and
+the uniformity of the Divine purpose. And if these be recognised,
+their conclusion inevitably follows. `With Him He will freely give
+us all things.'
+
+It is so, because the greater gift implies the less. We do not
+expect that a man who hands over a million of pounds to another,
+to help him, will stick at a farthing afterwards. If you give a
+diamond you may well give a box to keep it in. In God's gift the
+lesser will follow the lead of the greater; and whatsoever a man
+can want, it is a smaller thing for Him to bestow, than was the
+gift of His Son.
+
+There is a beautiful contrast between the manners of giving the
+two sets of gifts implied in words of the original, perhaps
+scarcely capable of being reproduced in any translation. The
+expression that is rendered `freely give,' implies that there is a
+grace and a pleasantness in the act of bestowal. God gave in
+Christ, what we may reverently say it was something like pain to
+give. Will He not give the lesser, whatever they may be, which it
+is the joy of His heart to communicate? The greater implies the
+less.
+
+Farther, this one great gift draws all other gifts after it,
+because the purpose of the greater gift cannot be attained without
+the bestowment of the lesser. He does not begin to build being
+unable to finish; He does not miscalculate His resources, nor
+stultify Himself by commencing upon a large scale, and having to
+stop short before the purpose with which He began is accomplished.
+Men build great palaces, and are bankrupt before the roof is put
+on. God lays His plans with the knowledge of His powers, and
+having first of all bestowed this large gift, is not going to have
+it bestowed in vain for want of some smaller ones to follow it up.
+Christ puts the same argument to us, beginning only at the other
+end of the process. Paul says, `God has laid the foundation in
+Christ.' Do you think He will stop before the headstone is put on?
+Christ said, `It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the
+Kingdom.' Do you think He will not give you bread and water on the
+road to it? Will He send out His soldiers half-equipped; will it
+be found when they are on their march that they have been started
+with a defective commissariat, and with insufficient trenching
+tools? Shall the children of the King, on the road to their
+thrones, be left to scramble along anyhow, in want of what they
+need to get there? That is not God's way of doing. He that hath
+begun a good work will also perfect the same, and when He gave to
+you and me His Son, He bound Himself to give us every subsidiary
+and secondary blessing which was needed to make that Son's work
+complete in each of us.
+
+Again, this great blessing draws after it, by necessary
+consequence, all other lesser and secondary gifts, inasmuch as, in
+every real sense, everything is included and possessed in the
+Christ when we receive Him. `With Him,' says Paul, as if that gift
+once laid in a man's heart actually enclosed within it, and had
+for its indispensable accompaniment the possession of every
+smaller thing that a man can need, Jesus Christ is, as it were, a
+great Cornucopia, a horn of abundance, out of which will pour,
+with magic affluence, all manner of supplies according as we
+require. This fountain flows with milk, wine, and water, as men
+need. Everything is given us when Christ is given to us, because
+Christ is the Heir of all things, and we possess all things in
+Him; as some poor village maiden married to a prince in disguise,
+who, on the morrow of her wedding finds that she is lady of broad
+lands, and mistress of a kingdom. `He that spared not His own
+Son,' not only `with Him will give,' but in Him has `given us all
+things.'
+
+And so, brethren, just as that great gift is the illuminating fact
+in reference to the divine heart, so is it the interpreting fact
+in reference to the divine dealings. Only when we keep firm hold
+of Christ as the gift of God, and the Explainer of all that God
+does, can we face the darkness, the perplexities, the torturing
+questions that from the beginning have harassed men's minds as
+they looked upon the mysteries of human misery. If we recognise
+that God has given us His Son, then all things become, if not
+plain, at least lighted with some gleam from that great gift; and
+we feel that the surrender of Christ is the constraining fact
+which shapes after its own likeness, and for its own purpose, all
+the rest of God's dealings with men. That gift makes anything
+believable, reasonable, possible, rather than that He should spare
+not His own Son, and then should counterwork His own act by
+sending the world anything but good.
+
+III. And now, lastly, take one or two practical issues from these
+thoughts, in reference to our own belief and conduct.
+
+First, I would say, Let us correct our estimates of the relative
+importance of the two sets of gifts. On the one side stands the
+solitary Christ; on the other side are massed all delights of sense,
+all blessings of time, all the things that the vulgar estimation of
+men unanimously recognises to be good. These are only makeweights.
+They are all lumped together into an `also.' They are but the golden
+dust that may be filed off from the great ingot and solid block.
+They are but the outward tokens of His far deeper and true
+preciousness. They are secondary; He is the primary. What an
+inversion of our notions of good! Do \emph{you} degrade all the
+world's wealth, pleasantness, ease, prosperity, into an `also?' Are
+you content to put it in the secondary place, as a result, if it
+please Him, of Christ? Do you live as if you did? Which do you
+hunger for most? Which do you labour for hardest? `Seek ye first the
+Kingdom and the King, and all `these things shall be added unto
+you.'
+
+Let these thoughts teach us that sorrow too is one of the gifts of
+the Christ. The words of my text, at first sight, might seem to be
+simply a promise of abundant earthly good. But look what lies
+close beside them, and is even part of the same triumphant burst.
+`Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or
+nakedness, or peril, or sword?' These are some of the `all things'
+which Paul expected that God would give him and his brethren. And
+looking upon all, he says, `They all work together for good'; and
+in them all we may be more than conquerors. It would be a poor,
+shabby issue of such a great gift as that of which we have been
+speaking, if it were only to be followed by the sweetnesses and
+prosperity and wealth of this world. But here is the point that we
+have to keep hold of---inasmuch as He gives us all things, let us
+take all the things that come to us as being as distinctly the
+gifts of His love, as is the gift of Christ Himself. A wise
+physician, to an ignorant onlooker, might seem to be acting in
+contradictory fashions when in the one moment he slashes into a
+limb, with a sharp, gleaming knife, and in the next sedulously
+binds the wounds, and closes the arteries, but the purpose of both
+acts is one.
+
+The diurnal revolution of the earth brings the joyful sunrise and
+the pathetic sunset. The same annual revolution whirls us through
+the balmy summer days and the biting winter ones. God's purpose is
+one. His methods vary. The road goes straight to its goal; but it
+sometimes runs in tunnels dank and dark and stifling, and
+sometimes by sunny glades and through green pastures. God's
+purpose is always love, brother. His withdrawals are gifts, and
+sorrow is not the least of the benefits which come to us through
+the Man of Sorrows.
+
+So again, let these thoughts teach us to live by a very quiet and
+peaceful faith. We find it a great deal easier to trust God for
+Heaven than for earth---for the distant blessings than for the
+near ones. Many a man will venture his soul into God's hands, who
+would hesitate to venture to-morrow's food there. Why? Is it not
+because we do not really trust Him for the greater that we find it
+so hard to trust Him for the less? Is it not because we want the
+less more really than we want the greater, that we can put
+ourselves off with faith for the one, and want something more
+solid to grasp for the other? Live in the calm confidence that God
+gives all things; and gives us for to-morrow as for eternity; for
+earth as for heaven.
+
+And, last of all, make you quite sure that you have taken
+\textit{the} great gift of God. He gives it to all the world, but
+they only have it who accept it by faith. Have you, my brother? I
+look out upon the lives of the mass of professing Christians; and
+this question weighs on my heart, judging by conduct---have they
+really got Christ for their own? `Wherefore do ye spend your money
+for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which
+satisfieth not?' Look how you are all fighting and scrambling, and
+sweating and fretting, to get hold of the goods of this present
+life, and here is a gift gleaming before you all the while that
+you will not condescend to take. Like a man standing in a
+market-place offering sovereigns for nothing, which nobody accepts
+because they think the offer is too good to be true, so God
+complains and wails: I have stretched out My hands all the day,
+laden with gifts, and no man regarded.
+
+\begin{verse}
+`It is only heaven may be had for the asking; \\
+ It is only God that is given away.'
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent He gives His Son. Take Him by humble faith in His
+sacrifice and Spirit; take Him, and with Him He freely gives you
+all things.
+
+\chapter{More Than Conquerors}
+\markright{ROMANS viii. 37}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him
+that loved us.'---\textsc{Romans} viii. 37.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+In order to understand and feel the full force of this triumphant
+saying of the Apostle, we must observe that it is a negative
+answer to the preceding questions, `Who shall separate us from the
+love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or
+famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?' A heterogeneous mass
+the Apostle here brigades together as an antagonistic army. They
+are alike in nothing except that they are all evils. There is no
+attempt at an exhaustive enumeration, or at classification. He
+clashes down, as it were, a miscellaneous mass of evil things, and
+then triumphs over them, and all the genus to which they belong,
+as being utterly impotent to drag men away from Jesus Christ. To
+ask the question is to answer it, but the form of the answer is
+worth notice. Instead of directly replying, `No! no such powerless
+things as these can separate us from the love of Christ,' he says,
+`No! In all these things, whilst weltering amongst them, whilst
+ringed round about by them, as by encircling enemies, ``we are
+more than conquerors.''\,' Thereby, he suggests that there is
+something needing to be done by us, in order that the foes may not
+exercise their natural effect. And so, taking the words of my text
+in connection with that to which they are an answer, we have three
+things---the impotent enemies of love; the abundant victory of
+love; `We are more than conquerors'; and the love that makes us
+victorious. Let us look then at these three things briefly.
+
+I. First of all, the impotent enemies of love.
+
+There is contempt in the careless massing together of the foes
+which the Apostle enumerates. He begins with the widest word that
+covers everything---`affliction.' Then he specifies various forms
+of it---`distress,' \textit{straitening}, as the word might be
+rendered, then he comes to evils inflicted for Christ's sake by
+hostile men---`persecution,' then he names purely physical evils,
+`hunger' and `nakedness,' then he harks back again to man's
+antagonism, `peril,' and `sword.' And thus carelessly, and without
+an effort at logical order, he throws together, as specimens of
+their class, these salient points, as it were, and crests of the
+great sea, whose billows threaten to roll over us; and he laughs
+at them all, as impotent and nought, when compared with the love
+of Christ, which shields us from them all.
+
+Now it must be noticed that here, in his triumphant question, the
+Apostle means not our love to Christ but His to us; and not even
+our sense of that love, but the fact itself. And his question is
+just this:---Is there any evil in the world that can make Christ
+stop loving a man that cleaves to Him? And, as I said, to ask the
+question is to answer it. The two things belong to two different
+regions. They have nothing in common. The one moves amongst the
+low levels of earth; the other dwells up amidst the abysses of
+eternity, and to suppose that anything that assails and afflicts
+us here has any effect in making that great heart cease to love us
+is to fancy that the mists can quench the sunlight, is to suppose
+that that which lies down low in the earth can rise to poison and
+to darken the heavens.
+
+There is no need, in order to rise to the full height of the
+Christian contempt for calamity, to deny any of its terrible
+power. These things can separate us from much. They can separate
+us from joy, from hope, from almost all that makes life desirable.
+They can strip us to the very quick, but the quick they cannot
+touch. The frost comes and kills the flowers, browns the leaves,
+cuts off the stems, binds the sweet music of the flowing rivers in
+silent chains, casts mists and darkness over the face of the
+solitary grey world, but it does not touch the life that is in the
+root.
+
+And so all these outward sorrows that have power over the whole of
+the outward life, and can slay joy and all but stifle hope, and
+can ban men into irrevocable darkness and unalleviated solitude,
+they do not touch in the smallest degree the secret bond that
+binds the heart to Jesus, nor in any measure affect the flow of
+His love to us. Therefore we may front them and smile at them and
+say:
+
+\begin{verse}
+`Do as thou wilt, devouring time, \\
+ With this wide world, and all its fading sweets';
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent `my flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength
+of my heart, and my portion for ever.'
+
+You need not be very much afraid of anything being taken from you
+as long as Christ is left you. You will not be altogether hopeless
+so long as Christ, who is our hope, still speaks His faithful
+promises to you, nor will the world be lonely and dark to them who
+feel that they are lapt in the sweet and all-pervading
+consciousness of the changeless love of the heart of Christ.
+`Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution?'---in any of
+these things, `we are more than conquerors through Him that loved
+us.' Brethren, that is the Christian way of looking at all
+externals, not only at the dark and the sorrowful, but at the
+bright and the gladsome. If the withdrawal of external blessings
+does not touch the central sanctities and sweetness of a life in
+communion with Jesus, the bestowal of external blessedness does
+not much brighten or gladden it. We can face the withdrawal of
+them all, we need not covet the possession of them all, for we
+have all in Christ; and the world without His love contributes
+less to our blessedness and our peace than the absence of all its
+joys with His love does. So let us feel that earth, in its givings
+and in its withholdings, is equally impotent to touch the one
+thing that we need, the conscious possession of the love of
+Christ.
+
+All these foes, as I have said, have no power over the fact of
+Christ's love to us, but they have power, and a very terrible
+power, over our consciousness of that love; and we may so kick
+against the pricks as to lose, in the pain of our sorrows, the
+assurance of His presence, or be so fascinated by the false and
+vulgar sweetnesses and promises of the world as, in the eagerness
+of our chase after them, to lose our sense of the all-sufficing
+certitude of His love. Tribulation does not strip us of His love,
+but tribulation may so darken our perceptions that we cannot see
+the sun. Joys need not rob us of His heart, but joys may so fill
+ours, as that there shall be no longing for His presence within
+us. Therefore let us not exaggerate the impotence of these foes,
+but feel that there are real dangers, as in the sorrows so in the
+blessings of our outward life, and that the evil to be dreaded is
+that outward things, whether in their bright or in their dark
+aspects, may come between us and the home of our hearts, the love
+of the loving Christ.
+
+II. So then, note next, the abundant victory of love.
+
+Mark how the Apostle, in his lofty and enthusiastic way, is not
+content here with simply saying that he and his fellows conquer.
+It would be a poor thing, he seems to think, if the balance barely
+inclined to our side, if the victory were but just won by a hair's
+breadth and triumph were snatched, as it were, out of the very
+jaws of defeat. There must be something more than that to
+correspond to the power of the victorious Christ that is in us.
+And so, he says, we very abundantly conquer; we not only hinder
+these things which he has been enumerating from doing that which
+it is their aim apparently to do, but we actually convert them
+into helpers or allies. The `\textit{more} than conquerors' seems
+to mean, if there is any definite idea to be attached to it, the
+conversion of the enemy conquered into a friend and a helper. The
+American Indians had a superstition that every foe tomahawked sent
+fresh strength into the warrior's arm. And so all afflictions and
+trials rightly borne, and therefore overcome, make a man stronger,
+and bring him nearer to Jesus Christ.
+
+Note then, further, that not only is this victory more than bare
+victory, being the conversion of the enemy into allies, but that
+it is a victory which is won even whilst we are in the midst of
+the strife. It is not that we shall be conquerors in some far-off
+heaven, when the noise of battle has ceased and they hang the
+trumpet in the hall, but it is here now, in the hand-to-hand and
+foot-to-foot death-grapple that we do overcome. No ultimate
+victory, in some far-off and blessed heaven, will be ours unless
+moment by moment, here, to-day,' we \textit{are} more than
+conquerors through Him that loved us.'
+
+So, then, about this abundant victory there are these things to
+say:---You conquer the world only, then, when you make it
+contribute to your conscious possession of the love of Christ.
+That is the real victory, the only real victory in life. Men talk
+about overcoming here on earth, and they mean thereby the
+accomplishment of their designs. A man has `victory,' as it is
+phrased, in the world's strife, when he secures for himself the
+world's goods at which he has aimed, but that is not the Christian
+idea of the conquest of calamity. Everything that makes me feel
+more thrillingly in my inmost heart the verity and the sweetness
+of the love of Jesus Christ as my very own, is conquered by me and
+compelled to subserve my highest good, and everything which slips
+a film between me and Him, which obscures the light of His face to
+me, which makes me less desirous of, and less sure of, and less
+happy in, and less satisfied with, His love, is an enemy that has
+conquered me. And all these evils as the world calls them, and as
+our bleeding hearts have often felt them to be, are converted into
+allies and friends when they drive us to Christ, and keep us close
+to Him, in the conscious possession of His sweet and changeless
+love. That is the victory, and the only victory. Has the world
+helped me to lay hold of Christ? Then I have conquered it. Has the
+world loosened my grasp upon Him? Then it has conquered me.
+
+Note then, further, that this abundant victory depends on how we
+deal with the changes of our outward lives, our sorrows or our
+joys. There is nothing, \textit{per se}, salutary in affliction,
+there is nothing, \textit{per se}, antagonistic to Christian faith
+in it either. No man is made better by his sorrows, no man need be
+made worse by them. That depends upon how we take the things which
+come storming against us. The set of your sails, and the firmness
+of your grasp upon the tiller, determine whether the wind shall
+carry you to the haven or shall blow you out, a wandering waif,
+upon a shoreless and melancholy sea. There are some of you that
+have been blown away from your moorings by sorrow. There are some
+professing Christians who have been hindered in their work, and
+had their peace and their faith shattered all but irrevocably,
+because they have not accepted, in the spirit in which they were
+sent, the trials that have come for their good. The worst of all
+afflictions is a wasted affliction, and they are all wasted unless
+they teach us more of the reality and the blessedness of the love
+of Jesus Christ.
+
+III. Lastly, notice the love which makes us conquerors.
+
+The Apostle, with a wonderful instinctive sense of fitness, names
+Christ here by a name congruous to the thoughts which occupy his
+mind, when he speaks of Him that loved us. His question has been,
+Can anything separate us from the love of Christ? And his answer
+is, So far from that being the case, that very love, by occasion
+of sorrows and afflictions, tightens its grasp upon us, and, by
+the communication of itself to us, makes us more than conquerors.
+This great love of Jesus Christ, from which nothing can separate
+us, will use the very things that seem to threaten our separation
+as a means of coming nearer to us in its depth and in its
+preciousness.
+
+The Apostle says `Him that loved us,' and the words in the
+original distinctly point to some one fact as being the great
+instance of love. That is to say they point to His death. And so
+we may say Christ's love helps us to conquer because in His death
+He interprets for us all possible sorrows. If it be true that love
+to each of us nailed Him there, then nothing that can come to us
+but must be a love-token, and a fruit of that same love. The Cross
+is the key to all tribulation, and shows it to be a token and an
+instrument of an unchanging love.
+
+Further, that great love of Christ helps us to conquer, because in
+His sufferings and death He becomes the Companion of all the
+weary. The rough, dark, lonely road changes its look when we see
+His footprints there, not without specks of blood in them, where
+the thorns tore His feet. We conquer our afflictions if we
+recognise that `in all our afflictions He was afflicted,' and that
+Himself has drunk to its bitterest dregs the cup which He commends
+to our lips. He has left a kiss upon its margin, and we need not
+shrink when He holds it out to us and says `Drink ye all of it.'
+That one thought of the companionship of the Christ in our sorrows
+makes us more than conquerors.
+
+And lastly, this dying Lover of our souls communicates to us all, if
+we will, the strength whereby we may coerce all outward things into
+being helps to the fuller participation of His perfect love. Our
+sorrows and all the other distracting externals do seek to drag us
+away from Him. Is all that happens in counteraction to that pull of
+the world, that we tighten our grasp upon Him, and will not let Him
+go; as some poor wretch might the horns of the altar that did not
+respond to his grasp? Nay! what we lay hold of is no dead thing, but
+a living hand, and it grasps us more tightly than we can ever grasp
+it. So because He holds us, and not because we hold Him, we shall
+not be dragged away, by anything outside of our own weak and
+wavering souls, and all these embattled foes may come against us,
+they may shear off everything else, they cannot sever Christ from us
+unless we ourselves throw Him away. `In this thou shalt conquer.'
+`They overcame by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of His
+testimony.'
+
+\chapter{Love's Triumph}
+\markright{ROMANS viii. 38, 39}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
+powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor
+depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from
+the love of God.'---\textsc{Romans} viii. 38, 39.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+These rapturous words are the climax of the Apostle's long
+demonstration that the Gospel is the revelation of `the
+righteousness of God from faith to faith,' and is thereby `the
+power of God unto salvation.' What a contrast there is between the
+beginning and the end of his argument! It started with sombre, sad
+words about man's sinfulness and aversion from the knowledge of
+God. It closes with this sunny outburst of triumph; like some
+stream rising among black and barren cliffs, or melancholy
+moorlands, and foaming through narrow rifts in gloomy ravines, it
+reaches at last fertile lands, and flows calm, the sunlight
+dancing on its broad surface, till it loses itself at last in the
+unfathomable ocean of the love of God.
+
+We are told that the Biblical view of human nature is too dark.
+Well, the important question is not whether it is dark, but
+whether it is true. But, apart from that, the doctrine of
+Scripture about man's moral condition is not dark, if you will
+take the whole of it together. Certainly, a part of it is very
+dark. The picture, for instance, of what men are, painted at the
+beginning of this Epistle, is shadowed like a canvas of
+Rembrandt's. The Bible is `Nature's sternest painter but her
+best.' But to get the whole doctrine of Scripture on the subject,
+we have to take its confidence as to what men may become, as well
+as its portrait of what they are---and then who will say that the
+anthropology of Scripture is gloomy? To me it seems that the
+unrelieved blackness of the view which, because it admits no fall,
+can imagine no rise, which sees in all man's sins and sorrows no
+token of the dominion of an alien power, and has, therefore, no
+reason to believe that they can be separated from humanity, is the
+true `Gospel of despair,' and that the system which looks steadily
+at all the misery and all the wickedness, and calmly proposes to
+cast it all out, is really the only doctrine of human nature which
+throws any gleam of light on the darkness. Christianity begins
+indeed with, `There is none that doeth good, no, not one,' but it
+ends with this victorious p\ae{}an of our text.
+
+And what a majestic close it is to the great words that have gone
+before, fitly crowning even their lofty height! One might well
+shrink from presuming to take such words as a text, with any idea
+of exhausting or of enhancing them. My object is very much more
+humble. I simply wish to bring out the remarkable order, in which
+Paul here marshals, in his passionate, rhetorical amplification,
+all the enemies that can be supposed to seek to wrench us away
+from the love of God; and triumphs over them all. We shall best
+measure the fullness of the words by simply taking these clauses
+as they stand in the text.
+
+I. The love of God is unaffected by the extremest changes of our
+condition.
+
+The Apostle begins his fervid catalogue of vanquished foes by a
+pair of opposites which might seem to cover the whole
+ground---`neither death nor life.' What more can be said? Surely,
+these two include everything. From one point of view they do. But
+yet, as we shall see, there is more to be said. And the special
+reason for beginning with this pair of possible enemies is
+probably to be found by remembering that they are a pair, that
+between them they do cover the whole ground and represent the
+\textit{extremes} of change which can befall us. The one stands at
+the one pole, the other at the other. If these two stations, so
+far from each other, are equally near to God's love, then no
+intermediate point can be far from it. If the most violent change
+which we can experience does not in the least matter to the grasp
+which the love of God has on us, or to the grasp which we may have
+on it, then no less violent a change can be of any consequence. It
+is the same thought in a somewhat modified form, as we find in
+another word of Paul's, `Whether we live, we live unto the Lord;
+and whether we die, we die unto the Lord.' Our subordination to
+Him is the same, and our consecration should be the same, in all
+varieties of condition, even in that greatest of all variations.
+His love to us makes no account of that mightiest of changes. How
+should it be affected by slighter ones?
+
+The distance of a star is measured by the apparent change in its
+position, as seen from different points of the earth's surface or
+orbit. But this great Light stands steadfast in our heaven, nor
+moves a hair's-breadth, nor pours a feebler ray on us, whether we
+look up to it from the midsummer day of busy life, or from the
+midwinter of death. These opposites are parted by a distance to
+which the millions of miles of the world's path among the stars
+are but a point, and yet the love of God streams down on them
+alike.
+
+Of course, the confidence in immortality is implied in this
+thought. Death does not, in the slightest degree, affect the
+essential vitality of the soul; so it does not, in the slightest
+degree, affect the outflow of God's love to that soul. It is a
+change of condition and circumstance, and no more. He does not
+lose us in the dust of death. The withered leaves on the pathway
+are trampled into mud, and indistinguishable to human eyes; but He
+sees them even as when they hung green and sunlit on the mystic
+tree of life.
+
+How beautifully this thought contrasts with the saddest aspect of
+the power of death in our human experience! He is Death the
+Separator, who unclasps our hands from the closest, dearest grasp,
+and divides asunder joints and marrow, and parts soul and body,
+and withdraws us from all our habitude and associations and
+occupations, and loosens every bond of society and concord, and
+hales us away into a lonely land. But there is one bond which his
+`abhorred shears' cannot cut. Their edge is turned on \textit{it}.
+One Hand holds us in a grasp which the fleshless fingers of Death
+in vain strive to loosen. The separator becomes the uniter; he
+rends us apart from the world that He may `bring us to God.' The
+love filtered by drops on us in life is poured upon us in a flood
+in death; `for I am persuaded, that neither death nor life shall
+be able to separate us from the love of God.'
+
+II. The love of God is undiverted from us by any other order of
+beings.
+
+`Nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers,' says Paul. Here we
+pass from conditions affecting ourselves to living beings beyond
+ourselves. Now, it is important for understanding the precise
+thought of the Apostle to observe that this expression, when used
+without any qualifying adjective, seems uniformly to mean good
+angels, the hierarchy of blessed spirits before the throne. So
+that there is no reference to `spiritual wickedness in high
+places' striving to draw men away from God. The supposition which
+the Apostle makes is, indeed, an impossible one, that these
+ministering spirits, who are sent forth to minister to them who
+shall be heirs of salvation, should so forget their mission and
+contradict their nature as to seek to bar us out from the love
+which it is their chiefest joy to bring to us. He knows it to be
+an impossible supposition, and its very impossibility gives energy
+to his conclusion, just as when in the same fashion he makes the
+other equally impossible supposition about an angel from heaven
+preaching another gospel than that which he had preached to
+them.
+
+So we may turn the general thought of this second category of
+impotent efforts in two different ways, and suggest, first, that
+it implies the utter powerlessness of any third party in regard to
+the relations between our souls and God.
+
+We alone have to do with Him alone. The awful fact of
+individuality, that solemn mystery of our personal being, has its
+most blessed or its most dread manifestation in our relation to
+God. There no other Being has any power. Counsel and stimulus,
+suggestion or temptation, instruction or lies, which may tend to
+lead us nearer to Him or away from Him, they may indeed give us;
+but after they have done their best or their worst, all depends on
+the personal act of our own innermost being. Man or angel can
+affect that, but from without. The old mystics called prayer `the
+flight of the lonely soul to the only God.' It is the name for all
+religion. These two, God and the soul, have to `transact,' as our
+Puritan forefathers used to say, as if there were no other beings
+in the universe but only they two. Angels and principalities and
+powers may stand beholding with sympathetic joy; they may minister
+blessing and guardianship in many ways; but the decisive act of
+union between God and the soul they can neither effect nor
+prevent.
+
+And as for them, so for men around us; the limits of their power
+to harm us are soon set. They may shut us out from human love by
+calumnies, and dig deep gulfs of alienation between us and dear
+ones; they may hurt and annoy us in a thousand ways with
+slanderous tongues, and arrows dipped in poisonous hatred, but one
+thing they cannot do. They may build a wall around us, and
+imprison us from many a joy and many a fair prospect, but they
+cannot put a roof on it to keep out the sweet influences from
+above, or hinder us from looking up to the heavens. Nobody can
+come between us and God but ourselves.
+
+Or, we may turn this general thought in another direction, and
+say, These blessed spirits around the throne do not absorb and
+intercept His love. They gather about its steps in their `solemn
+troops and sweet societies'; but close as are their ranks, and
+innumerable as is their multitude, they do not prevent that love
+from passing beyond them to us on the outskirts of the crowd. The
+planet nearest the sun is drenched and saturated with fiery
+brightness, but the rays from the centre of life pass on to each
+of the sister spheres in its turn, and travel away outwards to
+where the remotest of them all rolls in its far-off orbit, unknown
+for millenniums to dwellers closer to the sun, but through all the
+ages visited by warmth and light according to its needs. Like that
+poor, sickly woman who could lay her wasted fingers on the hem of
+Christ's garment, notwithstanding the thronging multitude, we can
+reach our hands through all the crowd, or rather He reaches His
+strong hand to us and heals and blesses us. All the guests are fed
+full at that great table. One's gain is not another's loss. The
+multitudes sit on the green grass, and the last man of the last
+fifty gets as much as the first. `They did all eat, and were
+filled'; and more remains than fed them all. So all beings are
+`nourished from the King's country,' and none jostle others out of
+their share. This healing fountain is not exhausted of its
+curative power by the early comers. `I will give unto this last,
+even as unto thee.' `Nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers,
+shall be able to separate us from the love of God.'
+
+III. The love of God is raised above the power of time.
+
+`Nor things present, nor things to come,' is the Apostle's next
+class of powers impotent to disunite us from the love of God. The
+rhythmical arrangement of the text deserves to be noticed, as
+bearing not only on its music and rhetorical flow, but as
+affecting its force. We had first a pair of opposites, and then a
+triplet; `death and life: angels, principalities, and powers.' We
+have again a pair of opposites; `things present, things to come,'
+again followed by a triplet, `height nor depth, nor any other
+creature.' The effect of this is to divide the whole into two, and
+to throw the first and second classes more closely together, as
+also the third and fourth. Time and Space, these two mysterious
+ideas, which work so fatally on all human love, are powerless
+here.
+
+The great revelation of God, on which the whole of Judaism was
+built, was that made to Moses of the name `I Am that I Am.' And
+parallel to the verbal revelation was the symbol of the Bush,
+burning and unconsumed, which is so often misunderstood. It
+appears wholly contrary to the usage of Scriptural visions, which
+are ever wont to express in material form the same truth which
+accompanies them in words, that the meaning of that vision should
+be, as it is frequently taken as being, the continuance of Israel
+unharmed by the fiery furnace of persecution. Not the continuance
+of Israel, but the eternity of Israel's God is the teaching of
+that flaming wonder. The burning Bush and the Name of the Lord
+proclaimed the same great truth of self-derived, self-determined,
+timeless, undecaying Being. And what better symbol than the bush
+burning, and yet not burning out, could be found of that God in
+whose life there is no tendency to death, whose work digs no pit
+of weariness into which it falls, who gives and is none the
+poorer, who fears no exhaustion in His spending, no extinction in
+His continual shining?
+
+And this eternity of Being is no mere metaphysical abstraction. It
+is eternity of love, for God is love. That great stream, the
+pouring out of His own very inmost Being, knows no pause, nor does
+the deep fountain from which it flows ever sink one hair's-breadth
+in its pure basin.
+
+We know of earthly loves which cannot die. They have entered so
+deeply into the very fabric of the soul, that like some cloth dyed
+in grain, as long as two threads hold together they will retain
+the tint. We have to thank God for such instances of love stronger
+than death, which make it easier for us to believe in the
+unchanging duration of His. But we know, too, of love that can
+change, and we know that all love must part. Few of us have
+reached middle life, who do not, looking back, see our track
+strewed with the gaunt skeletons of dead friendships, and dotted
+with `oaks of weeping,' waving green and mournful over graves, and
+saddened by footprints striking away from the line of march, and
+leaving us the more solitary for their departure.
+
+How blessed then to know of a love which cannot change or die! The
+past, the present, and the future are all the same to Him, to whom
+`a thousand years,' that can corrode so much of earthly love, are
+in their power to change `as one day,' and `one day,' which can
+hold so few of the expressions of our love, may be `as a thousand
+years' in the multitude and richness of the gifts which it can be
+expanded to contain. The whole of what He has been to any past, He
+is to us to-day. `The God of Jacob is our refuge.' All these
+old-world stories of loving care and guidance may be repeated in
+our lives.
+
+So we may bring the blessedness of all the past into the present,
+and calmly face the misty future, sure that it cannot rob us of
+His love.
+
+Whatever may drop out of our vainly-clasping hands, it matters
+not, if only our hearts are stayed on His love, which neither
+things present nor things to come can alter or remove. Looking on
+all the flow of ceaseless change, the waste and fading, the
+alienation and cooling, the decrepitude and decay of earthly
+affection, we can lift up with gladness, heightened by the
+contrast, the triumphant song of the ancient Church: `Give thanks
+unto the Lord: for He is good: because His mercy endureth for
+ever!'
+
+IV. The love of God is present everywhere.
+
+The Apostle ends his catalogue with a singular trio of
+antagonists; `nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature,' as
+if he had got impatient of the enumeration of impotencies, and
+having named the outside boundaries in space of the created
+universe, flings, as it were, with one rapid toss, into that large
+room the whole that it can contain, and triumphs over it all.
+
+As the former clause proclaimed the powerlessness of Time, so this
+proclaims the powerlessness of that other great mystery of
+creatural life which we call Space, Height or depth, it matters
+not. That diffusive love diffuses itself equally in all
+directions. Up or down, it is all the same. The distance from the
+centre is the same to Zenith or to Nadir.
+
+Here, we have the same process applied to that idea of
+Omnipresence as was applied in the former clause to the idea of
+Eternity. That thought, so hard to grasp with vividness, and not
+altogether a glad one to a sinful soul, is all softened and
+glorified, as some solemn Alpine cliff of bare rock is when the
+tender morning light glows on it, when it is thought of as the
+Omnipresence of Love. `Thou, God, seest me,' may be a stern word,
+if the God who sees be but a mighty Maker or a righteous Judge. As
+reasonably might we expect a prisoner in his solitary cell to be
+glad when he thinks that the jailer's eye is on him from some
+unseen spy-hole in the wall, as expect any thought of God but one
+to make a man read that grand one hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm
+with joy: `If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there; if I make my
+bed in Sheol, behold, Thou art there.' So may a man say
+shudderingly to himself, and tremble as he asks in vain, `Whither
+shall I flee from Thy Presence?' But how different it all is when
+we can cast over the marble whiteness of that solemn thought the
+warm hue of life, and change the form of our words into this of
+our text: `Nor height, nor depth, shall be able to separate us
+from the love of God.'
+
+In that great ocean of the divine love we live and move and have
+our being, floating in it like some sea flower which spreads its
+filmy beauty and waves its long tresses in the depths of
+mid-ocean. The sound of its waters is ever in our ears, and above,
+beneath, around us, its mighty currents run evermore. We need not
+cower before the fixed gaze of some stony god, looking on us
+unmoved like those Egyptian deities that sit pitiless with idle
+hands on their laps, and wide-open lidless eyes gazing out across
+the sands. We need not fear the Omnipresence of Love, nor the
+Omniscience which knows us altogether, and loves us even as it
+knows. Rather we shall be glad that we are ever in His Presence,
+and desire, as the height of all felicity and the power for all
+goodness, to walk all the day long in the light of His
+countenance, till the day come when we shall receive the crown of
+our perfecting in that we shall be `ever with the Lord.'
+
+The recognition of this triumphant sovereignty of love over all
+these real and supposed antagonists makes us, too, lords over
+them, and delivers us from the temptations which some of them
+present us to separate ourselves from the love of God. They all
+become our servants and helpers, uniting us to that love. So we
+are set free from the dread of death and from the distractions
+incident to life. So we are delivered from superstitious dread of
+an unseen world, and from craven fear of men. So we are
+emancipated from absorption in the present and from careful
+thought for the future. So we are at home everywhere, and every
+corner of the universe is to us one of the many mansions of our
+Father's house. `All things are yours, ... and ye are Christ's;
+and Christ is God's.'
+
+I do not forget the closing words of this great text. I have not
+ventured to include them in our present subject, because they
+would have introduced another wide region of thought to be laid
+down on our already too narrow canvas.
+
+But remember, I beseech you, that this love of God is explained by
+our Apostle to be `in Christ Jesus our Lord.' Love illimitable,
+all-pervasive, eternal; yes, but a love which has a channel and a
+course; love which has a method and a process by which it pours
+itself over the world. It is not, as some representations would make
+it, a vague, nebulous light diffused through space as in a chaotic
+half-made universe, but all gathered in that great Light which rules
+the day---even in Him who said: `I am the Light of the world.' In
+Christ the love of God is all centred and embodied, that it may be
+imparted to all sinful and hungry hearts, even as burning coals are
+gathered on a hearth that they may give warmth to all that are in
+the house. `God \textit{so} loved the world'---not merely \textit{so
+much}, but in \textit{such a fashion}---`that'---that what? Many
+people would leap at once from the first to the last clause of the
+verse, and regard eternal life for all and sundry as the only
+adequate expression of the universal love of God. Not so does Christ
+speak. Between that universal love and its ultimate purpose and
+desire for every man He inserts two conditions, one on God's part,
+one on man's. God's love reaches its end, namely, the bestowal of
+eternal life, by means of a divine act and a human response. `God
+\emph{so} loved the world, that He \textit{gave} His only begotten
+Son, that whosoever \textit{believeth} in Him should not perish, but
+have everlasting life.' So all the universal love of God for you and
+me and for all our brethren is `in Christ Jesus our Lord,' and faith
+in Him unites us to it by bonds which no foe can break, no shock of
+change can snap, no time can rot, no distance can stretch to
+breaking. `For I am persuaded, that neither death nor life, nor
+angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor
+things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall
+be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ
+Jesus our Lord.'
+
+\chapter{The Sacrifice of the Body}
+\markright{ROMANS xii. 1}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that
+ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto
+God, which is your reasonable service.`---\textsc{Romans} xii. 1.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+In the former part of this letter the Apostle has been building up
+a massive fabric of doctrine, which has stood the waste of
+centuries, and the assaults of enemies, and has been the home of
+devout souls. He now passes to speak of practice, and he binds the
+two halves of his letter indissolubly together by that significant
+`therefore,` which does not only look back to the thing last said,
+but to the whole of the preceding portion of the letter. `What God
+hath joined together let no man put asunder.' Christian living is
+inseparably connected with Christian believing. Possibly the error
+of our forefathers was in cutting faith too much loose from
+practice, and supposing that an orthodox creed was sufficient,
+though I think the extent to which they did suppose that has been
+very much exaggerated. The temptation of this day is precisely the
+opposite. `Conduct is three-fourths of life,' says one of our
+teachers. Yes. But what about the \textit{fourth} fourth which
+underlies conduct? Paul's way is the right way. Lay broad and deep
+the foundations of God's facts revealed to us, and then build upon
+that the fabric of a noble life. This generation superficially
+tends to cut practice loose from faith, and so to look for grapes
+from thorns and figs from thistles. Wrong thinking will not lead
+to right doing. `I beseech you, \textit{therefore}, brethren, that
+ye present your bodies a living sacrifice.'
+
+The Apostle, in beginning his practical exhortations, lays as the
+foundations of them all two companion precepts: one, with which we
+have to deal, affecting mainly the outward life; its twin sister,
+which follows in the next verse, affecting mainly the inward life.
+He who has drunk in the spirit of Paul's doctrinal teaching will
+present his body a living sacrifice, and be renewed in the spirit
+of his mind; and thus, outwardly and inwardly, will be
+approximating to God's ideal, and all specific virtues will be his
+in germ. Those two precepts lay down the broad outline, and all
+that follow in the way of specific commandments is but filling in
+its details.
+
+I. We observe that we have here, first, an all-inclusive directory
+for the outward life.
+
+Now, it is to be noticed that the metaphor of sacrifice runs
+through the whole of the phraseology of my text. The word rendered
+`present' is a technical expression for the sacerdotal action of
+offering. A tacit contrast is drawn between the sacrificial
+ritual, which was familiar to Romans as well as Jews, and the true
+Christian sacrifice and service. In the former a large portion of
+the sacrifices consisted of animals which were slain. Ours is to
+be `a living sacrifice.' In the former the offering was presented
+to the Deity, and became His property. In the Christian service,
+the gift passes, in like manner, from the possession of the
+worshipper, and is set apart for the uses of God, for that is the
+proper meaning of the word `holy.' The outward sacrifice gave an
+odour of a sweet smell, which, by a strong metaphor, was declared
+to be fragrant in the nostrils of Deity. In like manner, the
+Christian sacrifice is `acceptable unto God.' These other
+sacrifices were purely outward, and derived no efficacy from the
+disposition of the worshipper. Our sacrifice, though the material
+of the offering be corporeal, is the act of the inner man, and so
+is called `rational' rather than `reasonable,' as our Version has
+it, or as in other parts of Scripture, `spiritual.' And the last
+word of my text, `service,' retains the sacerdotal allusion,
+because it does not mean the service of a slave or domestic, but
+that of a priest.
+
+And so the sum of the whole is that the master-word for the
+outward life of a Christian is sacrifice. That, again, includes
+two things---self-surrender and surrender to God.
+
+Now, Paul was not such a superficial moralist as to begin at the
+wrong end, and talk about the surrender of the outward life,
+unless as the result of the prior surrender of the inward, and
+that priority of the consecration of the man to his offering of
+the body is contained in the very metaphor. For a priest needs to
+be consecrated before he can offer, and we in our innermost wills,
+in the depths of our nature, must be surrendered and set apart to
+God ere any of our outward activities can be laid upon His altar.
+The Apostle, then, does not make the mistake of substituting
+external for internal surrender, but he presupposes that the
+latter has preceded. He puts the sequence more fully in the
+parallel passage in this very letter: `Yield yourselves unto God,
+and your bodies as instruments of righteousness unto Him.' So,
+then, first of all, we must be priests by our inward consecration,
+and then, since `a priest must have somewhat to offer,' we must
+bring the outward life and lay it upon His altar.
+
+Now, of the two thoughts which I have said are involved in this
+great keyword, the former is common to Christianity, with all
+noble systems of morality, whether religious or irreligious. It is
+a commonplace, on which I do not need to dwell, that every man who
+will live a man's life, and not that of a beast, must sacrifice
+the flesh, and rigidly keep it down. But that commonplace is
+lifted into an altogether new region, assumes a new solemnity, and
+finds new power for its fulfilment when we add to the moralist's
+duty of control of the animal and outward nature the other
+thought, that the surrender must be to God.
+
+There is no need for my dwelling at any length on the various
+practical directions in which this great exhortation must be
+wrought out. It is of more importance, by far, to have well fixed
+in our minds and hearts the one dominant thought that sacrifice is
+the keyword of the Christian life than to explain the directions
+in which it applies. But still, just a word or two about these.
+There are three ways in which we may look at the body, which the
+Apostle here says is to be yielded up unto God.
+
+It is the recipient of impressions from without. \textit{There} is
+a field for consecration. The eye that looks upon evil, and by the
+look has rebellious, lustful, sensuous, foul desires excited in
+the heart, breaks this solemn law. The eye that among the things
+seen dwells with complacency on the pure, and turns from the
+impure as if a hot iron had been thrust into its pupil; that in
+the things seen discerns shimmering behind them, and manifested
+through them, the things unseen and eternal, is the consecrated
+eye. `Art for Art's sake,' to quote the cant of the day, has too
+often meant art for the flesh's sake. And there are pictures and
+books, and sights of various sorts, flashed before the eyes of you
+young men and women which it is pollution to dwell upon, and
+should be pain to remember. I beseech you all to have guard over
+these gates of the heart, and to pray, `Turn away mine eyes from
+viewing vanity.' And the other senses, in like manner, have need
+to be closely connected with God if they are not to rush us down
+to the devil.
+
+The body is not only the recipient of impressions. It is the
+possessor of appetites and necessities. See to it that these are
+indulged, with constant reference to God. It is no small
+attainment of the Christian life `to eat our meat with gladness
+and singleness of heart, praising God.' In a hundred directions
+this characteristic of our corporeal lives tends to lead us all
+away from supreme consecration to Him. There is the senseless
+luxury of this generation. There is the exaggerated care for
+physical strength and completeness amongst the young; there is the
+intemperance in eating and drinking, which is the curse and the
+shame of England. There is the provision for the flesh, the
+absorbing care for the procuring of material comforts, which
+drowns the spirit in miserable anxieties, and makes men
+bond-slaves. There is the corruption which comes from drunkenness
+and from lust. There is the indolence which checks lofty
+aspirations and stops a man in the middle of noble work. And there
+are many other forms of evil on which I need not dwell, all of
+which are swept clean out of the way when we lay to heart this
+injunction: `I beseech you present your bodies a living
+sacrifice,' and let appetites and tastes and corporeal needs be
+kept in rigid subordination and in conscious connection with Him.
+I remember a quaint old saying of a German schoolmaster, who
+apostrophised his body thus: `I go with you three times a day to
+eat; you must come with me three times a day to pray.' Subjugate
+the body, and let it be the servant and companion of the devout
+spirit.
+
+It is also, besides being the recipient of impressions, and the
+possessor of needs and appetites, our instrument for working in
+the world. And so the exhortation of my text comes to include
+this, that all our activities done by means of brain and eye and
+tongue and hand and foot shall be consciously devoted to Him, and
+laid as a sacrifice upon His altar. That pervasive, universally
+diffused reference to God, in all the details of daily life, is
+the thing that Christian men and women need most of all to try to
+cultivate. `Pray without ceasing,' says the Apostle. This
+exhortation can only be obeyed if our work is indeed worship,
+being done by God's help, for God's sake, in communion with
+God.
+
+So, dear friends, sacrifice is the keynote---meaning thereby
+surrender, control, and stimulus of the corporeal frame, surrender
+to God, in regard to the impressions which we allow to be made
+upon our senses, to the indulgence which we grant to our
+appetites, and the satisfaction which we seek for our needs, and
+to the activities which we engage in by means of this wondrous
+instrument with which God has trusted us. These are the plain
+principles involved in the exhortation of my text. `He that soweth
+to the flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption.' `I keep under
+my body, and bring it into subjection.' It is a good servant; it
+is a bad master.
+
+II. Note, secondly, the relation between this priestly service and
+other kinds of worship.
+
+I need only say a word about that. Paul is not meaning to
+depreciate the sacrificial ritual, from which he drew his emblem.
+But he is meaning to assert that the devotion of a life,
+manifested through bodily activity, is higher in its nature than
+the symbolical worship of any altar and of any sacrifice. And that
+falls in with prevailing tendencies in this day, which has laid
+such a firm hold on the principle that daily conduct is better
+than formal worship, that it has forgotten to ask the question
+whether the daily conduct is likely to be satisfactory if the
+formal worship is altogether neglected. I believe, as profoundly
+as any man can, that the true worship is distinguishable from and
+higher than the more sensuous forms of the Catholic or other
+sacramentarian churches, or the more simple of the Puritan and
+Nonconformist, or the altogether formless of the Quaker. I believe
+that the best worship is the manifold activities of daily life
+laid upon God's altar, so that the division between things secular
+and things sacred is to a large extent misleading and irrelevant.
+But at the same time I believe that you have very little chance of
+getting this diffused and all-pervasive reference of all a man's
+doings to God unless there are, all through his life, recurring
+with daily regularity, reservoirs of power, stations where he may
+rest, kneeling-places where the attitude of service is exchanged
+for the attitude of supplication; times of quiet communion with
+God which shall feed the worshipper's activities as the white
+snowfields on the high summits feed the brooks that sparkle by the
+way, and bring fertility wherever they run. So, dear brethren,
+remember that whilst life is the field of worship there must be
+the inward worship within the shrine if there is to be the outward
+service.
+
+III. Lastly, note the equally comprehensive motive and ground of
+this all-inclusive directory for conduct.
+
+`I beseech you, by the mercies of God.' That plural does not mean
+that the Apostle is extending his view over the whole wide field
+of the divine beneficence, but rather that he is contemplating the
+one all-inclusive mercy about which the former part of his letter
+has been eloquent---viz. the gift of Christ---and contemplating it
+in the manifoldness of the blessings which flow from it. The
+mercies of God which move a man to yield himself as a sacrifice
+are not the diffused beneficences of His providence, but the
+concentrated love that lies in the person and work of His Son.
+
+And there, as I believe, is the one motive to which we can appeal
+with any prospect of its being powerful enough to give the needful
+impetus all through a life. The sacrifice of Christ is the ground
+on which our sacrifices can be offered and accepted, for it was
+the sacrifice of a death propitiatory and cleansing, and on it, as
+the ancient ritual taught us, may be reared the enthusiastic
+sacrifice of a life---a thankoffering for it.
+
+Nor is it only the ground on which our sacrifice is accepted, but
+it is the great motive by which our sacrifice is impelled.
+\textit{There} is the difference between the Christian teaching,
+`present your bodies a sacrifice,' and the highest and noblest of
+similar teaching elsewhere. One of the purest and loftiest of the
+ancient moralists was a contemporary of Paul's. He would have
+re-echoed from his heart the Apostle's directory, but he knew
+nothing of the Apostle's motive. So his exhortations were
+powerless. He had no spell to work on men's hearts, and his lofty
+teachings were as the voice of one crying in the wilderness.
+Whilst Seneca taught, Rome was a cesspool of moral putridity and
+Nero butchered. So it always is. There may be noble teachings
+about self-control, purity, and the like, but an evil and
+adulterous generation is slow to dance to such piping.
+
+Our poet has bid us---
+
+\begin{verse}
+`Move upwards, casting out the beast, \\
+ And let the ape and tiger die.'
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent But how is this heavy bulk of ours to `move upwards';
+how is the beast to be `cast out'; how are the `ape and tiger' in
+us to be slain? Paul has told us, `By the mercies of God.'
+Christ's gift, meditated on, accepted, introduced into will and
+heart, is the one power that will melt our obstinacy, the one
+magnet that will draw us after it.
+
+Nothing else, brethren, as your own experience has taught you, and
+as the experience of the world confirms, nothing else will bind
+Behemoth, and put a hook in his nose. Apart from the constraining
+motive of the love of Christ, all the cords of prudence,
+conscience, advantage, by which men try to bind their unruly
+passions and manacle the insisting flesh, are like the chains on
+the demoniac's wrists--- `And he had oftentimes been bound by
+chains, and the chains were snapped asunder.' But the silken leash
+with which the fair Una in the poem leads the lion, the silken
+leash of love will bind the strong man, and enable us to rule
+ourselves. If we will open our hearts to the sacrifice of Christ,
+we shall be able to offer ourselves as thankofferings. If we will
+let His love sway our wills and consciences, He will give our
+wills and consciences power to master and to offer up our flesh.
+And the great change, according to which He will one day change
+the body of our humiliation into the likeness of the body of His
+glory, will be begun in us, if we live under the influence of the
+motive and the commandment which this Apostle bound together in
+our text and in his other great words, `Ye are not your own; ye
+are bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body and
+spirit, which are His.'
+
+\chapter{Transfiguration}
+\markright{ROMANS xii. 2}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the
+renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and
+acceptable, and perfect will of God.'---\textsc{Romans} xii. 2.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+I had occasion to point out, in a sermon on the preceding verse,
+that the Apostle is, in this context, making the transition from
+the doctrinal to the practical part of his letter, and that he
+lays down broad principles, of which all his subsequent
+injunctions and exhortations are simply the filling up of the
+details. One master word, for the whole Christian life, as we then
+saw, is sacrifice, self-surrender, and that to God. In like
+manner, Paul here brackets, with that great conception of the
+Christian life, another equally dominant and equally
+comprehensive. In one aspect, it is self-surrender; in another, it
+is growing transformation. And, just as in the former verse we
+found that an inward surrender preceded the outward sacrifice, and
+that the inner man, having been consecrated as a priest, by this
+yielding of himself to God, was then called upon to manifest
+inward consecration by outward sacrifice, so in this further
+exhortation, an inward `renewing of the mind' is regarded as the
+necessary antecedent of transformation of outward life.
+
+So we have here another comprehensive view of what the Christian
+life ought to be, and that not only grasped, as it were, in its very
+centre and essence, but traced out in two directions---as to that
+which must precede it within, and as to that which follows it as
+consequence. An outline of the possibilities, and therefore the
+duties, of the Christian, is set forth here, in these three thoughts
+of my text, the renewed mind issuing in a transfigured life, crowned
+and rewarded by a clearer and ever clearer insight into what we
+ought to be and do.
+
+I. Note, then, that the foundation of all transformation of
+character and conduct is laid deep in a renewed mind.
+
+Now it is a matter of world-wide experience, verified by each of
+us in our own case, if we have ever been honest in the attempt,
+that the power of self-improvement is limited by very narrow
+bounds. Any man that has ever tried to cure himself of the most
+trivial habit which he desires to get rid of, or to alter in the
+slightest degree the set of some strong taste or current of his
+being, knows how little he can do, even by the most determined
+effort. Something may be effected, but, alas! as the proverbs of
+all nations and all lands have taught us, it is very little
+indeed. `You cannot expel nature with a fork,' said the Roman.
+`What's bred in the bone won't come out of the flesh,' says the
+Englishman. `Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his
+spots?' says the Hebrew. And we all know what the answer to that
+question is. The problem that is set before a man when you tell
+him to effect self-improvement is something like that which
+confronted that poor paralytic lying in the porch at the pool: `If
+you can walk you will be able to get to the pool that will make
+you able to walk. But you have got to be cured before you can do
+what you need to do in order to be cured.' Only one knife can cut
+the knot. The Gospel of Jesus Christ presents itself, not as a
+mere republication of morality, not as merely a new stimulus and
+motive to do what is right, but as an actual communication to men
+of a new power to work in them, a strong hand laid upon our poor,
+feeble hand with which we try to put on the brake or to apply the
+stimulus. It is a new gift of a life which will unfold itself
+after its own nature, as the bud into flower, and the flower into
+fruit; giving new desires, tastes, directions, and renewing the
+whole nature. And so, says Paul, the beginning of transformation
+of character is the renovation in the very centre of the being,
+and the communication of a new impulse and power to the inward
+self.
+
+Now, I suppose that in my text the word `mind' is not so much
+employed in the widest sense, including all the affections and
+will, and the other faculties of our nature, as in the narrower
+sense of the perceptive power, or that faculty in our nature by
+which we recognise, and make our own, certain truths. `The
+renewing of the mind,' then, is only, in such an interpretation, a
+theological way of putting the simpler English thought, a change
+of estimates, a new set of views; or if that word be too shallow,
+as indeed it is, a new set of convictions. It is profoundly true
+that `As a man thinketh, so is he.' Our characters are largely
+made by our estimates of what is good or bad, desirable or
+undesirable. And what the Apostle is thinking about here is, as I
+take it, principally how the body of Christian truth, if it
+effects a lodgment in, not merely the brain of a man, but his
+whole nature, will modify and alter it all. Why, we all know how
+often a whole life has been revolutionised by the sudden dawning
+or rising in its sky, of some starry new truth, formerly hidden
+and undreamed of. And if we should translate the somewhat archaic
+phraseology of our text into the plainest of modern English, it
+just comes to this: If you want to change your characters, and God
+knows they all need it, change the deep convictions of your mind;
+and get hold, as living realities, of the great truths of Christ's
+Gospel. If you and I really believed what we say we believe, that
+Jesus Christ has died for us, and lives for us, and is ready to
+pour out upon us the gift of His Divine Spirit, and wills that we
+should be like Him, and holds out to us the great and wonderful
+hopes and prospects of an absolutely eternal life of supreme and
+serene blessedness at His right hand, should we be, could we be,
+the sort of people that most of us are? It is not the much that
+you say you believe that shapes your character; it is the little
+that you habitually realise. Truth professed has no transforming
+power; truth received and fed upon can revolutionise a man's whole
+character.
+
+So, dear brethren, remember that my text, though it is an analysis
+of the methods of Christian progress, and though it is a wonderful
+setting forth of the possibilities open to the poorest, dwarfed,
+blinded, corrupted nature, is also all commandment. And if it is
+true that the principles of the Gospel exercise transforming power
+upon men's lives, and that in order for these principles to effect
+their natural results there must be honest dealing with them, on
+our parts, take this as the practical outcome of all this first
+part of my sermon---let us all see to it that we keep ourselves in
+touch with the truths which we say we believe; and that we
+thorough-goingly apply these truths in all their searching,
+revealing, quickening, curbing power, to every action of our daily
+lives. If for one day we could bring everything that we do into
+touch with the creed that we profess, we should be different men
+and women. Make of your every thought an action; link every action
+with a thought. Or, to put it more Christianlike, let there be
+nothing in your creed which is not in your commandments; and let
+nothing be in your life which is not moulded by these. The
+beginning of all transformation is the revolutionised conviction
+of a mind that has accepted the truths of the Gospel.
+
+II. Well then, secondly, note the transfigured life.
+
+The Apostle uses in his positive commandment, `Be ye transformed,'
+the same word which is employed by two of the Evangelists in their
+account of our Lord's transfiguration. And although I suppose it
+would be going too far to assert that there is a distinct
+reference intended to that event, it may be permissible to look
+back to it as being a lovely illustration of the possibilities
+that open to an honest Christian life---the possibility of a
+change, coming from within upwards, and shedding a strange
+radiance on the face, whilst yet the identity remains. So by the
+rippling up from within of the renewed mind will come into our
+lives a transformation not altogether unlike that which passed on
+Him when His garments did shine `so as no fuller on earth could
+white them'; and His face was as the sun in his strength.
+
+The life is to be transfigured, yet it remains the same, not only
+in the consciousness of personal identity, but in the main trend
+and drift of the character. There is nothing in the Gospel of
+Jesus Christ which is meant to obliterate the lines of the
+strongly marked individuality which each of us receives by nature.
+Rather the Gospel is meant to heighten and deepen these, and to
+make each man more intensely himself, more thoroughly individual
+and unlike anybody else. The perfection of our nature is found in
+the pursuit, to the furthest point, of the characteristics of our
+nature, and so, by reason of diversity, there is the greater
+harmony, and, all taken together, will reflect less inadequately
+the infinite glories of which they are all partakers. But whilst
+the individuality remains, and ought to be heightened by Christian
+consecration, yet a change should pass over our lives, like the
+change that passes over the winter landscape when the summer sun
+draws out the green leaves from the hard black boughs, and flashes
+a fresh colour over all the brown pastures. There should be such a
+change as when a drop or two of ruby wine falls into a cup, and so
+diffuses a gradual warmth of tint over all the whiteness of the
+water. Christ in us, if we are true to Him, will make us more
+ourselves, and yet new creatures in Christ Jesus.
+
+And the transformation is to be into His likeness who is the
+pattern of all perfection. We must be moulded after the same type.
+There are two types possible for us: this world; Jesus Christ. We
+have to make our choice which is to be the headline after which we
+are to try to write. `They that make them are like unto them.' Men
+resemble their gods; men become more or less like their idols.
+What you conceive to be desirable you will more and more
+assimilate yourselves to. Christ is the Christian man's pattern;
+is He not better than the blind, corrupt world?
+
+That transformation is no sudden thing, though the revolution
+which underlies it may be instantaneous. The working \textit{out}
+of the new motives, the working \textit{in} of the new power, is
+no mere work of a moment. It is a lifelong task till the lump be
+leavened. Michael Angelo, in his mystical way, used to say that
+sculpture effected its aim by the removal of parts; as if the
+statue lay somehow hid in the marble block. We have, day by day,
+to work at the task of removing the superfluities that mask its
+outlines. Sometimes with a heavy mallet, and a hard blow, and a
+broad chisel, we have to take away huge masses; sometimes, with
+fine tools and delicate touches, to remove a grain or two of
+powdered dust from the sparkling block, but always to seek more
+and more, by slow, patient toil, to conform ourselves to that
+serene type of all perfectness that we have learned to love in
+Jesus Christ.
+
+And remember, brethren, this transformation is no magic change
+effected whilst men sleep. It is a commandment which we have to
+brace ourselves to perform, day by day to set ourselves to the
+task of more completely assimilating ourselves to our Lord. It
+comes to be a solemn question for each of us whether we can say,
+`To-day I am liker Jesus Christ than I was yesterday; to-day the
+truth which renews the mind has a deeper hold upon me than it ever
+had before.'
+
+But this positive commandment is only one side of the
+transfiguration that is to be effected. It is clear enough that if a
+new likeness is being stamped upon a man, the process may be looked
+at from the other side; and that in proportion as we become liker
+Jesus Christ, we shall become more unlike the old type to which we
+were previously conformed. And so, says Paul, `Be not conformed to
+this world, but be ye transformed.' He does not mean to say that the
+nonconformity precedes the transformation. They are two sides of one
+process; both arising from the renewing of the mind within.
+
+Now, I do not wish to do more than just touch most lightly upon
+the thoughts that are here, but I dare not pass them by
+altogether. `This world' here, in my text, is more properly `this
+age,' which means substantially the same thing as John's favourite
+word `world,' viz.\ the sum total of godless men and things
+conceived of as separated from God, only that by this expression
+the essentially fleeting nature of that type is more distinctly
+set forth. Now the world is the world to-day just as much as it
+was in Paul's time. No doubt the Gospel has sweetened society; no
+doubt the average of godless life in England is a better thing
+than the average of godless life in the Roman Empire. No doubt
+there is a great deal of Christianity diffused through the average
+opinion and ways of looking at things, that prevail around us. But
+the World is the world still. There are maxims and ways of living,
+and so on, characteristic of the Christian life, which are in as
+complete antagonism to the ideas and maxims and practices that
+prevail amongst men who are outside of the influences of this
+Christian truth in their own hearts, as ever they were.
+
+And although it can only be a word, I want to put in here a very
+earnest word which the tendencies of this generation do very
+specially require. It seems to be thought, by a great many people,
+who call themselves Christians nowadays, that the nearer they can
+come in life, in ways of looking at things, in estimates of
+literature, for instance, in customs of society, in politics, in
+trade, and especially in amusements---the nearer they can come to
+the un-Christian world, the more `broad' (save the mark!) and
+`superior to prejudice' they are. `Puritanism,' not only in
+theology, but in life and conduct, has come to be at a discount in
+these days. And it seems to be by a great many professing
+Christians thought to be a great feat to walk as the mules on the
+Alps do, with one foot over the path and the precipice down below.
+Keep away from the edge. You are safer so. Although, of course, I
+am not talking about mere conventional dissimilarities; and though
+I know and believe and feel all that can be said about the
+insufficiency, and even insincerity, of such, yet there is a broad
+gulf between the man who believes in Jesus Christ and His Gospel
+and the man who does not, and the resulting conducts cannot be the
+same unless the Christian man is insincere.
+
+III. And now lastly, and only a word, note the great reward and
+crown of this transfigured life.
+
+Paul puts it in words which, if I had time, would require some
+commenting upon. The issue of such a life is, to put it into plain
+English, an increased power of perceiving, instinctively and
+surely, what it is God's will that we should do. And that is the
+reward. Just as when you take away disturbing masses of metal from
+near a compass, it trembles to its true point, so when, by the
+discipline of which I have been speaking, there are swept away
+from either side of us the things that would perturb our judgment,
+there comes, as blessing and reward, a clear insight into that
+which it is our duty to do.
+
+There may be many difficulties left, many perplexities. There is
+no promise here, nor is there anything in the tendencies of
+Christ-like living, to lead us to anticipate that guidance in
+regard to matters of prudence or expediency or temporal advantage
+will follow from such a transfigured life. All such matters are
+still to be determined in the proper fashion, by the exercise of
+our own best judgment and common-sense. But in the higher region,
+the knowledge of good and evil, surely it is a blessed reward, and
+one of the highest that can be given to a man, that there shall be
+in him so complete a harmony with God that, like God's Son, he
+`does always the things that please Him,' and that the Father will
+show him whatsoever things Himself doeth; and that these also will
+the son do likewise. To know beyond doubt what I ought to do, and
+knowing, to have no hesitation or reluctance in doing it, seems to
+me to be heaven upon earth, and the man that has it needs but
+little more. This, then, is the reward. Each peak we climb opens
+wider and clearer prospects into the untravelled land before
+us.
+
+And so, brethren, here is the way, the only way, by which we can
+change ourselves, first let us have our minds renewed by contact
+with the truth, then we shall be able to transform our lives into
+the likeness of Jesus Christ, and our faces too will shine, and
+our lives will be ennobled, by a serene beauty which men cannot
+but admire, though it may rebuke them. And as the issue of all we
+shall have clearer and deeper insight into that will, which to
+know is life, in keeping of which there is great reward. And thus
+our apostle's promise may be fulfilled for each of us. `We all
+with unveiled faces reflecting'---as a mirror does---`the glory of
+the Lord, are changed ... into the same image.'
+
+\chapter{Sober Thinking}
+\markright{ROMANS xii. 3}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`For I say, through the grace that is given unto me, to every man
+that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he
+ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt
+to every man the measure of faith.'---\textsc{Romans} xii. 3.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+It is hard to give advice without seeming to assume superiority;
+it is hard to take it, unless the giver identifies himself with
+the receiver, and shows that his counsel to others is a law for
+himself. Paul does so here, led by the delicate perception which
+comes from a loving heart, compared with which deliberate `tact'
+is cold and clumsy. He wishes, as the first of the specific duties
+to which he invites the Roman Christians, an estimate of
+themselves based upon the recognition of God as the Giver of all
+capacities and graces, and leading to a faithful use for the
+general good of the `gifts differing according to the grace given
+to us.' In the first words of our text, he enforces his counsel by
+an appeal to his apostolic authority; but he so presents it that,
+instead of separating himself from the Roman Christians by it, he
+unites himself with them. He speaks of `the grace given to
+\textit{me},' and in verse 6 of `the grace given to \textit{us}.'
+He was made an Apostle by the same giving God who has bestowed
+varying gifts on each of \textit{them}. He knows what is the grace
+which he possesses as he would have them know; and in these
+counsels he is assuming no superiority, but is simply using the
+special gift bestowed on him for the good of all. With this
+delicate turn of what might else have sounded harshly
+authoritative, putting prominently forward the divine gift and
+letting the man Paul to whom it was given fall into the
+background, he counsels as the first of the social duties which
+Christian men owe to one another, a sober and just estimate of
+themselves. This sober estimate is here regarded as being
+important chiefly as an aid to right service. It is immediately
+followed by counsels to the patient and faithful exercise of
+differing gifts. For thus we may know what our gifts are; and the
+acquisition of such knowledge is the aim of our text.
+
+I. What determines our gifts.
+
+Paul here gives a precise standard, or `measure' as he calls it,
+according to which we are to estimate ourselves. `Faith' is the
+measure of our gifts, and is itself a gift from God. The strength
+of a Christian man's faith determines his whole Christian
+character. Faith is trust, the attitude of receptivity. There are
+in it a consciousness of need, a yearning desire and a confidence
+of expectation. It is the open empty hand held up with the
+assurance that it will be filled; it is the empty pitcher let down
+into the well with the assurance that it will be drawn up filled.
+It is the precise opposite of the self-dependent isolation which
+shuts us out from God. The law of the Christian life is ever,
+`according to your faith be it unto you'; `believe that ye receive
+and ye have them.' So then the more faith a man exercises the more
+of God and Christ he has. It is the measure of our capacity, hence
+there may be indefinite increase in the gifts which God bestows on
+faithful souls. Each of us will have as much as he desires and is
+capable of containing. The walls of the heart are elastic, and
+desire expands them.
+
+The grace given by faith works in the line of its possessor's
+natural faculties; but these are supernaturally reinforced and
+strengthened while, at the same time, they are curbed and
+controlled, by the divine gift, and the natural gifts thus dealt
+with become what Paul calls \textit{charisms}. The whole nature of
+a Christian should be ennobled, elevated, made more delicate and
+intense, when the `Spirit of life that is in Christ Jesus' abides
+in and inspires it. Just as a sunless landscape is smitten into
+sudden beauty by a burst of sunshine which heightens the colouring
+of the flowers on the river's bank, and is flashed back from every
+silvery ripple on the stream, so the faith which brings the life
+of Christ into the life of the Christian makes him more of a man
+than he was before. So, there will be infinite variety in the
+resulting characters. It is the same force in various forms that
+rolls in the thunder or gleams in the dewdrops, that paints the
+butterfly's feathers or flashes in a star. All individual
+idiosyncrasies should be developed in the Christian Church, and
+will be when its members yield themselves fully to the indwelling
+Spirit, and can truly declare that the lives which they live in
+the flesh they live by the faith of the Son of God.
+
+But Paul here regards the measure of faith as itself `dealt to
+every man'; and however we may construe the grammar of this
+sentence there is a deep sense in which our faith is God's gift to
+us. We have to give equal emphasis to the two conceptions of faith
+as a human act and as a divine bestowal, which have so often been
+pitted against each other as contradictory when really they are
+complementary. The apparent antagonism between them is but one
+instance of the great antithesis to which we come to at last in
+reference to all human thought on the relations of man to God. `It
+is He that worketh in us both to will and to do of His own good
+pleasure'; and all our goodness is God-given goodness, and yet it
+is our goodness. Every devout heart has a consciousness that the
+faith which knits it to God is God's work in it, and that left to
+itself it would have remained alienated and faithless. The
+consciousness that his faith was his own act blended in full
+harmony with the twin consciousness that it was Christ's gift, in
+the agonised father's prayer, `Lord, I believe, help Thou mine
+unbelief.'
+
+II. What is a just estimate of our gifts.
+
+The Apostle tells us, negatively, that we are not to think more
+highly than we ought to think, and positively that we are to
+`think soberly.'
+
+To arrive at a just estimate of ourselves the estimate must ever
+be accompanied with a distinct consciousness that all is God's
+gift. That will keep us from anything in the nature of pride or
+over-weening self-importance. It will lead to true humility, which
+is not ignorance of what we can do, but recognition that we, the
+doers, are of ourselves but poor creatures. We are less likely to
+fancy that we are greater than we are when we feel that, whatever
+we are, God made us so. `What hast thou that thou didst not
+receive? Now, if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if
+thou hadst not received it?'
+
+Further, it is to be noted that the estimate of gifts which Paul
+enjoins is an estimate with a view to service. Much
+self-investigation is morbid, because it is self-absorbed; and
+much is morbid because it is undertaken only for the purpose of
+ascertaining one's `spiritual condition.' Such self-examination is
+good enough in its way, and may sometimes be very necessary; but a
+testing of one's own capacities for the purpose of ascertaining
+what we are fit for, and what therefore it is our duty to do, is
+far more wholesome. Gifts are God's summons to work, and our first
+response to the summons should be our scrutiny of our gifts with a
+distinct purpose of using them for the great end for which we
+received them. It is well to take stock of the loaves that we
+have, if the result be that we bring our poor provisions to Him,
+and put them in His hands, that He may give them back to us so
+multiplied as to be more than adequate to the needs of the
+thousands. Such just estimate of our gifts is to be attained
+mainly by noting ourselves at work. Patient self-observation may
+be important, but is apt to be mistaken; and the true test of what
+we can do is what we \textit{do} do.
+
+The just estimate of our gifts which Paul enjoins is needful in
+order that we may ascertain what God has meant us to be and do,
+and may neither waste our strength in trying to be some one else,
+nor hide our talent in the napkin of ignorance or false humility.
+There is quite as much harm done to Christian character and
+Christian service by our failure to recognise what is in our
+power, as by ambitious or ostentatious attempts at what is above
+our power. We have to be ourselves as God has made us in our
+natural faculties, and as the new life of Christ operating on
+these has made us new creatures in Him not by changing but by
+enlarging our old natures. It matters nothing what the special
+form of a Christian man's service may be; the smallest and the
+greatest are alike to the Lord of all, and He appoints His
+servants' work. Whether the servant be a cup-bearer or a
+counsellor is of little moment. `He that is faithful in that which
+is least, is faithful also in much.'
+
+The positive aspect of this right estimate of one's gifts is, if
+we fully render the Apostle's words, as the Revised Version does,
+`so to think as to think soberly.' There is to be self-knowledge
+in order to `sobriety,' which includes not only what we mean by
+sober-mindedness, but self-government; and this aspect of the
+apostolic exhortation opens out into the thought that the gifts,
+which a just estimate of ourselves pronounces us to possess, need
+to be kept bright by the continual suppression of the mind of the
+flesh, by putting down earthly desires, by guarding against a
+selfish use of them, by preventing them by rigid control from
+becoming disproportioned and our masters. All the gifts which
+Christ bestows upon His people He bestows on condition that they
+bind them together by the golden chain of self-control.
+
+\chapter{Many and One}
+\markright{ROMANS xii. 4, 5}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`For we have many members in one body, and all members have not
+the same office: 5.\ So we, being many, are one body in Christ,
+and every one members one of another.`---\textsc{Romans} xii. 4,
+5.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+To Paul there was the closest and most vital connection between
+the profoundest experiences of the Christian life and its plainest
+and most superficial duties. Here he lays one of his most mystical
+conceptions as the very foundation on which to rear the great
+structure of Christian conduct, and links on to one of his
+profoundest thoughts, the unity of all Christians in Christ, a
+comprehensive series of practical exhortations. We are accustomed
+to hear from many lips: `I have no use for these dogmas that Paul
+delights in. Give me his practical teaching. You may keep the
+Epistle to the Romans, I hold by the thirteenth of First
+Corinthians.' But such an unnatural severance between the doctrine
+and the ethics of the Epistle cannot be effected without the
+destruction of both. The very principle of this Epistle to the
+Romans is that the difference between the law and the Gospel is,
+that the one preaches conduct without a basis for it, and that the
+other says, First believe in Christ, and in the strength of that
+belief, do the right and be like Him. Here, then, in the very
+laying of the foundation for conduct in these verses we have in
+concrete example the secret of the Christian way of making good
+men.
+
+I. The first point to notice here is, the unity of the derived
+life. Many are one, because they are each in Christ, and the
+individual relationship and derivation of life from Him makes them
+one whilst continuing to be many. That great metaphor, and
+nowadays much forgotten and neglected truth, is to Paul's mind the
+fact which ought to mould the whole life and conduct of individual
+Christians and to be manifested therein. There are three most
+significant and instructive symbols by which the unity of
+believers in Christ Jesus is set forth in the New Testament. Our
+Lord Himself gives us the one of the vine and its branches, and
+that symbol suggests the silent, effortless process by which the
+life-giving sap rises and finds its way from the deep root to the
+furthest tendril and the far-extended growth. The same symbol
+loses indeed in one respect its value if we transfer it to growths
+more congenial to our northern climate, and instead of the vine
+with its rich clusters, think of some great elm, deeply rooted,
+and with its firm bole and massive branches, through all of which
+the mystery of a common life penetrates and makes every leaf in
+the cloud of foliage through which we look up participant of
+itself. But, profound and beautiful as our Lord's metaphor is, the
+vegetative uniformity of parts and the absence of individual
+characteristics make it, if taken alone, insufficient. In the tree
+one leaf is like another; it `grows green and broad and takes no
+care.' Hence, to express the whole truth of the union between
+Christ and us we must bring in other figures. Thus we find the
+Apostle adducing the marriage tie, the highest earthly example of
+union, founded on choice and affection. But even that sacred bond
+leaves a gap between those who are knit together by it; and so we
+have the conception of our text, the unity of the body as
+representing for us the unity of believers with Jesus. This is a
+unity of life. He is not only head as chief and sovereign, but He
+is soul or life, which has its seat, not in this or that organ as
+old physics teach, but pervades the whole and `filleth all in
+all.' The mystery which concerns the union of soul and body, and
+enshrouds the nature of physical life, is part of the felicity of
+this symbol in its Christian application. That commonest of all
+things, the mysterious force which makes matter live and glow
+under spiritual emotion, and changes the vibrations of a nerve, or
+the undulations of the grey brain, into hope and love and faith,
+eludes the scalpel and the microscope. Of man in his complex
+nature it is true that `clouds and darkness are round about him,'
+and we may expect an equally solemn mystery to rest upon that
+which makes out of separate individuals one living body, animated
+with the life and moved by the Spirit of the indwelling Christ. We
+can get no further back, and dig no deeper down, than His own
+words, `I am ... the life.'
+
+But, though this unity is mysterious, it is most real. Every
+Christian soul receives from Christ the life of Christ. There is a
+real implantation of a higher nature which has nothing to do with
+sin and is alien from death. There is a true regeneration which is
+supernatural, and which makes all who possess it one, in the
+measure of their possession, as truly as all the leaves on a tree
+are one because fed by the same sap, or all the members in the
+natural body are one, because nourished by the same blood. So the
+true bond of Christian unity lies in the common participation of
+the one Lord, and the real Christian unity is a unity of derived
+life.
+
+The misery and sin of the Christian Church have been, and are,
+that it has sought to substitute other bonds of unity. The whole
+weary history of the divisions and alienations between Christians
+has surely sufficiently, and more than sufficiently, shown the
+failure of the attempts to base Christian oneness upon uniformity
+of opinion, or of ritual, or of purpose. The difference between
+the real unity, and these spurious attempts after it, is the
+difference between bundles of faggots, dead and held together by a
+cord, and a living tree lifting its multitudinous foliage towards
+the heavens. The bundle of faggots may be held together in some
+sort of imperfect union, but is no exhibition of unity. If visible
+churches must be based on some kind of agreement, they can never
+cover the same ground as that of `the body of Christ.'
+
+That oneness is independent of our organisations, and even of our
+will, since it comes from the common possession of a common life.
+Its enemies are not divergent opinions or forms, but the evil
+tempers and dispositions which impede, or prevent, the flow into
+each Christian soul of the uniting `Spirit of life in Christ
+Jesus' which makes the many who may be gathered into separate
+folds one flock clustered around the one Shepherd. And if that
+unity be thus a fundamental fact in the Christian life and
+entirely apart from external organisation, the true way to
+increase it in each individual is, plainly, the drawing nearer to
+Him, and the opening of our spirits so as to receive fuller,
+deeper, and more continuous inflows from His own inexhaustible
+fullness. In the old Temple stood the seven-branched candlestick,
+an emblem of a formal unity; in the new the seven candlesticks are
+one, because Christ stands in the midst. He makes the body one;
+without Him it is a carcase.
+
+II. The diversity.
+
+`We have many members in one body, but all members have not the
+same office.' Life has different functions in different organs. It
+is light in the eye, force in the arm, music on the tongue,
+swiftness in the foot; so also is Christ. The higher a creature
+rises in the scale of life, the more are the parts differentiated.
+The lowest is a mere sac, which performs all the functions that
+the creature requires; the highest is a man with a multitude of
+organs, each of which is definitely limited to one office. In like
+manner the division of labour in society measures its advance; and
+in like manner in the Church there is to be the widest diversity.
+What the Apostle designates as `gifts' are natural characteristics
+heightened by the Spirit of Christ; the effect of the common life
+in each ought to be the intensifying and manifestation of
+individuality of character. In the Christian ideal of humanity
+there is place for every variety of gifts. The flora of the
+Mountain of God yields an endless multiplicity of growths on its
+ascending slopes which pass through every climate. There ought to
+be a richer diversity in the Church than anywhere besides; that
+tree should `bear twelve manner of fruits, yielding its fruit
+every month for the healing of the nations.' `All flesh is not the
+same flesh.' `Star differeth from star in glory.'
+
+The average Christian life of to-day sorely fails in two things:
+in being true to itself, and in tolerance of diversities. We are
+all so afraid of being ticketed as `eccentric,' `odd,' that we
+oftentimes stifle the genuine impulses of the Spirit of Christ
+leading us to the development of unfamiliar types of goodness, and
+the undertaking of unrecognised forms of service. If we trusted in
+Christ in ourselves more, and took our laws from His whispers, we
+should often reach heights of goodness which tower above us now,
+and discover in ourselves capacities which slumber undiscerned.
+There is a dreary monotony and uniformity amongst us which
+impoverishes us, and weakens the testimony that we bear to the
+quickening influence of the Spirit that is in Christ Jesus; and we
+all tend to look very suspiciously at any man who `puts all the
+others out' by being himself, and letting the life that he draws
+from the Lord dictate its own manner of expression. It would
+breathe a new life into all our Christian communities if we
+allowed full scope to the diversities of operation, and realised
+that in them all there was the one Spirit. The world condemns
+originality: the Church should have learned to prize it. `One
+after this fashion, and one after that,' is the only wholesome law
+of the development of the manifold graces of the Christian
+life.
+
+III. The harmony.
+
+`We being many are one body in Christ, and every one members one
+of another.' That expression is remarkable, for we might have
+expected to read rather members \textit{of the body}, than
+\textit{of each other}; but the bringing in of such an idea
+suggests most emphatically that thought of the mutual relation of
+each part of the great whole, and that each has offices to
+discharge for the benefit of each. In the Christian community, as
+in an organised body, the active co-operation of all the parts is
+the condition of health. All the rays into which the spectrum
+breaks up the pure white light must be gathered together again in
+order to produce it; just as every instrument in the great
+orchestra contributes to the volume of sound. The Lancashire
+hand-bell ringers may illustrate this point for us. Each man picks
+up his own bell from the table and sounds his own note at the
+moment prescribed by the score, and so the whole of the composer's
+idea is reproduced. To suppress diversities results in monotony;
+to combine them is the only sure way to secure harmony. Nor must
+we forget that the indwelling life of the Church can only be
+manifested by the full exhibition and freest possible play of all
+the forms which that life assumes in individual character. It
+needs all, and more than all, the types of mental characteristics
+that can be found in humanity to mirror the infinite beauty of the
+indwelling Lord. `There are diversities of operations,' and all
+those diversities but partially represent that same Lord `who
+worketh all in all,' and Himself is more than all, and, after all
+manifestation through human characters, remains hinted at rather
+than declared, suggested but not revealed.
+
+Still further, only by the exercise of possible diversities is the
+one body nourished, for each member, drawing life directly and
+without the intervention of any other from Christ the Source,
+draws also from his fellow-Christian some form of the common life
+that to himself is unfamiliar, and needs human intervention in
+order to its reception. Such dependence upon one's brethren is not
+inconsistent with a primal dependence on Christ alone, and is a
+safeguard against the cultivating of one's own idiosyncrasies till
+they become diseased and disproportionate. The most slenderly
+endowed Christian soul has the double charge of giving to, and
+receiving from, its brethren. We have all something which we can
+contribute to the general stock. We have all need to supplement
+our own peculiar gifts by brotherly ministration. The prime
+condition of Christian vitality has been set forth for ever by the
+gracious invitation, which is also an imperative command, `Abide
+in Me and I in you'; but they who by such abiding are recipients
+of a communicated life are not thereby isolated, but united to all
+who like them have received `the manifestation of the Spirit to do
+good with.'
+
+\chapter{Grace and Graces}
+\markright{ROMANS xii. 6--8}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Having then gifts, differing according to the grace that is given
+to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the
+proportion of faith; 7.\ Or ministry, let us wait on our
+ministering; or he that teacheth, on teaching; 8.\ Or he that
+exhorteth, on exhortation; he that giveth, let him do it with
+simplicity; he that ruleth, with diligence; he that showeth mercy,
+with cheerfulness.'---\textsc{Romans} xii. 6--8.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The Apostle here proceeds to build upon the great thought of the
+unity of believers in the one body a series of practical
+exhortations. In the first words of our text, he, with
+characteristic delicacy, identifies himself with the Roman
+Christians as a recipient, like them, of `the grace that is given
+to us,' and as, therefore, subject to the same precepts which he
+commends to them. He does not stand isolated by the grace that is
+given to him; nor does he look down as from the height of his
+apostleship on the multitude below, saying to them,---Go. As one
+of themselves he stands amongst them, and with brotherly
+exhortation says,---Come. If that had been the spirit in which all
+Christian teachers had besought men, their exhortations would less
+frequently have been breath spent in vain.
+
+We may note
+
+I. The grace that gives the gifts.
+
+The connection between these two is more emphatically suggested by
+the original Greek, in which the word for `gifts' is a derivative
+of that for `grace.' The relation between these two can scarcely
+be verbally reproduced in English; but it may be, though
+imperfectly, suggested by reading `graces' instead of `gifts.' The
+gifts are represented as being the direct product of, and cognate
+with, the grace bestowed. As we have had already occasion to
+remark, they are in Paul's language a designation of natural
+capacities strengthened by the access of the life of the Spirit of
+Christ. As a candle plunged in a vase of oxygen leaps up into more
+brilliant flame, so all the faculties of the human soul are made a
+hundred times themselves when the quickening power of the life of
+Christ enters into them.
+
+It is to be observed that the Apostle here assumes that every
+Christian possesses, in some form, that grace which gives graces.
+To him a believing soul without Christ-given gifts is a
+monstrosity. No one is without some graces, and therefore no one
+is without some duties. No one who considers the multitude of
+professing Christians who hamper all our churches to-day, and
+reflects on the modern need to urge on the multitude of idlers
+forms of Christian activity, will fail to recognise signs of
+terribly weakened vitality. The humility, which in response to all
+invitations to work for Christ pleads unfitness is, if true, more
+tragical than it at first seems, for it is a confession that the
+man who alleges it has no real hold of the Christ in whom he
+professes to trust. If a Christian man is fit for no Christian
+work, it is time that he gravely ask himself whether he has any
+Christian life. `Having gifts' is the basis of all the Apostle's
+exhortations. It is to him inconceivable that any Christian should
+not possess, and be conscious of possessing, some endowment from
+the life of Christ which will fit him for, and bind him to, a
+course of active service.
+
+The universality of this possession is affirmed, if we note that,
+according to the Greek, it was `given' at a special time in the
+experience of each of these Roman Christians. The rendering `was
+given' might be more accurately exchanged for `has been given,'
+and that expression is best taken as referring to a definite
+moment in the history of each believer namely, his conversion.
+When we `yield ourselves to God,' as Paul exhorts us to do in the
+beginning of this chapter, as the commencement of all true life of
+conformity to His will, Christ yields Himself to us. The
+possession of these gifts of grace is no prerogative of officials;
+and, indeed, in all the exhortations which follow there is no
+reference to officials, though of course such were in existence in
+the Roman Church. They had their special functions and special
+qualifications for these. But what Paul is dealing with now is the
+grace that is inseparable from individual surrender to Christ, and
+has been bestowed upon all who are His. To limit the gifts to
+officials, and to suppose that the universal gifts in any degree
+militate against the recognition of officials in the Church, are
+equally mistakes, and confound essentially different subjects.
+
+II. The graces that flow from the grace.
+
+The Apostle's catalogue of these is not exhaustive, nor logically
+arranged; but yet a certain loose order may be noted, which may be
+profitable for us to trace. They are in number seven---the sacred
+number; and are capable of being divided, as so many of the series
+of sevens are, into two portions, one containing four and the other
+three. The former include more public works, to each of which a man
+might be specially devoted as his life work for and in the Church.
+Three are more private, and may be conceived to have a wider
+relation to the world. There are some difficulties of construction
+and rendering in the list, which need not concern us here; and we
+may substantially follow the Authorised Version.
+
+The first group of four seems to fall into two pairs, the first of
+which, `prophecy' and `ministry,' seem to be bracketed together by
+reason of the difference between them. Prophecy is a very high
+form of special inspiration, and implies a direct reception of
+special revelation, but not necessarily of future events. The
+prophet is usually coupled in Paul's writings with the apostle,
+and was obviously amongst those to whom was given one of the
+highest forms of the gifts of Christ. It is very beautiful to note
+that by natural contrast the Apostle at once passes to one of the
+forms of service which a vulgar estimate would regard as remotest
+from the special revelation of the prophet, and is confined to
+lowly service. Side by side with the exalted gift of prophecy Paul
+puts the lowly gift of ministry. Very significant is the
+juxtaposition of these two extremes. It teaches us that the
+lowliest office is as truly allotted by Jesus as the most sacred,
+and that His highest gifts find an adequate field for
+manifestation in him who is servant of all. Ministry to be rightly
+discharged needs spiritual character. The original seven were men
+`full of faith and of the Holy Ghost,' though all they had to do
+was to hand their pittances to poor widows. It may be difficult to
+decide for what reason other than the emphasising of this contrast
+the Apostle links together ministry and prophecy, and so breaks a
+natural sequence which would have connected the second pair of
+graces with the first member of the first pair. We should have
+expected that here, as elsewhere, `prophet,' `teacher,'
+`exhorter,' would have been closely connected, and there seems no
+reason why they should not have been so, except that which we have
+suggested, namely, the wish to bring together the highest and the
+lowest forms of service.
+
+The second pair seem to be linked together by likeness. The
+`teacher' probably had for his function, primarily, the narration
+of the facts of the Gospel, and the setting forth in a form
+addressed chiefly to the understanding the truths thereby
+revealed; whilst the `exhorter' rather addressed himself to the
+will, presenting the same truth, but in forms more intended to
+influence the emotions. The word here rendered `exhort' is found
+in Paul's writings as bearing special meanings, such as consoling,
+stimulating, encouraging, rebuking and others. Of course these two
+forms of service would often be associated, and each would be
+imperfect when alone; but it would appear that in the early Church
+there were persons in whom the one or the other of these two
+elements was so preponderant that their office was thereby
+designated. Each received a special gift from the one Source. The
+man who could only say to his brother, `Be of good cheer,' was as
+much the recipient of the Spirit as the man who could connect and
+elaborate a systematic presentation of the truths of the
+Gospel.
+
+These four graces are followed by a group of three, which may be
+regarded as being more private, as not pointing to permanent
+offices so much as to individual acts. They are `giving,'
+`ruling,' `showing pity,' concerning which we need only note that
+the second of these can hardly be the ecclesiastical office, and
+that it stands between two which are closely related, as if it
+were of the same kind. The gifts of money, or of direction, or of
+pity, are one in kind. The right use of wealth comes from the gift
+of God's grace; so does the right use of any sway which any of us
+have over any of our brethren; and so does the glow of compassion,
+the exercise of the natural human sympathy which belongs to all,
+and is deepened and made tenderer and intenser by the gift of the
+Spirit. It would be a very different Church, and a very different
+world, if Christians, who were not conscious of possessing gifts
+which made them fit to be either prophets, or teachers, or
+exhorters, and were scarcely endowed even for any special form of
+ministry, felt that a gift from their hands, or a wave of pity
+from their hearts, was a true token of the movement of God's
+Spirit on their spirits. The fruit of the Spirit is to be found in
+the wide fields of everyday life, and the vine bears many clusters
+for the thirsty lips of wearied men who may little know what gives
+them their bloom and sweetness. It would be better for both giver
+and receiver if Christian beneficence were more clearly recognised
+as one of the manifestations of spiritual life.
+
+III. The exercise of the graces.
+
+There are some difficulties in reference to the grammatical
+construction of the words of our text, into which it is not
+necessary that we should enter here. We may substantially follow
+the Authorised and Revised Versions in supplying verbs in the
+various clauses, so as to make of the text a series of
+exhortations. The first of these is to `prophesy according to the
+proportion of faith'; a commandment which is best explained by
+remembering that in the preceding verse `the measure of faith' has
+been stated as being the measure of the gifts. The prophet then is
+to exercise his gifts in proportion to his faith. He is to speak
+his convictions fully and openly, and to let his utterances be
+shaped by the indwelling life. This exhortation may well sink into
+the heart of preachers in this day. It is but the echo of
+Jeremiah's strong words: `He that hath my word, let him speak my
+word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord.
+Is not my word like as fire, saith the Lord, and like a hammer
+that breaketh the rock in pieces?' The ancient prophet's woe falls
+with double weight on those who use their words as a veil to
+obscure their real beliefs, and who prophesy, not `according to
+the proportion of faith,' but according to the expectations of the
+hearers, whose faith is as vague as theirs.
+
+In the original, the next three exhortations are alike in
+grammatical construction, which is represented in the Authorised
+Version by the supplement `let us wait on,' and in the Revised
+Version by `let us give ourselves to'; we might with advantage
+substitute for either the still more simple form `be in,' after
+the example of Paul's exhortation to Timothy `be in these things';
+that is, as our Version has it, `give thyself wholly to them.' The
+various gifts are each represented as a sphere within which its
+possessor is to move, for the opportunities for the exercise of
+which he is carefully to watch, and within the limits of which he
+is humbly to keep. That general law applies equally to ministry,
+and teaching and exhorting. We are to seek to discern our spheres;
+we are to be occupied with, if not absorbed in, them. At the least
+we are diligently to use the gift which we discover ourselves to
+possess, and thus filling our several spheres, we are to keep
+within them, recognising that each is sacred as the manifestation
+of God's will for each of us. The divergence of forms is
+unimportant, and it matters nothing whether `the Giver of all'
+grants less or more. The main thing is that each be faithful in
+the administration of what he has received, and not seek to
+imitate his brother who is diversely endowed, or to monopolise for
+himself another's gifts. To insist that our brethren's gifts
+should be like ours, and to try to make ours like theirs, are
+equally sins against the great truth, of which the Church as a
+whole is the example, that there are `diversities of operations
+but the same Spirit.'
+
+The remaining three exhortations are in like manner thrown
+together by a similarity of construction in which the personality
+of the doer is put in the foreground, and the emphasis of the
+commandment is rested on the manner in which the grace is
+exercised. The reason for that may be that in these three
+especially the manner will show the grace. `Giving' is to be `with
+simplicity.' There are to be no sidelong looks to self-interest;
+no flinging of a gift from a height, as a bone might be flung to a
+dog; no seeking for gratitude; no ostentation in the gift. Any
+taint of such mixed motives as these infuses poison into our
+gifts, and makes them taste bitter to the receiver, and recoil in
+hurt upon ourselves. To `give with simplicity' is to give as God
+gives.
+
+`Diligence' is the characteristic prescribed for the man that
+rules. We have already pointed out that this exhortation includes
+a much wider area than that of any ecclesiastical officials. It
+points to another kind of rule, and the natural gifts needed for
+any kind of rule are diligence and zeal. Slackly-held reins make
+stumbling steeds; and any man on whose shoulders is laid the
+weight of government is bound to feel it as a weight. The history
+of many a nation, and of many a family, teaches that where the
+rule is slothful all evils grow apace; and it is that natural
+energy and earnestness, deepened and hallowed by the Christian
+life, which here is enjoined as the true Christian way of
+discharging the function of ruling, which, in some form or
+another, devolves on almost all of us.
+
+`He that showeth mercy with cheerfulness.' The glow of natural
+human sympathy is heightened so as to become a `gift,' and the way
+in which it is exercised is defined as being `with cheerfulness.'
+That injunction is but partially understood if it is taken to mean
+no more than that sympathy is not to be rendered grudgingly, or as
+by necessity. No sympathy is indeed possible on such terms; unless
+the heart is in it, it is nought. And that it should thus flow
+forth spontaneously wherever sorrow and desolation evoke it, there
+must be a continual repression of self, and a heart disengaged
+from the entanglements of its own circumstances, and at leisure to
+make a brother's burden its very own. But the exhortation may,
+perhaps, rather mean that the truest sympathy carries a bright
+face into darkness, and comes like sunshine in a shady place.
+
+\chapter{Love That Can Hate}
+\markright{ROMANS xii. 9--10}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor that which is evil; cleave
+to that which is good. 10.\ In love of the brethren be tenderly
+affectioned one to another; in honour preferring one
+another.'---\textsc{Romans} xii. 9--10 (R.~V.).
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+Thus far the Apostle has been laying down very general precepts
+and principles of Christian morals. Starting with the one
+all-comprehensive thought of self-sacrifice as the very foundation
+of all goodness, of transformation as its method, and of the clear
+knowledge of our several powers and faithful stewardship of these,
+as its conditions, he here proceeds to a series of more specific
+exhortations, which at first sight seem to be very unconnected,
+but through which there may be discerned a sequence of
+thought.
+
+The clauses of our text seem at first sight strangely
+disconnected. The first and the last belong to the same subject,
+but the intervening clause strikes a careless reader as out of
+place and heterogeneous. I think that we shall see it is not so;
+but for the present we but note that here are three sets of
+precepts which enjoin, first, honest love; then, next, a healthy
+vehemence against evil and for good; and finally, a brotherly
+affection and mutual respect.
+
+I. Let love be honest.
+
+Love stands at the head, and is the fontal source of all separate
+individualised duties. Here Paul is not so much prescribing love as
+describing the kind of love which he recognises as genuine, and the
+main point on which he insists is sincerity. The `dissimulation' of
+the Authorised Version only covers half the ground. It means, hiding
+what one is; but there is simulation, or pretending to be what one
+is not. There are words of love which are like the iridescent scum
+on the surface veiling the black depths of a pool of hatred. A
+Psalmist complains of having to meet men whose words were `smoother
+than butter' and whose true feelings were as `drawn swords'; but,
+short of such consciously lying love, we must all recognise as a
+real danger besetting us all, and especially those of us who are
+naturally inclined to kindly relations with our fellows, the
+tendency to use language just a little in excess of our feelings.
+The glove is slightly stretched, and the hand in it is not quite
+large enough to fill it. There is such a thing, not altogether
+unknown in Christian circles, as benevolence, which is largely cant,
+and words of conventional love about individuals which do not
+represent any corresponding emotion. Such effusive love pours itself
+in words, and is most generally the token of intense selfishness.
+Any man who seeks to make his words a true picture of his emotions
+must be aware that few harder precepts have ever been given than
+this brief one of the Apostle's, `Let love be without hypocrisy.'
+
+But the place where this exhortation comes in the apostolic
+sequence here may suggest to us the discipline through which
+obedience to it is made possible. There is little to be done by
+the way of directly increasing either the fervour of love or the
+honesty of its expression. The true method of securing both is to
+be growingly transformed by `the renewing of our minds,' and
+growingly to bring our whole old selves under the melting and
+softening influence of `the mercies of God.' It is swollen
+self-love, `thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought to
+think,' which impedes the flow of love to others, and it is in the
+measure in which we receive into our minds `the mind that was in
+Christ Jesus,' and look at men as He did, that we shall come to
+love them all honestly and purely. When we are delivered from the
+monstrous oppression and tyranny of self, we have hearts capable
+of a Christlike and Christ-giving love to all men, and only they
+who have cleansed their hearts by union with Him, and by receiving
+into them the purging influence of His own Spirit, will be able to
+love without hypocrisy.
+
+II. Let love abhor what is evil, and cleave to what is good.
+
+If we carefully consider this apparently irrelevant interruption in
+the sequence of the apostolic exhortations, we shall, I think, see
+at once that the irrelevance is only apparent, and that the healthy
+vehemence against evil and resolute clinging to good is as essential
+to the noblest forms of Christian love as is the sincerity enjoined
+in the previous clause. To detest the one and hold fast by the other
+are essential to the purity and depth of our love. Evil is to be
+loathed, and good to be clung to in our own moral conduct, and
+wherever we see them. These two precepts are not mere tautology, but
+the second of them is the ground of the first. The force of our
+recoil from the bad will be measured by the firmness of our grasp of
+the good; and yet, though inseparably connected, the one is apt to
+be easier to obey than is the other. There are types of Christian
+men to whom it is more natural to abhor the evil than to cleave to
+the good; and there are types of character of which the converse is
+true. We often see men very earnest and entirely sincere in their
+detestation of meanness and wickedness, but very tepid in their
+appreciation of goodness. To hate is, unfortunately, more congenial
+with ordinary characters than to love; and it is more facile to look
+down on badness than to look up at goodness.
+
+But it needs ever to be insisted upon, and never more than in this
+day of spurious charity and unprincipled toleration, that a
+healthy hatred of moral evil and of sin, wherever found and
+however garbed, ought to be the continual accompaniment of all
+vigorous and manly cleaving to that which is good. Unless we
+shudderingly recoil from contact with the bad in our own lives,
+and refuse to christen it with deceptive euphemisms when we meet
+it in social and civil life, we shall but feebly grasp, and
+slackly hold, that which is good. Such energy of moral recoil from
+evil is perfectly consistent with honest love, for it is things,
+not men, that we are to hate; and it is needful as the completion
+and guardian of love itself. There is always danger that love
+shall weaken the condemnation of wrong, and modern liberality,
+both in the field of opinion and in regard to practical life, has
+so far condoned evil as largely to have lost its hold upon good.
+The criminal is pitied rather than blamed, and a multitude of
+agencies are so occupied in elevating the wrong-doers that they
+lose sight of the need of punishing.
+
+Nor is it only in reference to society that this tendency works
+harm. The effect of it is abundantly manifest in the fashionable
+ideas of God and His character. There are whole schools of opinion
+which practically strike out of their ideal of the Divine Nature
+abhorrence of evil, and, little as they think it, are thereby
+fatally impoverishing their ideal of God, and making it impossible
+to understand His government of the world. As always, so in this
+matter, the authentic revelation of the Divine Nature, and the
+perfect pattern for the human are to be found in Jesus Christ. We
+recall that wonderful incident, when on His last approach to
+Jerusalem, rounding the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, He beheld
+the city, gleaming in the morning sunshine across the valley, and
+forgetting His own sorrow, shed tears over its approaching
+desolation, which yet He steadfastly pronounced. His loathing of
+evil was whole-souled and absolute, and equally intense and
+complete was His cleaving to that which is good. In both, and in
+the harmony between them, He makes God known, and prescribes and
+holds forth the ideal of perfect humanity to men.
+
+III. Let sincere and discriminating love be concentrated on
+Christian men.
+
+In the final exhortation of our text `the love of the brethren'
+takes the place of the more diffused and general love enjoined in
+the first clause. The expression `kindly affectioned' is the
+rendering of a very eloquent word in the original in which the
+instinctive love of a mother to her child, or the strange mystical
+ties which unite members of a family together, irrespective of
+their differences of character and temperament, are taken as an
+example after which Christian men are to mould their relations to
+one another. The love which is without hypocrisy, and is to be
+diffused on all sides, is also to be gathered together and
+concentrated with special energy on all who `call upon Jesus
+Christ as Lord, both their Lord and ours.' The more general
+precept and the more particular are in perfect harmony, however
+our human weakness sometimes confuses them. It is obvious that
+this final precept of our text will be the direct result of the
+two preceding, for the love which has learned to be moral, hating
+evil, and clinging to good as necessary, when directed to
+possessors of like precious faith will thrill with the
+consciousness of a deep mystical bond of union, and will
+effloresce in all brotherly love and kindly affections. They who
+are like one another in the depths of their moral life, who are
+touched by like aspirations after like holy things, and who
+instinctively recoil with similar revulsion from like
+abominations, will necessarily feel the drawing of a unity far
+deeper and sacreder than any superficial likenesses of race, or
+circumstance, or opinion. Two men who share, however imperfectly,
+in Christ's Spirit are more akin in the realities of their nature,
+however they may differ on the surface, than either of them is to
+another, however like he may seem, who is not a partaker in the
+life of Christ.
+
+This instinctive, Christian love, like all true and pure love, is
+to manifest itself by `preferring one another in honour'; or as
+the word might possibly be rendered, `anticipating one another.'
+We are not to wait to have our place assigned before we give our
+brother his. There will be no squabbling for the chief seat in the
+synagogue, or the uppermost rooms at the feast, where brotherly
+love marshals the guests. The one cure for petty jealousies and
+the miserable strife for recognition, which we are all tempted to
+engage in, lies in a heart filled with love of the brethren
+because of its love to the Elder Brother of them all, and to the
+Father who is His Father as well as ours. What a contrast is
+presented between the practice of Christians and these precepts of
+Paul! We may well bow ourselves in shame and contrition when we
+read these clear-drawn lines indicating what we ought to be, and
+set by the side of them the blurred and blotted pictures of what
+we are. It is a painful but profitable task to measure ourselves
+against Paul's ideal of Christ's commandment; but it will only be
+profitable if it brings us to remember that Christ gives before He
+commands, and that conformity with His ideal must begin, not with
+details of conduct, or with emotion, however pure, but with
+yielding ourselves to the God who moves us by His mercies, and
+being `transformed by the renewing of our minds' and `the
+indwelling of Christ in our hearts by faith.'
+
+\chapter{A Triplet of Graces}
+\markright{ROMANS xii. 11}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the
+Lord.'---\textsc{Romans} xii. 11.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+Paul believed that Christian doctrine was meant to influence
+Christian practice; and therefore, after the fundamental and
+profound exhibition of the central truths of Christianity which
+occupies the earlier portion of this great Epistle, he tacks on,
+with a `therefore' to his theological exposition, a series of
+plain, practical teachings. The place where conduct comes in the
+letter is profoundly significant, and, if the significance of it
+had been observed and the spirit of it carried into practice,
+there would have been less of a barren orthodoxy, and fewer
+attempts at producing righteous conduct without faith.
+
+But not only is the place where this series of exhortations occur
+very significant, but the order in which they appear is also
+instructive. The great principle which covers all conduct, and may
+be broken up into all the minutenesses of practical directions is
+self-surrender. Give yourselves up to God; that is the Alpha and
+the Omega of all goodness, and wherever that foundation is really
+laid, on it will rise the fair building of a life which is a
+temple, adorned with whatever things are lovely and of good
+report. So after Paul has laid deep and broad the foundation of
+all Christian virtue in his exhortation to present ourselves as
+living sacrifices, he goes on to point out the several virtues in
+which such self-surrender will manifest itself. There runs through
+the most of these exhortations an arrangement in triplets---three
+sister Graces linked together hand-in-hand as it were---and my
+text presents an example of that threefoldness in grouping. `Not
+slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord.'
+
+I. We have, first, the prime grace of Christian diligence.
+
+`Not slothful in business' suggests, by reason of our modern
+restriction of that word `business' to a man's daily occupation, a
+much more limited range to this exhortation than the Apostle meant
+to give it. The idea which is generally drawn from these words by
+English readers is that they are to do their ordinary work
+diligently, and, all the while, notwithstanding the cooling or
+distracting influences of their daily avocations, are to keep
+themselves `fervent in spirit.' That is a noble and needful
+conception of the command, but it does not express what is in the
+Apostle's mind. He does not mean by `business' a trade or
+profession, or daily occupation. But the word means `zeal' or
+`earnestness.' And what Paul says is just this---`In regard to
+your earnestness in all directions, see that you are not
+slothful.'
+
+The force and drift of the whole precept is just the exhortation
+to exercise the very homely virtue of diligence, which is as much
+a condition of growth and maturity in the Christian as it is in
+any other life. The very homeliness and obviousness of the duty
+causes us often to lose sight of its imperativeness and
+necessity.
+
+Many of us, if we would sit quietly down and think of how we go
+about our `business,' as we call it, and of how we go about our
+Christian life, which ought to be our highest business, would have
+great cause for being ashamed. We begin the one early in the
+morning, we keep hard at it all day, our eyes are wide open to see
+any opening where money is to be made; that is all right. We give
+our whole selves to our work whilst we are at it; that is as it
+should be. But why are there not the same concentration, the same
+wide-awakeness, the same open-eyed eagerness to find out ways of
+advancement, the same resolved and continuous and
+all-comprehending and dominating enthusiasm about our Christianity
+as there is about our shop, or our mill, or our success as
+students? Why are we all fire in the one case and all ice in the
+other? Why do we think that it is enough to lift the burden that
+Christ lays upon us with one languid finger, and to put our whole
+hand, or rather, as the prophet says, `both hands earnestly,' to
+the task of lifting the load of daily work? `In your earnestness
+be not slothful.'
+
+Brethren, that is a very homely exhortation. I wonder how many of
+us can say, `Lord! I have heard, and I have obeyed Thy
+precept.'
+
+II. Diligence must be fed by a fervent spirit.
+
+The word translated `fervent' is literally boiling. The metaphor
+is very plain and intelligible. The spirit brought into contact
+with Christian truth and with the fire of the Holy Spirit will
+naturally have its temperature raised, and will be moved by the
+warm touch as heat makes water in a pot hung above a fire boil.
+Such emotion, produced by the touch of the fiery Spirit of God, is
+what Paul desires for, and enjoins on, all Christians; for such
+emotion is the only way by which the diligence, without which no
+Christian progress will be made, can be kept up.
+
+No man will work long at a task that his heart is not in; or if he
+does, because he is obliged, the work will be slavery. In order,
+then, that diligence may neither languish and become slothfulness,
+nor be felt to be a heavy weight and an unwelcome necessity, Paul
+here bids us see to it that our hearts are moved because there is a
+fire below which makes `the soul's depths boil in earnest.'
+
+Now, of course, I know that, as a great teacher has told us, `The
+gods approve the depth and not the tumult of the soul,' and I know
+that there is a great deal of emotional Christianity which is
+worth nothing. But it is not that kind of fervour that the Apostle
+is enjoining here. Whilst it is perfectly true that mere emotion
+often does co-exist with, and very often leads to, entire
+negligence as to possessing and manifesting practical excellence,
+the true relation between these is just the opposite---viz. that
+this fervour of which I speak, this wide-awakeness and enthusiasm
+of a spirit all quickened into rapidity of action by the warmth
+which it has felt from God in Christ, should drive the wheels of
+life. Boiling water makes steam, does it not? And what is to be
+done with the steam that comes off the `boiling' spirit? You may
+either let it go roaring through a waste-pipe and do nothing but
+make a noise and be idly dissipated in the air, or you may lead it
+into a cylinder and make it lift a piston, and then you will get
+work out of it. That is what the Apostle desires us to do with our
+emotion. The lightning goes careering through the sky, but we have
+harnessed it to tram-cars nowadays, and made it `work for its
+living,' to carry our letters and light our rooms. Fervour of a
+Christian spirit is all right when it is yoked to Christian work,
+and made to draw what else is a heavy chariot. It is not emotion,
+but it is indolent emotion, that is the curse of much of our
+`fervent' Christianity.
+
+There cannot be too much fervour. There may be too little outlet
+provided for the fervour to work in. It may all go off in
+comfortable feeling, in enthusiastic prayers and `Amens!' and `So
+be it, Lords!' and the like, or it may come with us into our daily
+tasks, and make us buckle to with more earnestness, and more
+continuity. Diligence driven by earnestness, and fervour that
+works, are the true things.
+
+And surely, surely there cannot be any genuine
+Christianity---certainly there cannot be any deep
+Christianity---which is not fervent.
+
+We hear from certain quarters of the Church a great deal about the
+virtue of moderation. But it seems to me that, if you take into
+account what Christianity tells us, the `sober' feeling is fervent
+feeling, and tepid feeling is imperfect feeling. I cannot
+understand any man believing as plain matter-of-fact the truths on
+which the whole New Testament insists, and keeping himself `cool,'
+or, as our friends call it, `moderate.' Brethren,
+enthusiasm---which properly means the condition of being dwelt in
+by a god---is the wise, the reasonable attitude of Christian men,
+if they believe their own Christianity and are really serving
+Jesus Christ. They should be `diligent in business,
+fervent'---boiling---in spirit.
+
+III. The diligence and the fervency are both to be animated by the
+thought, `Serving the Lord!'
+
+Some critics, as many of you know, no doubt, would prefer to read
+this verse in its last clause `serving the time.' But that seems
+to me a very lame and incomplete climax for the Apostle's thought,
+and it breaks entirely the sequence which, as I think, is
+discernible in it. Much rather, he here, in the closing member of
+the triplet, suggests a thought which will be stimulus to the
+diligence and fuel to the fire that makes the spirit boil.
+
+In effect he says, `Think, when your hands begin to droop, and
+when your spirits begin to be cold and indifferent, and languor to
+steal over you, and the paralysing influences of the commonplace
+and the familiar, and the small begin to assert themselves---think
+that you are serving the Lord.' Will that not freshen you up? Will
+that not set you boiling again? Will it not be easy to be diligent
+when we feel that we are `ever in the great Taskmaster's eye'?
+There are many reasons for diligence---the greatness of the work,
+for it is no small matter for us to get the whole lump of our
+nature leavened with the good leaven; the continual operation of
+antagonistic forces which are all round us, and are working
+night-shifts as well as day ones, whether we as Christians are on
+short time or not, the brevity of the period during which we have
+to work, and the tremendous issues which depend upon the
+completeness of our service here---all these things are reasons
+for our diligence. But \textit{the} reason is: `Thou Christ hast
+died for me, and livest for me; truly I am Thy slave.' That is the
+thought that will make a man bend his back to his work, whatever
+it be, and bend his will to his work, too, however unwelcome it
+may be; and that is the thought that will stir his whole spirit to
+fervour and earnestness, and thus will deliver him from the
+temptations to languid and perfunctory work that ever creep over
+us.
+
+You can carry that motive---as we all know, and as we all forget
+when the pinch comes---into your shop, your study, your office,
+your mill, your kitchen, or wherever you go. `On the bells of the
+horses there shall be written, Holiness to the Lord,' said the
+prophet, and `every bowl in Jerusalem' may be sacred as the
+vessels of the altar. All life may flash into beauty, and tower
+into greatness, and be smoothed out into easiness, and the crooked
+things may be made straight and the rough places plain, and the
+familiar and the trite be invested with freshness and wonder as of
+a dream, if only we write over them, `For the sake of the Master.'
+Then, whatever we do or bear, be it common, insignificant, or
+unpleasant, will change its aspect, and all will be sweet. Here is
+the secret of diligence and of fervency, `I set the Lord always
+before me.'
+
+\chapter{Another Triplet of Graces}
+\markright{ROMANS xii. 12}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in
+prayer.'---\textsc{Romans} xii. 12.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+These three closely connected clauses occur, as you all know, in
+the midst of that outline of the Christian life with which the
+Apostle begins the practical part of this Epistle. Now, what he
+omits in this sketch of Christian duty seems to me quite as
+significant as what he inserts. It is very remarkable that in the
+twenty verses devoted to this subject, this is the only one which
+refers to the inner secrets of the Christian life. Paul's notion
+of `deepening the spiritual life' was `Behave yourself better in
+your relation to other people.' So all the rest of this chapter is
+devoted to inculcating our duties to one another. Conduct is
+all-important. An orthodox creed is valuable if it influences
+action, but not otherwise. Devout emotion is valuable, if it
+drives the wheels of life, but not otherwise. Christians should
+make efforts to attain to clear views and warm feelings, but the
+outcome and final test of both is a daily life of visible
+imitation of Jesus. The deepening of spiritual life should be
+manifested by completer, practical righteousness in the
+market-place and the street and the house, which non-Christians
+will acknowledge.
+
+But now, with regard to these three specific exhortations here, I
+wish to try to bring out their connection as well as the force of
+each of them.
+
+I. So I remark first, that the Christian life ought to be joyful
+because it is hopeful.
+
+Now, I do not suppose that many of us habitually recognise it as a
+Christian duty to be joyful. We think that it is a matter of
+temperament and partly a matter of circumstance. We are glad when
+things go well with us. If we have a sunny disposition, and are
+naturally light-hearted, all the better; if we have a melancholy
+or morose one, all the worse. But do we recognise this, that a
+Christian who is not joyful is not living up to his duty; and that
+there is no excuse, either in temperament or in circumstances, for
+our not being so, and always being so? `Rejoice in the Lord
+alway,' says Paul; and then, as if he thought, `Some of you will
+be thinking that that is a very rash commandment, to aim at a
+condition quite impossible to make constant,' he goes on---`and,
+to convince you that I do not say it hastily, I will repeat
+it---``and again I say, rejoice.''\,' Brethren, we shall have to
+alter our conceptions of what true gladness is before we can come
+to understand the full depth of the great thought that joy is a
+Christian duty. The true joy is not the kind of joy that a saying
+in the Old Testament compares to the `crackling of thorns under a
+pot,' but something very much calmer, with no crackle in it; and
+very much deeper, and very much more in alliance with `whatsoever
+things are lovely and of good report,' than that foolish,
+short-lived, and empty mirth that burns down so soon into black
+ashes.
+
+To be glad is a Christian duty. Many of us have as much religion
+as makes us sombre, and impels us often to look upon the more
+solemn and awful aspects of Christian truth, but we have not
+enough to make us glad. I do not need to dwell upon all the
+sources in Christian faith and belief, of that lofty and
+imperatively obligatory gladness, but I confine myself to the one
+in my text, `Rejoicing in hope.'
+
+Now, we all know---from the boy that is expecting to go home for
+his holidays in a week, up to the old man to whose eye the
+time-veil is wearing thin---that hope, if it is certain, is a
+source of gladness. How lightly one's bosom's lord sits upon its
+throne, when a great hope comes to animate us! how everybody is
+pleasant, and all things are easy, and the world looks different!
+Hope, if it is certain, will gladden, and if our Christianity
+grasps, as it ought to do, the only hope that is absolutely
+certain, and as sure as if it were in the past and had been
+experienced, then our hearts, too, will sing for joy. True joy is
+\textit{not} a matter of temperament, so much as a matter of
+faith. It is \textit{not} a matter of circumstances. All the
+surface drainage may be dry, but there is a well in the courtyard
+deep and cool and full and exhaustless, and a Christian who
+rightly understands and cherishes the Christian hope is lifted
+above temperament, and is not dependent upon conditions for his
+joys.
+
+The Apostle, in an earlier part of this same letter, defines for
+us what that hope is, which thus is the secret of perpetual
+gladness, when he speaks about `rejoicing in hope of the glory of
+God.' Yes, it is that great, supreme, calm, far off, absolutely
+certain prospect of being gathered into the divine glory, and
+walking there, like the three in the fiery furnace, unconsumed and
+at ease; it is that hope that will triumph over temperament, and
+over all occasions for melancholy, and will breathe into our life
+a perpetual gladness. Brethren, is it not strange and sad that
+with such a treasure by our sides we should consent to live such
+poor lives as we do?
+
+But remember, although I cannot say to myself, `Now I will be
+glad,' and cannot attain to joy by a movement of the will or
+direct effort, although it is of no use to say to a man---which is
+all that the world can ever say to him---`Cheer up and be glad,'
+whilst you do not alter the facts that make him sad, there is a
+way by which we can bring about feelings of gladness or of gloom.
+It is just this---we can choose what we will look at. If you
+prefer to occupy your mind with the troubles, losses,
+disappointments, hard work, blighted hopes of this poor sin-ridden
+world, of course sadness will come over you often, and a general
+grey tone will be the usual tone of your lives, as it is of the
+lives of many of us, broken only by occasional bursts of foolish
+mirth and empty laughter. But if you choose to turn away from all
+these, and instead of the dim, dismal, hard present, to sun
+yourselves in the light of the yet unrisen sun, which you can do,
+then, having rightly chosen the subjects to think about, the
+feeling will come as a matter of course. You cannot make
+yourselves glad by, as it were, laying hold of yourselves and
+lifting yourselves into gladness, but you can rule the direction
+of your thoughts, and so can bring around you summer in the midst
+of winter, by steadily contemplating the facts---and they are
+present facts, though we talk about them collectively as `the
+future'---the facts on which all Christian gladness ought to be
+based. We can carry our own atmosphere with us; like the people in
+Italy, who in frosty weather will be seen sitting in the
+market-place by their stalls with a dish of embers, which they
+grasp in their hands, and so make themselves comfortably warm on
+the bitterest day. You can bring a reasonable degree of warmth
+into the coldest weather, if you will lay hold of the vessel in
+which the fire is, and keep it in your hand and close to your
+heart. Choose what you think about, and feelings will follow
+thoughts.
+
+But it needs very distinct and continuous effort for a man to keep
+this great source of Christian joy clear before him. We are like the
+dwellers in some island of the sea, who, in some conditions of the
+atmosphere, can catch sight of the gleaming mountain-tops on the
+mainland across the stormy channel between. But thick days, with a
+heavy atmosphere and much mist, are very frequent in our latitude,
+and then all the distant hills are blotted out, and we see nothing
+but the cold grey sea, breaking on the cold, grey stones. Still, you
+can scatter the mist if you will. You can make the atmosphere
+bright; and it is worth an effort to bring clear before us, and to
+keep high above the mists that cling to the low levels, the great
+vision which will make us glad. Brethren, I believe that one great
+source of the weakness of average Christianity amongst us to-day is
+the dimness into which so many of us have let the hope of the glory
+of God pass in our hearts. So I beg you to lay to heart this first
+commandment, and to rejoice in hope.
+
+II. Now, secondly, here is the thought that life, if full of
+joyful hope, will be patient.
+
+I have been saying that the gladness of which my text speaks is
+independent of circumstances, and may persist and be continuous
+even when externals occasion sadness. It is possible---I do not
+say it is easy, God knows it is hard---I do not say it is
+frequently attained, but I do say it is possible---to realise that
+wonderful ideal of the Apostle's `As sorrowful, yet always
+rejoicing.' The surface of the ocean may be tossed and fretted by
+the winds, and churned into foam, but the great central depths
+`hear not the loud winds when they call,' and are still in the
+midst of tempest. And we, dear brethren, ought to have an inner
+depth of spirit, down to the disturbance of which no
+surface-trouble can ever reach. That is the height of attainment
+of Christian faith, but it is a possible attainment for every one
+of us.
+
+And if there be that burning of the light under the water, like
+`Greek fire,' as it was called, which many waters could not
+quench---if there be that persistence of gladness beneath the
+surface-sorrow, as you find a running stream coming out below a
+glacier, then the joy and the hope, which co-exist with the
+sorrow, will make life patient.
+
+Now, the Apostle means by these great words, `patient' and
+`patience,' which are often upon his lips, something more than
+simple endurance. That endurance is as much as many of us can
+often muster up strength to exercise. It sometimes takes all our
+faith and all our submission simply to say, `I opened not my
+mouth, because thou didst it; and I will bear what thine hand lays
+upon me.' But that is not all that the idea of Christian
+`patience' includes, for it also takes in the thought of active
+work, and it is \textit{perseverance} as much as
+\textit{patience}.
+
+Now, if my heart is filled with a calm gladness because my eye is
+fixed upon a celestial hope, then both the passive and active
+sides of Christian `patience' will be realised by me. If my hope
+burns bright, and occupies a large space in my thoughts, then it
+will not be hard to take the homely consolation of good John
+Newton's hymn and say---
+
+\begin{verse}
+`Though painful at present, \\
+\ \ `Twill cease before long; \\
+And then, oh, how pleasant \\
+\ \ The conqueror's song!'
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent A man who is sailing to America, and knows that he will
+be in New York in a week, does not mind, although his cabin is
+contracted, and he has a great many discomforts, and though he has
+a bout of sea-sickness. The disagreeables are only going to last
+for a day or two. So our hope will make us bear trouble, and not
+make much of it.
+
+And our hope will strengthen us, if it is strong, for all the work
+that is to be done. Persistence in the path of duty, though my
+heart be beating like a smith's hammer on the anvil, is what
+Christian men should aim at, and possess. If we have within our
+hearts that fire of a certain hope, it will impel us to diligence
+in doing the humblest duty, whether circumstances be for or
+against us; as some great steamer is driven right on its course,
+through the ocean, whatever storms may blow in the teeth of its
+progress, because, deep down in it, there are furnaces and boilers
+which supply the steam that drives the engines. So a life that is
+joyful because it is hopeful will be full of calm endurance and
+strenuous work. `Rejoicing in hope; patient,' persevering in
+tribulation.
+
+III. Lastly, our lives will be joyful, hopeful, and patient, in
+proportion as they are prayerful.
+
+`Continuing instant'---which, of course, just means
+steadfast---`in prayer.' Paul uttered a paradox when he said,
+`Rejoice in the Lord alway,' as he said long before this verse, in
+the very first letter that he ever wrote, or at least the first
+which has come down to us. There he bracketed it along with two
+other equally paradoxical sayings. `Rejoice evermore; pray without
+ceasing; in everything give thanks.' If you pray without ceasing
+you can rejoice without ceasing.
+
+But can I pray without ceasing? Not if by prayer you mean only
+words of supplication and petition, but if by prayer you mean also
+a mental attitude of devotion, and a kind of sub-conscious
+reference to God in all that you do, such unceasing prayer is
+possible. Do not let us blunt the edge of this commandment, and
+weaken our own consciousness of having failed to obey it, by
+getting entangled in the cobwebs of mere curious discussions as to
+whether the absolute ideal of perfectly unbroken communion with
+God is possible in this life. At all events it is possible to us
+to approximate to that ideal a great deal more closely than our
+consciences tell us that we ever yet have done. If we are trying
+to keep our hearts in the midst of daily duty in contact with God,
+and if, ever and anon in the press of our work, we cast a thought
+towards Him and a prayer, then joy and hope and patience will come
+to us, in a degree that we do not know much about yet, but might
+have known all about long, long ago.
+
+There is a verse in the Old Testament which we may well lay to
+heart: `They cried unto God in the battle, and He was entreated of
+them.' Well, what sort of a prayer do you think that would be?
+Suppose that you were standing in the thick of battle with the
+sword of an enemy at your throat, there would not be much time for
+many words of prayer, would there? But the cry could go up, and
+the thought could go up, and as they went up, down would come the
+strong buckler which God puts between His servants and all evil.
+That is the sort of prayer that you, in the battle of business, in
+your shops and counting-houses and warehouses and mills, we
+students in our studies, and you mothers in your families and your
+kitchens, can send up to heaven. If thus we `pray without
+ceasing,' then we shall `rejoice evermore,' and our souls will be
+kept in patience and filled with the peace of God.
+
+\chapter{Still Another Triplet}
+\markright{ROMANS xii. 13--15}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Distributing to the necessity of saints; given to hospitality.
+14.\ Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not. 15.\
+Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that
+weep.'---\textsc{Romans} xii. 13--15.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+In these verses we pass from the innermost region of communion
+with God into the wide field of duties in relation to men. The
+solitary secrecies of rejoicing hope, endurance, and prayer
+unbroken, are exchanged for the publicities of benevolence and
+sympathy. In the former verses the Christian soul is in `the
+secret place of the Most High'; in those of our text he comes
+forth with the light of God on his face, and hands laden with
+blessings. The juxtaposition of the two suggests the great
+principles to which the morality of the New Testament is ever
+true---that devotion to God is the basis of all practical
+helpfulness to man, and that practical helpfulness to man is the
+expression and manifestation of devotion to God.
+
+The three sets of injunctions in our text, dissimilar though they
+appear, have a common basis. They are varying forms of one
+fundamental disposition---love; which varies in its forms
+according to the necessities of its objects, bringing temporal
+help to the needy, meeting hostility with blessing, and rendering
+sympathy to both the glad and the sorrowful. There is, further, a
+noteworthy connection, not in sense but in sound, between the
+first and second clauses of our text, which is lost in our English
+Version. `Given to hospitality' is, as the Revised margin shows,
+literally, pursuing hospitality. Now the Greek, like the English
+word, has the special meaning of following with a hostile intent,
+and the use of it in the one sense suggests its other meaning to
+Paul, whose habit of `going off at a word,' as it has been called,
+is a notable feature of his style. Hence, this second injunction,
+of blessing the persecutors, comes as a kind of play upon words,
+and is obviously occasioned by the verbal association. It would
+come more appropriately at a later part of the chapter, but its
+occurrence here is characteristic of Paul's idiosyncrasy. We may
+represent the connection of these two clauses by such a rendering
+as: Pursue hospitality, and as for those who pursue you, bless,
+and curse not.
+
+We may look at these three flowers from the one root of love.
+
+I. Love that speaks in material help.
+
+We have here two special applications of that love which Paul
+regards as `the bond of perfectness,' knitting all Christians
+together. The former of these two is love that expresses itself by
+tangible material aid. The persons to be helped are `saints,' and
+it is their `needs' that are to be aided. There is no trace in the
+Pauline Epistles of the community of goods which for a short time
+prevailed in the Church of Jerusalem and which was one of the
+causes that led to the need for the contribution for the poor
+saints in that city which occupied so much of Paul's attention at
+Corinth and elsewhere. But, whilst Christian love leaves the
+rights of property intact, it charges them with the duty of
+supplying the needs of the brethren. They are not absolute and
+unconditioned rights, but are subject to the highest principles of
+stewardship for God, trusteeship for men, and sacrifice for
+Christ. These three great thoughts condition and limit the
+Christian man's possession of the wealth, which, in a modified
+sense, it is allowable for him to call his own. His brother's need
+constitutes a first charge on all that belongs to him, and ought
+to precede the gratification of his own desires for superfluities
+and luxuries. If we `see our brother have need and shut up our
+bowels of compassion against him' and use our possessions for the
+gratification of our own whims and fancies, `how dwelleth the love
+of God in us?' There are few things in which Christian men of this
+day have more need for the vigorous exercise of conscience, and
+for enlightenment, than in their getting, and spending, and
+keeping money. In that region lies the main sphere of usefulness
+for many of us; and if we have not been `faithful in that which is
+least,' our unfaithfulness there makes it all but impossible that
+we should be faithful in that which is greatest. The honest and
+rigid contemplation of our own faults in the administration of our
+worldly goods, might well invest with a terrible meaning the
+Lord's tremendous question, `If ye have not been faithful in that
+which is another's, who shall give you that which is your
+own?'
+
+The hospitality which is here enjoined is another shape which
+Christian love naturally took in the early days. When believers
+were a body of aliens, dispersed through the world, and when, as
+they went from one place to another, they could find homes only
+amongst their own brethren, the special circumstances of the time
+necessarily attached special importance to this duty; and as a
+matter of fact, we find it recognised in all the Epistles of the
+New Testament as one of the most imperative of Christian duties.
+`It was the unity and strength which this intercourse gave that
+formed one of the great forces which supported Christianity.' But
+whilst hospitality was a special duty for the early Christians, it
+still remains a duty for us, and its habitual exercise would go
+far to break down the frowning walls which diversities of social
+position and of culture have reared between Christians.
+
+II. The love that meets hostility with blessing.
+
+There are perhaps few words in Scripture which have been more
+fruitful of the highest graces than this commandment. What a train
+of martyrs, from primitive times to the Chinese Christians in
+recent years, have remembered these words, and left their legacy
+of blessing as they laid their heads on the block or stood circled
+by fire at the stake! For us, in our quieter generation, actual
+persecution is rare, but hostility of ill-will more or less may
+well dog our steps, and the great principle here commended to us
+is that we are to meet enmity with its opposite, and to conquer by
+love. The diamond is cut with sharp knives, and each stroke brings
+out flashing beauty. There are kinds of wood which are fragrant
+when they burn; and there are kinds which show their veining under
+the plane. It is a poor thing if a Christian character only gives
+back like a mirror the expression of the face that looks at it. To
+meet hate with hate, and scorn with scorn, is not the way to turn
+hate into love and scorn into sympathy. Indifferent equilibrium in
+the presence of active antagonism is not possible for us. As long
+as we are sensitive we shall wince from a blow, or a sarcasm, or a
+sneer. We must bless in order to keep ourselves from cursing. The
+lesson is very hard, and the only way of obeying it fully is to
+keep near Christ and drink in His spirit who prayed `Father,
+forgive them, for they know not what they do.'
+
+III. Love that flows in wide sympathy.
+
+Of the two forms of sympathy which are here enjoined, the former
+is the harder. To `rejoice with them that do rejoice' makes a
+greater demand on unselfish love than to `weep with them that
+weep.' Those who are glad feel less need of sympathy than do the
+sorrowful, and envy is apt to creep in and mar the completeness of
+sympathetic joy. But even the latter of the two injunctions is not
+altogether easy. The cynic has said that there is `something not
+wholly displeasing in the misfortunes of our best friends'; and,
+though that is an utterly worldly and unchristian remark, it must
+be confessed not to be altogether wanting in truth.
+
+But for obedience to both of these injunctions, a heart at leisure
+from itself is needed to sympathise; and not less needed is a
+sedulous cultivation of the power of sympathy. No doubt
+temperament has much to do with the degree of our obedience; but
+this whole context goes on the assumption that the grace of God
+working on temperament strengthens natural endowments by turning
+them into `gifts differing according to the grace that is given to
+us.' Though we live in that awful individuality of ours, and are
+each, as it were, islanded in ourselves `with echoing straits
+between us thrown,' it is possible for us, as the result of close
+communion with Jesus Christ, to bridge the chasms, and to enter
+into the joy of a brother's joy. He who groaned in Himself as He
+drew near to the grave of Lazarus, and was moved to weep with the
+weeping sisters, will help us, in the measure in which we dwell in
+Him and He in us, that we too may look `not every man on his own
+things, but every man also on the things of others.'
+
+On the whole, love to Jesus is the basis of love to man, and love
+to man is the practical worship of Christianity. As in all things,
+so in the exhortations which we have now been considering, Jesus
+is our pattern and power. He Himself communicates with our
+necessities, and opens His heart to give us hospitable welcome
+there. He Himself has shown us how to meet and overcome hatred
+with love, and hurt with blessing. He shares our griefs, and by
+sharing lessens them. He shares our joys, and by sharing hallows
+them. The summing up of all these specific injunctions is, `Let
+that mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.'
+
+\chapter{Still Another Triplet}
+\markright{ROMANS xii. 16}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Be of the same mind one toward another. Set not your mind on high
+things, but condescend to things that are lowly. Be not wise in
+your own conceits.'---Romans xii. 16 (R.~V.).
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+We have here again the same triple arrangement which has prevailed
+through a considerable portion of the context. These three
+exhortations are linked together by a verbal resemblance which can
+scarcely be preserved in translation. In the two former the same
+verb is employed: and in the third the word for `wise' is cognate
+with the verb found in the other two clauses. If we are to seek
+for any closer connection of thought we may find it first in
+this---that all the three clauses deal with mental attitudes,
+whilst the preceding ones dealt with the expression of such; and
+second in this---that the first of the three is a general precept,
+and the second and third are warnings against faults which are
+most likely to interfere with it.
+
+I. We note, the bond of peace.
+
+`Be of the same mind one toward another.' It is interesting to
+notice how frequently the Apostle in many of his letters exhorts
+to mutual harmonious relations. For instance, in this very Epistle
+he invokes `the God of patience and of comfort' to grant to the
+Roman Christians `to be of the same mind with one another
+according to Christ Jesus,' and to the Corinthians, who had their
+full share of Greek divisiveness, he writes, `Be of the same mind,
+live in peace,' and assures them that, if so, `the God of love and
+peace will be with them'; to his beloved Philippians he pours out
+his heart in beseeching them by `the consolation that is in Christ
+Jesus, and the comfort of love, and the fellowship of the
+Spirit---' that they would `fulfil his joy, that they be of the
+same mind, having the same love, being of one accord, of one
+mind'; whilst to the two women in that Church who were at variance
+with one another he sends the earnest exhortation `to be of the
+same mind in the Lord,' and prays one whom we only know by his
+loving designation of `a true yokefellow,' to help them in what
+would apparently put a strain upon their Christian principle. For
+communities and for individuals the cherishing of the spirit of
+amity and concord is a condition without which there will be
+little progress in the Christian life.
+
+But it is to be carefully noted that such a spirit may co-exist
+with great differences about other matters. It is not opposed to
+wide divergence of opinion, though in our imperfect sanctification
+it is hard for us to differ and yet to be in concord. We all know
+the hopelessness of attempting to make half a dozen good men think
+alike on any of the greater themes of the Christian religion; and
+if we could succeed in such a vain attempt, there would still be
+many an unguarded door through which could come the spirit of
+discord, and the half-dozen might have divergence of heart even
+whilst they profess identity of opinion. The true hindrances to
+our having `the same mind one toward another' lie very much deeper
+in our nature than the region in which we keep our creeds. The
+self-regard and self-absorption, petulant dislike of
+fellow-Christians' peculiarities, the indifference which comes
+from lack of imaginative sympathy, and which ministers to the
+ignorance which causes it, and a thousand other weaknesses in
+Christian character bring about the deplorable alienation which
+but too plainly marks the relation of Christian communities and of
+individual Christians to one another in this day. When one thinks
+of the actual facts in every corner of Christendom, and probes
+one's own feelings, the contrast between the apostolic ideal and
+the Church's realisation of it presents a contradiction so glaring
+that one wonders if Christian people at all believe that it is
+their duty `to be of the same mind one toward another.'
+
+The attainment of this spirit of amity and concord ought to be a
+distinct object of effort, and especially in times like ours, when
+there is no hostile pressure driving Christian people together,
+but when our great social differences are free to produce a
+certain inevitable divergence and to check the flow of our
+sympathy, and when there are deep clefts of opinion, growing
+deeper every day, and seeming to part off Christians into camps
+which have little understanding of, and less sympathy with, one
+another. Even the strong individualism, which it is the glory of
+true Christian faith to foster in character, and which some forms
+of Christian fellowship do distinctly promote, works harm in this
+matter; and those who pride themselves on belonging to `Free
+churches,' and standing apart from creed-bound and clergy-led
+communities, are specially called upon to see to it that they keep
+this exhortation, and cultivate `the unity of the Spirit in the
+bond of peace.'
+
+It should not be necessary to insist that the closest mutual
+concord amongst all believers is but an imperfect manifestation,
+as all manifestations in life of the deepest principles must be,
+of the true oneness which binds together in the most sacred unity,
+and should bind together in closest friendship, all partakers of
+the one life. And assuredly the more that one life flows into our
+spirits, the less power will all the enemies of Christian concord
+have over us. It is the Christ in us which makes us kindred with
+all others in whom He is. It is self, in some form or other, that
+separates us from the possessors of like precious faith. When the
+tide is out, the little rock-pools on the shore lie separated by
+stretches of slimy weeds, but the great sea, when it rushes up,
+buries the divisions, and unites them all. Our Christian unity is
+unity in Christ, and the only sure way `to be of the same mind one
+toward another' is, that `the mind which was in Christ Jesus be in
+us also.'
+
+II. The divisive power of selfish ambition.
+
+`Set not your mind on high things, but condescend to things that
+are lowly.' The contrast here drawn between the high and the lowly
+makes it probable that the latter as well as the former is to be
+taken as referring to `things' rather than persons. The margin of
+the Revised Version gives the literal rendering of the word
+translated `condescend.' `To be carried away with,' is
+metaphorically equivalent to surrendering one's self to; and the
+two clauses present two sides of one disposition, which seeks not
+for personal advancement or conspicuous work which may minister to
+self-gratulation, but contentedly fills the lowly sphere, and `the
+humblest duties on herself doth lay.' We need not pause to point
+out that such an ideal is dead against the fashionable maxims of
+this generation. Personal ambition is glorified as an element in
+progress, and to a world which believes in such a proverb as
+`devil take the hindmost,' these two exhortations can only seem
+fanatical absurdity. And yet, perhaps, if we fairly take into
+account how the seeking after personal advancement and conspicuous
+work festers the soul, and how the flower of heart's-ease grows,
+as Bunyan's shepherd-boy found out, in the lowly valley, these
+exhortations to a quiet performance of lowly duties and a
+contented filling of lowly spheres, may seem touched with a higher
+wisdom than is to be found in the arenas where men trample over
+each other in their pursuit of a fame `which appeareth for a
+little time, and then vanisheth away.' What a peaceful world it
+would be, and what peaceful souls they would have, if Christian
+people really adopted as their own these two simple maxims. They
+are easy to understand, but how hard they are to follow.
+
+It needs scarcely be noted that the temper condemned here destroys
+all the concord and amity which the Apostle has been urging in the
+previous clause. Where every man is eagerly seeking to force
+himself in front of his neighbour, any community will become a
+struggling mob; and they who are trying to outrun one another and
+who grasp at `high things,' will never be `of the same mind one
+toward another.' But, we may observe that the surest way to keep
+in check the natural selfish tendency to desire conspicuous things
+for ourselves is honestly, and with rigid self-control, to let
+ourselves be carried away by enthusiasm for humble tasks. If we
+would not disturb our lives and fret our hearts by ambitions that,
+even when gratified, bring no satisfaction, we must yield
+ourselves to the impulse of the continuous stream of lowly duties
+which runs through every life.
+
+But, plainly as this exhortation is needful, it is too heavy a
+strain to be ever carried out except by the power of Christ formed
+in the heart. It is in His earthly life that we find the great
+example of the highest stooping to the lowest duties, and elevating
+them by taking them upon Himself. He did not `strive nor cry, nor
+cause His voice to be heard in the streets.' Thirty years of that
+perfect life were spent in a little village folded away in the
+Galilean hills, with rude peasants for the only spectators, and the
+narrow sphere of a carpenter's shop for its theatre. For the rest,
+the publicity possible would have been obscurity to an ambitious
+soul. To speak comforting words to a few weeping hearts; to lay His
+hands on a few sick folk and heal them; to go about in a despised
+land doing good, loved indeed by outcasts and sinners, unknown by
+all the dispensers of renown, and consciously despised by all whom
+the world honoured---that was the perfect life of the Incarnate God.
+And that is an example which His followers seem with one consent to
+set aside in their eager race after distinction and work that may
+glorify their names. The difficulty of a faithful following of these
+precepts, and the only means by which that difficulty can be
+overcome, are touchingly taught us in another of Paul's Epistles by
+the accumulation of motives which he brings to bear upon his
+commandment, when he exhorts by the tender motives of `comfort in
+Christ, consolation of love, fellowship of the Spirit, and tender
+mercies and compassions, that ye fulfil my joy, being of the same
+mind, of one accord; doing nothing through faction or vainglory, but
+in lowliness of mind each counting other better than himself.' As
+the pattern for each of us in our narrow sphere, he holds forth the
+mind that was in Christ Jesus, and the great self-emptying which he
+shrank not from, `but being in the form of God counted it not a
+prize to be on an equality with God, but, being found in fashion as
+a man, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto death.'
+
+III. The divisive power of intellectual self-conceit.
+
+In this final clause the Apostle, in some sense, repeats the maxim
+with which he began the series of special exhortations in this
+chapter. He there enjoined `every one among you not to think of
+himself more highly than he ought to think'; here he deals with
+one especial form of such too lofty thinking, viz. intellectual
+conceit. He is possibly quoting the Book of Proverbs (iii. 7),
+where we read, `Be not wise in thine own eyes,' which is preceded
+by, `Lean not to thine own understanding; in all thy ways
+acknowledge Him'; and is followed by, `Fear the Lord and depart
+from evil'; thus pointing to the acknowledgment and fear of the
+Lord as the great antagonist of such over-estimate of one's own
+wisdom as of all other faults of mind and life. It needs not to
+point out how such a disposition breaks Christian unity of spirit.
+There is something especially isolating in that form of
+self-conceit. There are few greater curses in the Church than
+little coteries of superior persons who cannot feed on ordinary
+food, whose enlightened intelligence makes them too fastidious to
+soil their dainty fingers with rough, vulgar work, and whose
+supercilious criticism of the unenlightened souls that are content
+to condescend to lowly Christian duties, is like an iceberg that
+brings down the temperature wherever it floats. That temper
+indulged in, breaks the unity, reduces to inactivity the work, and
+puts an end to the progress, of any Christian community in which
+it is found; and just as its predominance is harmful, so the
+obedience to the exhortation against it is inseparable from the
+fulfilling of its sister precepts. To know ourselves for the
+foolish creatures that we are, is a mighty help to being `of the
+same mind one toward another.' Who thinks of himself soberly and
+according to the measure of faith which God hath dealt to him will
+not hunger after high things, but rather prefer the lowly ones
+that are on a level with his lowly self.
+
+The exhortations of our text were preceded with injunctions to
+distribute material help, and to bestow helpful sympathy. The
+tempers enjoined in our present text are the inward source and
+fountain of such external bestowments. The rendering of material
+help and of sympathetic emotion are right and valuable only as
+they are the outcome of this unanimity and lowliness. It is
+possible to `distribute to the necessity of saints' in such a way
+as that the gift pains more than a blow; it is possible to proffer
+sympathy so that the sensitive heart shrinks from it. It was `when
+the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and one
+soul' that it became natural to have all things common. As in the
+aurora borealis, quivering beams from different centres stream out
+and at each throb approach each other till they touch and make an
+arch of light that glorifies the winter's night, so, if Christian
+men were `of the same mind toward one another,' did not `set their
+minds on high things, but condescended to things that were lowly,
+and were not wise in their own conceits,' the Church of Christ
+would shine forth in the darkness of a selfish world and would
+witness to Him who came down `from the highest throne in glory' to
+the lowliest place in this lowly world, that He might lift us to
+His own height of glory everlasting.
+
+\chapter{Still Another Triplet}
+\markright{ROMANS xii. 17, 18}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Render to no man evil for evil. Take thought for things
+honourable in the light of all men. 18. If it be possible, as much
+as in you lieth, be at peace with all men.'---\textsc{Romans} xii.
+17, 18 (R.~V.).
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The closing words of this chapter have a certain unity in that
+they deal principally with a Christian's duty in the face of
+hostility and antagonism. A previous injunction touched on the
+same subject in the exhortation to bless the persecutors; but with
+that exception, all the preceding verses have dealt with duties
+owing to those with whom we stand in friendly relations. Such
+exhortations take no cognisance of the special circumstances of
+the primitive Christians as `lambs in the midst of wolves'; and a
+large tract of Christian duty would be undealt with, if we had not
+such directions for feelings and actions in the face of hate and
+hurt. The general precept in our text is expanded in a more
+complete form in the verses which follow the text, and we may
+postpone its consideration until we have to deal with them. It is
+one form of the application of the `love without hypocrisy' which
+has been previously recommended. The second of these three
+precepts seems quite heterogeneous, but it may be noticed that the
+word for `evil' in the former and that for `honourable,' in these
+closely resemble each other in sound, and the connection of the
+two clauses may be partially owing to that verbal resemblance;
+whilst we may also discern a real link between the thoughts in the
+consideration that we owe even to our enemies the exhibition of a
+life which a prejudiced hostility will be forced to recognise as
+good. The third of these exhortations prescribes unmoved
+persistence in friendly regard to all men.
+
+Dealing then, in this sermon only, with the second and third of
+these precepts, and postponing the consideration of the first to
+the following discourse, we have here the counsel that
+
+I. Hostility is to be met with a holy and beautiful life.
+
+The Authorised Version inadequately translates the significant
+word in this exhortation by `honest.' The Apostle is not simply
+enjoining honesty in our modern, narrow sense of the word, which
+limits it to the rendering to every man his own. It is a
+remarkable thing that `honest,' like many other words expressing
+various types of goodness, has steadily narrowed in signification,
+and it is very characteristic of England that probity as to money
+and material goods should be its main meaning. Here the word is
+used in the full breadth of its ancient use, and is equivalent to
+that which is fair with the moral beauty of goodness.
+
+A Christian man then is bound to live a life which all men will
+acknowledge to be good. In that precept is implied the recognition
+of even bad men's notions of morality as correct. The Gospel is
+not a new system of ethics, though in some points it brings old
+virtues into new prominence, and alters their perspective. It is
+further implied that the world's standard of what Christians ought
+to be may be roughly taken as a true one. Christian men would
+learn a great deal about themselves, and might in many respects
+heighten their ideal, if they would try to satisfy the
+expectations of the most degraded among them as to what they ought
+to be. The worst of men has a rude sense of duty which tops the
+attainments of the best. Christian people ought to seek for the
+good opinion of those around them. They are not to take that
+opinion as the motive for their conduct, nor should they do good
+in order to be praised or admired for it; but they are to `adorn
+the doctrine,' and to let their light shine that men seeing their
+good may be led to think more loftily of its source, and so to
+`glorify their Father which is in heaven.' That is one way of
+preaching the Gospel. The world knows goodness when it sees it,
+though it often hates it, and has no better ground for its dislike
+of a man than that his purity and beauty of character make the
+lives of others seem base indeed. Bats feel the light to be light,
+though they flap against it, and the winnowing of their leathery
+wings and their blundering flight are witnesses to that against
+which they strike. Jesus had to say, `The world hateth Me because
+I testify of it that the deeds thereof are evil.' That witness was
+the result of His being `the Light of the world'; and if His
+followers are illuminated from Him, they will have the same
+effect, and must be prepared for the same response. But none the
+less is it incumbent upon them to `take thought for things
+honourable in the sight of all men.'
+
+This duty involves the others of taking care that we have goodness
+to show, and that we do not make our goodness repulsive by our
+additions to it. There are good people who comfort themselves when
+men dislike them, or scoff at them, by thinking that their religion
+is the cause, when it is only their own roughness and harshness of
+character. It is not enough that we present an austere and repellent
+virtue; the fair food should be set on a fair platter. This duty is
+especially owing to our enemies. They are our keenest critics. They
+watch for our halting. The thought of their hostile scrutiny should
+ever stimulate us, and the consciousness that Argus-eyes are
+watching us, with a keenness sharpened by dislike, should lead us
+not only to vigilance over our own steps, but also to the prayer,
+`Lead me in a plain path, because of those who watch me.' To
+`provide things honest in the sight of all men' is a possible way of
+disarming some hostility, conciliating some prejudice, and
+commending to some hearts the Lord whom we seek to imitate.
+
+II. Be sure that, if there is to be enmity, it is all on one
+side.
+
+`As much as in you lieth, be at peace with all.' These words are,
+I think, unduly limited when they are supposed to imply that there
+are circumstances in which a Christian has a right to be at
+strife. As if they meant: Be peaceable as far as you can; but if
+it be impossible, then quarrel. The real meaning goes far deeper
+than that. `It takes two to make a quarrel,' says the old proverb;
+it takes two to make peace also, does it not? We cannot determine
+whether our relations with men will be peaceful or no; we are only
+answerable for our part, and for that we are answerable. `As much
+as lieth in you' is the explanation of `if it be possible.' Your
+part is to be at peace; it is not your part up to a certain point
+and no further, but always, and in all circumstances, it is your
+part. It may not be possible to be at peace with all men; there
+may be some who \textit{will} quarrel with you. You are not to
+blame for that, but their part and yours are separate, and your
+part is the same whatever they do. Be you at peace with all men
+whether they are at peace with you or not. Don't you quarrel with
+them even if they will quarrel with you. That seems to me to be
+plainly the meaning of the words. It would be contrary to the
+tenor of the context and the teaching of the New Testament to
+suppose that here we had that favourite principle, `There is a
+point beyond which forbearance cannot go,' where it becomes right
+to cherish hostile sentiments or to try to injure a man. If there
+be such a point, it is very remarkable that there is no attempt
+made in the New Testament to define it. The nearest approach to
+such definition is `till seventy times seven,' the two perfect
+numbers multiplied into themselves. So I think that this
+injunction absolutely prescribes persistent, patient peacefulness,
+and absolutely proscribes our taking up the position of
+antagonism, and under no circumstances meeting hate with hate. It
+does not follow that there is never to be opposition. It may be
+necessary for the good of the opponent himself, and for the good
+of society, that he should be hindered in his actions of
+hostility, but there is never to be bitterness; and we must take
+care that none of the devil's leaven mingles with our zeal against
+evil.
+
+There is no need for enlarging on the enormous difficulty of
+carrying out such a commandment in our daily lives. We all know
+too well how hard it is; but we may reflect for a moment on the
+absolute necessity of obeying this precept to the full. For their
+own souls' sakes Christian men are to avoid all bitterness,
+strife, and malice. Let us try to remember, and to bring to bear
+on our daily lives, the solemn things which Jesus said about God's
+forgiveness being measured by our forgiveness. The faithful, even
+though imperfect, following of this exhortation would
+revolutionise our lives. Nothing that we can only win by fighting
+with our fellows is worth fighting for. Men will weary of
+antagonism which is met only by the imperturbable calm of a heart
+at peace with God, and seeking peace with all men. The hot fire of
+hatred dies down, like burning coals scattered on a glacier, when
+laid against the crystal coldness of a patient, peaceful spirit.
+Watch-dogs in farmhouses will bark half the night through because
+they hear another barking a mile off. It takes two to make a
+quarrel; let me be sure that I am never one of the two!
+
+\chapter{Still Another Triplet}
+\markright{ROMANS xii. 19--21}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto
+wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith
+the Lord. 20.\ Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him: if he
+thirst, give him drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of
+fire on his head. 21.\ Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil
+with good.'---\textsc{Romans} xii. 19--21.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The natural instinct is to answer enmity with enmity, and
+kindliness with kindliness. There are many people of whom we think
+well and like, for no other reason than because we believe that
+they think well of and like us. Such a love is really selfishness.
+In the same fashion, dislike, and alienation on the part of
+another naturally reproduce themselves in our own minds. A dog
+will stretch its neck to be patted, and snap at a stick raised to
+strike it. It requires a strong effort to master this instinctive
+tendency, and that effort the plainest principles of Christian
+morality require from us all. The precepts in our text are in
+twofold form, negative and positive; and they are closed with a
+general principle, which includes both these forms, and much more
+besides. There are two pillars, and a great lintel coping them,
+like the trilithons of Stonehenge.
+
+I. We deal with the negative precept.
+
+`Avenge not yourselves, beloved, but give place unto wrath.' Do
+not take the law into your own hands, but leave God's way of
+retribution to work itself out. By avenging, the Apostle means a
+passionate redress of private wrongs at the bidding of personal
+resentment. We must note how deep this precept goes. It prohibits
+not merely external acts which, in civilised times are restrained
+by law, but, as with Christian morality, it deals with thoughts
+and feelings, and not only with deeds. It forbids such natural and
+common thoughts as `I owe him an ill turn for that'; `I should
+like to pay him off.' A great deal of what is popularly called `a
+proper spirit' becomes extremely improper if tested by this
+precept. There is an eloquent word in German which we can only
+clumsily reproduce, which christens the ugly pleasure at seeing
+misfortune and calls it `joy in others' disasters.' We have not
+the word; would that we had not the thing!
+
+A solemn reason is added for the difficult precept, in that
+frequently misunderstood saying, `Give place unto wrath.' The
+question is, Whose wrath? And, plainly, the subsequent words of
+the section show that it is God's. That quotation comes from
+Deuteronomy xxxii. 35. It is possibly unfortunate that `vengeance'
+is ascribed to God; for hasty readers lay hold of the idea of
+passionate resentment, and transfer it to Him, whereas His
+retributive action has in it no resentment and no passion. Nor are
+we to suppose that the thought here is only the base one,
+\textit{they are sure to be punished, so we need not trouble}. The
+Apostle points to the solemn fact of retribution as an element in
+the Divine government. It is not merely automatically working laws
+which recompense evil by evil, but it is the face of the Lord
+which is inexorably and inevitably set `against them that do
+evil.' That recompense is not hidden away in the future behind the
+curtain of death, but is realised in the present, as every
+evil-doer too surely and bitterly experiences.
+
+`Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.' God only has
+the right to recompense the ungodly and the sinner as well as the
+righteous. Dwelling in such a system as we do, how dares any one
+take that work into his hands? It requires perfect knowledge of
+the true evil of an action, which no one has who cannot read the
+heart; it requires perfect freedom from passion; it requires
+perfect immunity from evil desert on the part of the avenger; in a
+word, it belongs to God, and to Him alone. We have nothing to do
+with apportioning retribution to desert, either in private actions
+or in the treatment of so-called criminals. In the latter our
+objects should be reformation and the safety of society. If we add
+to these retribution, we transcend our functions.
+
+II. Take the positive,---Follow God's way of meeting hostility
+with beneficence.
+
+The hungry enemy is to be fed, the thirsty to be given drink; and
+the reason is, that such beneficence will `heap coals of fire upon
+his head.' The negative is not enough. To abstain from vengeance
+will leave the heart unaffected, and may simply issue in the
+cessation of all intercourse. The reason assigned sounds at first
+strange. It is clear that the `coals of fire' which are to be
+heaped on the head are meant to melt and soften the heart, and
+cause it to glow with love. There may be also included the burning
+pangs of shame felt by a man whose evil is answered by good. But
+these are secondary and auxiliary to the true end of kindling the
+fire of love in his alienated heart. The great object which every
+Christian man is bound to have in view is to win over the enemy
+and melt away misconceptions and hostility. It is not from any
+selfish regard to one's own personal ease that we are so to act,
+but because of the sacred regard which Christ has taught us to
+cherish for the blessing of peace amongst men, and in order that
+we may deliver a brother from the snare, and make him share in the
+joys of fellowship with God. The only way to burn up the evil in
+his heart is by heaping coals of kindness and beneficence on his
+head. And for such an end it becomes us to watch for
+opportunities. We have to mark the right moment, and make sure
+that we time our offer for food when he is hungry and of drink
+when he thirsts; for often \textit{mal-a-propos} offers of
+kindness make things worse. Such is God's way. His thunderbolts we
+cannot grasp, His love we can copy. Of the two weapons mercy and
+judgment which He holds in His hand, the latter is emphatically
+His own; the former should be ours too.
+
+III. In all life meet and conquer evil with good.
+
+This last precept, `Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil
+with good,' is cast into a form which covers not only relations to
+enemies, but all contact with evil of every kind. It involves many
+great thoughts which can here be only touched. It implies that in
+all our lives we have to fight evil, and that it conquers, and we
+are beaten when we are led to do it. It is only conquered by being
+transformed into good. We overcome our foes when we win them to be
+lovers. We overcome our temptations to doing wrong when we make
+them occasions for developing virtues; we overcome the evil of
+sorrow when we use it to bring us nearer to God; we overcome the
+men around us when we are not seduced by their example to evil,
+but attract them to goodness by ours.
+
+Evil is only thus transformed by the positive exercise of goodness
+on our part. We have seen this in regard to enemies in the
+preceding remarks. In regard to other forms of evil, it is often
+better not to fight them directly, but to occupy the mind and
+heart with positive truth and goodness, and the will and hands
+with active service. A rusty knife shall not be cleaned so
+effectually by much scouring as by strenuous use. Our lives are to
+be moulded after the great example of Him, who at almost the last
+moment of His earthly course said, `Be of good cheer: I have
+overcome the world.' Jesus seeks to conquer evil in us all, and
+counts that He has conquered it when He has changed it into
+love.
+
+\chapter{Love and the Day}
+\markright{ROMANS xiii. 8--14}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Owe no man anything, but to love one another: for he that loveth
+another hath fulfilled the law. 9.\ For this, Thou shalt not
+commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou
+shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there
+be any other commandment it is briefly comprehended in this
+saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 10.\
+Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the
+fulfilling of the law. 11.\ And that, knowing the time, that now
+it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation
+nearer than when we believed. 12.\ The night is far spent, the day
+is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and
+let us put on the armour of light, 13.\ Let us walk honestly, as
+in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and
+wantonness, not in strife and envying: 14.\ But put ye on the Lord
+Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the
+lusts thereof.'---\textsc{Romans} xiii. 8--14.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The two paragraphs of this passage are but slightly connected. The
+first inculcates the obligation of universal love; and the second
+begins by suggesting, as a motive for the discharge of that duty,
+the near approach of `the day.' The light of that dawn draws
+Paul's eyes and leads him to wider exhortations on Christian
+purity as befitting the children of light.
+
+I. Verses 8--10 set forth the obligation of a love which embraces
+all men, and comprehends all duties to them. The Apostle has just
+been laying down the general exhortation, `Pay every man his due'
+and applying it especially to the Christian's relation to civic
+rulers. He repeats it in a negative form, and bases on it the
+obligation of loving every man. That love is further represented
+as the sum and substance of the law. Thus Paul brings together two
+thoughts which are often dealt with as mutually
+exclusive,---namely, love and law. He does not talk
+sentimentalisms about the beauty of charity and the like, but lays
+it down, as a `hard and fast rule,' that we are bound to love
+every man with whom we come in contact; or, as the Greek has it,
+`the other.'
+
+That is the first plain truth taught here. Love is not an emotion
+which we may indulge or not, as we please. It is not to select its
+objects according to our estimate of their lovableness or
+goodness. But we are bound to love, and that all round, without
+distinction of beautiful or ugly, good or bad. `A hard saying; who
+can hear it?' Every man is our creditor for that debt. He does not
+get his due from us unless he gets love. Note, further, that the
+debt of love is never discharged. After all payments it still
+remains owing. There is no paying in full of all demands, and, as
+Bengel says, it is an undying debt. We are apt to weary of
+expending love, especially on unworthy recipients, and to think
+that we have wiped off all claims, and it may often be true that
+our obligations to others compel us to cease helping one; but if
+we laid Paul's words to heart, our patience would be
+longer-breathed, and we should not be so soon ready to shut hearts
+and purses against even unthankful suitors.
+
+Further, Paul here teaches us that this debt (\textit{debitum},
+`duty') of love includes all duties. It is the fulfilling of the
+law, inasmuch as it will secure the conduct which the law
+prescribes. The Mosaic law itself indicates this, since it
+recapitulates the various commandments of the second table, in the
+one precept of love to our neighbour (Lev. xix. 18). Law enjoins
+but has no power to get its injunctions executed. Love enables and
+inclines to do all that law prescribes, and to avoid all that it
+prohibits. The multiplicity of duties is melted into unity; and
+that unity, when it comes into act, unfolds into whatsoever things
+are lovely and of good report. Love is the mother tincture which,
+variously diluted and manipulated, yields all potent and fragrant
+draughts. It is the white light which the prism of daily life
+resolves into its component colours.
+
+But Paul seems to limit the action of love here to negative doing
+no ill. That is simply because the commandments are mostly
+negative, and that they are is a sad token of the lovelessness
+natural to us all. But do we love ourselves only negatively, or
+are we satisfied with doing ourselves no harm? That stringent
+pattern of love to others not only prescribes degree, but manner.
+It teaches that true love to men is not weak indulgence, but must
+sometimes chastise, and thwart, and always must seek their good,
+and not merely their gratification.
+
+Whoever will honestly seek to apply that negative precept of
+working no ill to others, will find it positive enough. We harm
+men when we fail to help them. If we can do them a kindness, and
+do it not, we do them ill. Non-activity for good is activity for
+evil. Surely, nothing can be plainer than the bearing of this
+teaching on the Christian duty as to intoxicants. If by using
+these a Christian puts a stumbling-block in the way of a weak
+will, then he is working ill to his neighbour, and that argues
+absence of love, and that is dishonest, shirking payment of a
+plain debt.
+
+II. The great stimulus to love and to all purity is set forth as
+being the near approach---of the day (verses 11--14). `The day,'
+in Paul's writing, has usually the sense of the great day of the
+Lord's return, and may have that meaning here; for, as Jesus has
+told us, `it is not for' even inspired Apostles `to know the times
+or the seasons,' and it is no dishonour to apostolic inspiration
+to assign to it the limits which the Lord has assigned.
+
+But, whether we take this as the meaning of the phrase, or regard
+it simply as pointing to the time of death as the dawning of
+heaven's day, the weight of the motive is unaffected. The language
+is vividly picturesque. The darkness is thinning, and the
+blackness turning grey. Light begins to stir and whisper. A band
+of soldiers lies asleep, and, as the twilight begins to dawn, the
+bugle call summons them to awake, to throw off their
+night-gear,---namely, the works congenial to darkness,---and to
+brace on their armour of light. Light may here be regarded as the
+material of which the glistering armour is made; but, more
+probably, the expression means weapons appropriate to the
+light.
+
+Such being the general picture, we note the fact which underlies
+the whole representation; namely, that every life is a definite
+whole which has a fixed end. Jesus said, `We must work the works
+of Him that sent Me, while it is day: the night cometh.' Paul uses
+the opposite metaphors in these verses. But, though the two
+sayings are opposite in form, they are identical in substance. In
+both, the predominant thought is that of the rapidly diminishing
+space of earthly life, and the complete unlikeness to it of the
+future. We stand like men on a sandbank with an incoming tide, and
+every wash of the waves eats away its edges, and presently it will
+yield below our feet. We forget this for the most part, and
+perhaps it is not well that it should be ever present; but that it
+should never be present is madness and sore loss.
+
+Paul, in his intense moral earnestness, in verse 13, bids us
+regard ourselves as already in `the day,' and shape our conduct as
+if it shone around us and all things were made manifest by its
+light. The sins to be put off are very gross and palpable. They
+are for the most part sins of flesh, such as even these Roman
+Christians had to be warned against, and such as need to be
+manifested by the light even now among many professing Christian
+communities.
+
+But Paul has one more word to say. If he stopped without it, he
+would have said little to help men who are crying out, `How am I
+to strip off this clinging evil, which seems my skin rather than
+my clothing? How am I to put on that flashing panoply?' There is
+but one way,---put on the Lord Jesus Christ. If we commit
+ourselves to Him by faith, and front our temptations in His
+strength, and thus, as it were, wrap ourselves in Him, He will be
+to us dress and armour, strength and righteousness. Our old self
+will fall away, and we shall take no forethought for the flesh, to
+fulfil the lusts thereof.
+
+\chapter{Salvation Nearer}
+\markright{ROMANS xiii. 11}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`... Now is our salvation nearer than when we
+believed.'---\textsc{Romans} xiii. 11.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+There is no doubt, I suppose, that the Apostle, in common with the
+whole of the early Church, entertained more or less consistently the
+expectation of living to witness the second coming of Jesus Christ.
+There are in Paul's letters passages which look both in the
+direction of that anticipation, and in the other one of expecting to
+taste death. `We which are alive and remain unto the coming of the
+Lord,' he says twice in one chapter. `I am ready to be offered, and
+the hour of my departure is at hand,' he says in his last letter.
+
+Now this contrariety of anticipation is but the natural result of
+what our Lord Himself said, `It is not for you to know the times
+and the seasons,' and no one, who is content to form his doctrine
+of the knowledge resulting from inspiration from the words of
+Jesus Christ Himself, need stumble in the least degree in
+recognising the plain fact that Paul and his brother Apostles did
+not know when the Master was to come. Christ Himself had told them
+that there was a chamber locked against their entrance, and
+therefore we do not need to think that it militates against the
+authoritative inspiration of these early teachers of the Church,
+if they, too, searched `what manner of time the Spirit which was
+in them did signify when it testified beforehand ... the glory
+that should follow.'
+
+Now, my text is evidently the result of the former of these two
+anticipations, viz. that Paul and his generation were probably to
+see the coming of the Lord from heaven. And to him the thought
+that' the night was far spent,' as the context says, `and the day
+was at hand,' underlay his most buoyant hope, and was the
+inspiration and motive-spring of his most strenuous effort.
+
+Now, our relation to the closing moments of our own earthly lives,
+to the fact of death, is precisely the same as that of the Apostle
+and his brethren to the coming of the Lord. We, too, stand in that
+position of partial ignorance, and for us practically the words of
+my text, and all their parallel words, point to how we should
+think of, and how we should be affected by, the end to which we
+are coming. And this is the grand characteristic of the Christian
+view of that last solemn moment. `Now is our salvation nearer than
+when we believed.' So I would note, first of all, what these words
+teach us should be the Christian view of our own end; and, second,
+to what conduct that view should lead us.
+
+I. The Christian view of death.
+
+`Now is our salvation nearer.' We have to think away by faith and
+hope all the grim externals of death, and to get to the heart of
+the thing. And then everything that is repulsive, everything that
+makes flesh and blood shrink, disappears and is evaporated, and
+beneath the folds of his black garment, there is revealed God's
+last, sweetest, most triumphant angel-messenger to Christian
+souls, the great, strong, silent Angel of Death, and he carries in
+his hand the gift of a full salvation. That is what our Apostle
+rose to the rapture of beholding, when he knew that the thought of
+his surviving till Christ came again must be put away, and when
+close to the last moment of his life, he said, `The Lord shall
+deliver me, and save me into His everlasting kingdom.' What was
+the deliverance and being saved that he expected and expresses in
+these words? Immunity from punishment? Escape from the headsman's
+axe? Being `delivered from the mouth of the lion,' the persecuting
+fangs of the bloody Nero? By no means. He knew that death was at
+hand, and he said, `He will save me'---not from it, but through
+it---`into His everlasting kingdom.' And so in the words of my
+text we may say---though Paul did not mean them so---as we see the
+distance between us, and that certain close, dwindling, dwindling,
+dwindling: `Now,' as moment after moment ticks itself into the
+past, `now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.'
+Children, when they are getting near their holidays, take strips
+of paper, and tear off a piece as each day passes. And as we tear
+off the days let us feel that we are drawing closer to our home,
+and that the blessedness laid up for us in it is drawing nearer to
+us. `Our salvation,' not our destruction, our fuller life, not in
+any true sense of the word our `death,' is `nearer than when we
+believed.'
+
+But some one may say, `Is a man not saved till after he is dead?'
+Is salvation future, not coming till after the grave? No,
+certainly not. There are three aspects of that word in Scripture.
+Sometimes the New Testament writers treat salvation as past, and
+represent a Christian as being invested with the possession of it
+all at the very moment of his first faith. That is true, that
+whatever is yet to be evolved from what is given to the poorest
+and foulest sinner, in the moment of his initial faith in Christ,
+there is nothing to be added to it. The salvation which the
+penitent thief received on the cross is all the salvation that he
+was ever to get. But out of it there came welling and welling and
+welling, when he had passed into the region `where beyond these
+voices there is peace'---there came welling out from that
+inexhaustible fountain which was opened in him all the fullnesses
+of an eternal progress in the heavens. And so it is with us.
+Salvation is a past gift which we received when we believed.
+
+But in another aspect, which is also emphatically stated in
+Scripture, it is a progressive process, and not merely a gift
+bestowed once for all in the past. I do not dwell upon that thought,
+but just remind you of a turn of expression which occurs in various
+connections more than once. `The Lord added to the Church daily such
+as were being saved,' says Luke. Still more emphatically in the
+Epistle to the Corinthians, the Apostle puts into antithesis the two
+progressive processes, and speaks of the Gospel as being preached,
+and being a savour of life unto life `to them that are being saved,'
+and a savour of destruction `to them that are being lost.' No moral
+or spiritual condition is stereotyped or stagnant. It is all
+progressive. And so the salvation that is given once for all is ever
+being unfolded, and the Christian life on earth is the unfolding of
+it.
+
+But in another aspect still, such as is presented in my text, and
+in other parallel passages, that salvation is regarded as lying on
+the other side of the flood, because the manifestations of it
+there, the evolving there of what is in it, and the great gifts
+that come then, are so transcendently above all even of our
+selectest experiences here, that they are, as it were, new, though
+still their roots are in the old. The salvation which culminates
+in the absolute removal from our whole being of all manner of
+evil, whether it be sorrow or sin, and in the conclusive bestowal
+upon us of all manner of good, whether it be righteousness or joy,
+and which has for its seal `the adoption, to wit, the redemption
+of the body,' so that body, soul, and spirit `make one music as
+before, but vaster,' is so far beyond the germs of itself which
+here we experience that my text and its like are amply vindicated.
+And the man who is most fully persuaded and conscious that he
+possesses the salvation of God, and most fully and blessedly aware
+that that salvation is gradually gaining power in his life, is the
+very man who will most feel that between its highest manifestation
+on earth, and its lowest in the heavens there is such a gulf as
+that the wine that he will drink there at the Father's table is
+indeed new wine. And so `is our salvation nearer,' though we
+already possess it, `than when we believed.'
+
+Dear brethren, if these things be true, and if to die is to be
+saved into the kingdom, do not two thoughts result? The one is
+that that blessed consummation should occupy more of our thoughts
+than I am afraid it does. As life goes on, and the space dwindles
+between us and it, we older people naturally fall into the way,
+unless we are fools, of more seriously and frequently turning our
+thoughts to the end. I suppose the last week of a voyage to
+Australia has far more thoughts in it about the landing next week
+than the two or three first days of beating down the English
+Channel had. I do not want to put old heads on young shoulders in
+this or in any other respect. But sure I am that it does belong
+very intimately to the strength of our Christian characters that
+we should, as the Psalmist says, be `wise' to `consider our latter
+end.'
+
+The other thought that follows is as plain, viz. that that
+anticipation should always be buoyant, hopeful, joyous. We have
+nothing to do with the sad aspects of parting from earth. They are
+all but non-existent for the Christian consciousness, when it is
+as vigorous and God-directed as it ought to be. They drop into the
+background, and sometimes are lost to sight altogether. Remember
+how this Apostle, when he does think about death, looks at it
+with---I was going to quote words which may strike you as being
+inappropriate---`a frolic welcome'; how, at all events, he is
+neither a bit afraid of it, nor does he see in it anything from
+which to shrink. He speaks of being with Christ, which is far
+better; `absent from the body, present with the Lord'; `the
+dissolution of the earthly house of this tabernacle'---the
+tumbling down of the old clay cottage in order that a stately
+palace of marble and precious stones may be reared upon its site;
+`the hour of my departure is at hand; I have finished the fight.'
+Peter, too, chimes in with his words: `My exodus; my departure,'
+and both of the two are looking, if not longingly, at all events
+without a tremor of the eyelid, into the very eyeballs of the
+messenger whom most men feel so hideous. Is it not a wonderful
+gift to Christian souls that by faith in Jesus Christ, the realm
+in which their hope can expatiate is more than doubled, and
+annexes the dim lands beyond the frontier of death? Dear friends,
+if we are living in Christ, the thought of the end and that here
+we are absent from home, ought to be infinitely sweet, of whatever
+superficial terrors this poor, shrinking flesh may still be
+conscious. And I am sure that the nearer we get to our Saviour,
+and the more we realise the joyous possession of salvation as
+already ours, and the more we are conscious of the expanding of
+that gift in our hearts, the more we shall be delivered from that
+fear of death which makes men all their `lifetime subject to
+bondage.' So I beseech you to aim at this, that, when you look
+forward, the furthest thing you see on the horizon of earth may be
+that great Angel of Death coming to save you into the everlasting
+kingdom.
+
+Now, just a word about
+
+II. The conduct to which such a hope should incite.
+
+The Apostle puts it very plainly in the context, and we need but
+expand in a word or two what he teaches us there. `And that
+knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep,
+for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.' To what
+does he refer by `that'? The whole of the practical exhortations
+to a Christian life which have been given before. Everything that
+is duty becomes tenfold more stringent and imperative when we
+apprehend the true meaning of that last moment. They tell us that
+it is unwholesome to be thinking about death and the beyond,
+because to do so takes away interest from much of our present
+occupations and weakens energy. If there is anything from which a
+man is wrenched away because he steadily contemplates the fact of
+being wrenched away altogether from everything before long, it is
+something that he had better be wrenched from. And if there be any
+occupations which dwindle into nothingness, and into which a man
+cannot for the life of him fling himself with any thoroughgoing
+enthusiasm or interest, if once the thought of death stirs in him,
+depend upon it they are occupations which are in themselves
+contemptible and unworthy. All good aims will gain greater power
+over us; we shall have a saner estimate of what is worth living
+for; we shall have a new standard of what is the relative
+importance of things; and if some that looked very great turn out
+to be very small when we let that searching light in upon them,
+and others which seemed very insignificant spring suddenly up into
+dominating magnitude---that new and truer perspective will be all
+clear gain. The more we feel that our salvation is sweeping
+towards us, as it were, from the throne of God through the blue
+abysses, the more diligently we shall `work while it is called
+day,' and the more earnestly we shall seek, when the Saviour and
+His salvation come, to be found with loins girt for all strenuous
+work, and lamps burning in all the brightness of the light of a
+Christian character.
+
+Further, says Paul, this hopeful, cheerful contemplation of
+approaching salvation should lead us to cast off the evil, and to
+put on the good. You will remember the heart-stirring imagery
+which the Apostle employs in the context, where he says, `The day
+is at hand; let us therefore fling off the works of darkness'---as
+men in the morning, when the daylight comes through the window,
+and makes them lift their eyelids, fling off their
+night-gear---`and let us put on the armour of light.' We are
+soldiers, and must be clad in what will be bullet-proof, and will
+turn a sword's edge. And where shall steel of celestial temper be
+found that can resist the fiery darts shot at the Christian
+soldier? His armour must be `of light.' Clad in the radiance of
+Christian character he will be invulnerable. And how can we, who
+have robed ourselves in the works of darkness, either cast them
+off or array ourselves in sparkling armour of light? Paul tells
+us, `Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for
+the flesh.' The picture is of a camp of sleeping soldiers; the
+night wears thin, the streaks of saffron are coming in the dawning
+east. One after another the sleepers awake; they cast aside their
+night-gear, and they brace on the armour that sparkles in the
+beams of the morning sun. So they are ready when the trumpet
+sounds the reveille, and with the morning comes the Captain of the
+Lord's host, and with the Captain comes the perfecting of the
+salvation which is drawing nearer and nearer to us, as our moments
+glide through our fingers like the beads of a rosary. Many men
+think of death and fear; the Christian should think of death---and
+hope.
+
+\chapter{The Soldier's Morning-call}
+\markright{ROMANS xiii. 12}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Let us put on the armour of light.'---\textsc{Romans} xiii. 12.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+It is interesting to notice that the metaphor of the Christian
+armour occurs in Paul's letters throughout his whole course. It
+first appears, in a very rudimentary form, in the earliest of the
+Epistles, that to the Thessalonians. It appears here in a letter
+which belongs to the middle of his career, and it appears finally
+in the Epistle to the Ephesians, in its fully developed and
+drawn-out shape, at almost the end of his work. So we may fairly
+suppose that it was one of his familiar thoughts. Here it has a
+very picturesque addition, for the picture that is floating before
+his vivid imagination is that of a company of soldiers, roused by
+the morning bugle, casting off their night-gear because the day is
+beginning to dawn, and bracing on the armour that sparkles in the
+light of the rising sun. `That,' says Paul, `is what you Christian
+people ought to be. Can you not hear the notes of the reveille?
+The night is far spent; the day is at hand; therefore let us put
+off the works of darkness---the night-gear that was fit for those
+hours of slumber. Toss it away, and put on the armour that belongs
+to the day.'
+
+Now, I am not going to ask or try to answer the question of how
+far this Apostolic exhortation is based upon the Apostle's
+expectation that the world was drawing near its end. That does not
+matter at all for us at present, for the fact which he expresses
+as the foundation of this exhortation is true about us all, and
+about our position in the midst of these fleeting shadows round
+us. We are hastening to the dawning of the true day. And so let me
+try to emphasise the exhortation here, old and threadbare and
+commonplace as it is, because we all need it, at whatever point of
+life's journey we have arrived.
+
+Now, the first thing that strikes me is that the garb for the man
+expectant of the day is armour.
+
+We might have anticipated something very different in accordance
+with the thoughts that Paul's imagery here suggests, about the
+difference between the night which is so swiftly passing, and is
+full of enemies and dangers, and the day which is going to dawn,
+and is full of light and peace and joy. We might have expected
+that he would have said, `Let us put on the festal robes.' But no!
+`The night is far spent; the day is at hand.' But the dress that
+befits the expectant of the day is not yet the robe of the feast,
+but it is `the armour' which, put into plain words, means just
+this, that there is fighting, always fighting, to be done. If you
+are ever to belong to the day, you have to equip yourselves
+\textit{now} with armour and weapons. I do not need to dwell upon
+that, but I do wish to insist upon this fact, that after all that
+may be truly said about growth in grace, and the peaceful
+approximation towards perfection in the Christian character, we
+cannot dispense with the other element in progress, and that is
+fighting. We have to struggle for every step. \textit{Growth} is
+not enough to define completely the process by which men become
+conformed to the image of the Father, and are `made meet to be
+partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.' Growth does
+express part of it, but only a part. Conflict is needed to come
+in, before you have the whole aspect of Christian progress before
+your minds. For there will always be antagonism without and
+traitors within. There will always be recalcitrant horses that
+need to be whipped up, and jibbing horses that need to be dragged
+forward, and shying ones that need to be violently coerced and
+kept in the traces. Conflict is the law, because of the enemies,
+and because of the conspiracy between the weakness within and the
+things without that appeal to it.
+
+We hear a great deal to-day about being `sanctified by faith.' I
+believe that as much as any man, but the office of faith is to
+bring us the power that cleanses, and the application of that
+power requires our work, and it requires our fighting. So it is
+not enough to say, `Trust for your sanctifying as you have trusted
+for your justifying and acceptance,' but you have to work out what
+you get by your faith, and you will never work it out unless you
+fight against your unworthy self, and the temptations of the
+world. The garb of the candidate for the day is armour.
+
+And there is another side to that same thought, and that is, the
+more vivid our expectations of that blessed dawn the more complete
+should be our bracing on of the armour. The anticipation of that
+future, in very many instances, in the Christian Church, has led
+to precisely the opposite state of mind. It has induced people to
+drop into mere fantastic sentiment, or to ignore this contemptible
+present, and think that they have nothing to do with it, and are
+only `waiting for the coming of the Lord,' and the like. Paul
+says, `Just because, on your eastern horizon, you can see the pink
+flush that tells that the night is gone, and the day is coming,
+therefore do not be a sentimentalist, do not be idle, do not be
+negligent or contemptuous of the daily tasks; but because you see
+it, put on the armour of light, and whether the time between the
+rising of the whole orb of the sun on the horizon be long or
+short, fill the hours with triumphant conflict. Put on the whole
+armour of light.'
+
+Again, note here what the armour is. Of course that phrase, `the
+armour of light,' may be nothing more than a little bit of colour
+put in by a picturesque imagination, and may suggest simply how
+the burnished steel would shine and glitter when the sunbeams
+smote it, and the glistening armour, like that of Spenser's Red
+Cross Knight, would make a kind of light in the dark cave, into
+which he went. Or it may mean `the armour that befits the light';
+as is perhaps suggested by the antithesis `the works of darkness,'
+which are to be `put off.' These are works that match the
+darkness, and similarly the armour is to be the armour that befits
+the light, and that can flash back its beams. But I think there is
+more than that in the expression. I would rather take the phrase
+to be parallel to another of this Apostle's, who speaks in 2nd
+Corinthians of the `armour of righteousness on the right hand and
+on the left.' `Light' makes the armour, `righteousness' makes the
+armour. The two phrases say the same thing, the one in plain
+English, the other in figure, which being brought down to daily
+life is just this, that the true armour and weapon of a Christian
+man is Christian character. `Whatsoever things are true,
+whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good
+report,' these are the pieces of armour, and these are the weapons
+which we are to wield. A Christian man fights against evil in
+himself by putting on good. The true way to empty the heart of sin
+is to fill the heart with righteousness. The lances of the light,
+according to the significant old Greek myth, slew pythons. The
+armour is `righteousness on the right hand and on the left.' Stick
+to plain, simple, homely duties, and you will find that they will
+defend your heart against many a temptation. A flask that is full
+of rich wine may be plunged into the saltest ocean, and not a drop
+will find its way in. Fill your heart with righteousness; your
+lives---let them glisten in the light, and the light will be your
+armour. God is light, wherefore God cannot be tempted with evil.
+`Walk in the light, as He is in the light' ... and `the blood of
+Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin.'
+
+But there is another side to that thought, for if you will look,
+at your leisure, to the closing words of the chapter, you will
+find the Apostle's own exposition of what putting on the armour of
+light means. `Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ'---that is his
+explanation of putting on `the armour of light.' For `once ye were
+darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord,' and it is in the
+measure in which we are united to Him, by the faith which binds us
+to Him, and by the love which works obedience and conformity, that
+we wear the invulnerable armour of light. Christ Himself is, and
+He supplies to all, the separate graces which Christian men can
+wear. We may say that He is `the panoply of God,' as Paul calls it
+in Ephesians, and when we wear Him, and only in the measure in
+which we do wear Him, in that measure are we clothed with it. And
+so the last thing that I would point out here is that the
+obedience to these commands requires continual effort.
+
+The Christians in Rome, to whom Paul was writing, were no novices
+in the Christian life. Long ago many of them had been brought to
+Him. But the oldest Christian amongst them needed the exhortation
+as much as the rawest recruit in the ranks. Continual renewal day
+by day is what we need, and it will not be secured without a great
+deal of work. Seeing that there is a `putting off' to go along
+with the `putting on,' the process is a very long one. `'Tis a
+lifelong task till the lump be leavened.' It is a lifelong task
+till we strip off all the rags of this old self; and `being
+clothed,' are not `found naked.' It takes a lifetime to fathom
+Jesus; it takes a lifetime to appropriate Jesus, it takes a
+lifetime to be clothed with Jesus. And the question comes to each
+of us, have we `put off the old man with his deeds'? Are we daily,
+as sure as we put on our clothes in the morning, putting on Christ
+the Lord?
+
+For notice with what solemnity the Apostle gives the master His
+full, official, formal title here, `put ye on the \textit{Lord
+Jesus Christ}.' Do we put Him on as \textit{Lord}; bowing our
+whole wills to Him, and accepting Him, His commandments, promises,
+providences, with glad submission? Do we put on \textit{Jesus},
+recognising in His manhood as our Brother not only the pattern of
+our lives, but the pledge that the pattern, by His help and love,
+is capable of reproduction in ourselves? Do we put Him on as `the
+Lord Jesus \textit{Christ},' who was anointed with the Divine
+Spirit, that from the head it might flow, even to the skirts of
+the garments, and every one of us might partake of that unction
+and be made pure and clean thereby? `Put ye on the Lord Jesus
+Christ,' and do it day by day, and then you have `put on the whole
+armour of God.'
+
+And when the day that is dawning has risen to its full, then, not
+till then, may we put off the armour and put on the white robe,
+lay aside the helmet, and have our brows wreathed with the laurel,
+sheathe the sword, and grasp the palm, being `more than conquerors
+through Him who loved us,' and fights in us, as well as for
+us.
+
+\chapter{The Limits of Liberty}
+\markright{ROMANS xiv. 12--23}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God.
+13.\ Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge
+this rather, that no man put a stumblingblock, or an occasion to
+fall, in his brother's way. 14.\ I know, and am persuaded by the
+Lord Jesus, that there is nothing unclean of itself: but to him
+that esteemeth anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean. 15.\
+But if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou not
+charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died.
+16.\ Let not then your good be evil spoken of: 17.\ For the
+kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and
+peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. 18.\ For he that in these things
+serveth Christ is acceptable to God, and approved of men. 19.\ Let
+us therefore follow after the things which make for peace, and
+things wherewith one may edify another. 20.\ For meat destroy not
+the work of God. All things indeed are pure; but it is evil for
+that man who eateth with offence. 21.\ It is good neither to eat
+flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother
+stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak. 22.\ Hast thou faith?
+have it to thyself before God. Happy is he that condemneth not
+himself in that thing which he alloweth. 23.\ And he that doubteth
+is damned if he eat, because he eateth not of faith: for
+whatsoever is not of faith is sin.'---\textsc{Romans} xiv. 12--23.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The special case in view, in the section of which this passage is
+part, is the difference of opinion as to the lawfulness of eating
+certain meats. It is of little consequence, so far as the
+principles involved are concerned, whether these were the food
+which the Mosaic ordinances made unclean, or, as in Corinth, meats
+offered to idols. The latter is the more probable, and would be
+the more important in Rome. The two opinions on the point
+represented two tendencies of mind, which always exist; one more
+scrupulous, and one more liberal. Paul has been giving the former
+class the lesson they needed in the former part of this chapter;
+and he now turns to the `stronger' brethren, and lays down the law
+for their conduct. We may, perhaps, best simply follow him, verse
+by verse.
+
+We note then, first, the great thought with which he starts, that
+of the final judgment, in which each man shall give account of
+himself. What has that to do with the question in hand? This, that
+it ought to keep us from premature and censorious judging. We have
+something more pressing to do than to criticise each other.
+Ourselves are enough to keep our hands full, without taking a lift
+of our fellows' conduct. And this, further, that, in view of the
+final judgment, we should hold a preliminary investigation on our
+own principles of action, and `decide' to adopt as the overruling
+law for ourselves, that we shall do nothing which will make duty
+harder for our brethren. Paul habitually settled small matters on
+large principles, and brought the solemnities of the final account
+to bear on the marketplace and the meal.
+
+In verse 13 he lays down the supreme principle for settling the
+case in hand. No Christian is blameless if he voluntarily acts so
+as to lay a stumbling-block or an occasion to fall in another's
+path. Are these two things the same? Possibly, but a man may
+stumble, and not fall, and that which makes him stumble may
+possibly indicate a temptation to a less grave evil than that
+which makes him fall does. It may be noticed that in the sequel we
+hear of a brother's being `grieved' first, and then of his being
+`overthrown.' In any case, there is no mistake about the principle
+laid down and repeated in verse 21. It is a hard saying for some
+of us. Is my liberty to be restricted by the narrow scruples of
+`strait-laced' Christians? Yes. Does not that make them masters,
+and attach too much importance to their narrowness? No. It
+recognises Christ as Master, and all His servants as brethren. If
+the scrupulous ones go so far as to say to the more liberal, `You
+cannot be Christians if you do not do as we do' then the limits of
+concession have been reached, and we are to do as Paul did, when
+he flatly refused to yield one hair's-breadth to the Judaisers. If
+a man says, You must adopt this, that, or the other limitation in
+conduct, or else you shall be unchurched, the only answer is, I
+will not. We are to be flexible as long as possible, and let weak
+brethren's scruples restrain our action. But if they insist on
+things indifferent as essential, a yet higher duty than that of
+regard to their weak consciences comes in, and faithfulness to
+Christ limits concession to His servants.
+
+But, short of that extreme case, Paul lays down the law of curbing
+liberty in deference to `narrowness.' In verse 14 he states with
+equal breadth the extreme principle of the liberal party, that
+nothing is unclean of itself. He has learned that `in the Lord
+Jesus.' Before he was `in Him,' he had been entangled in cobwebs
+of legal cleanness and uncleanness; but now he is free. But he
+adds an exception, which must be kept in mind by the
+liberal-minded section---namely, that a clean thing is unclean to
+a man who thinks it is. Of course, these principles do not affect
+the eternal distinctions of right and wrong. Paul is not playing
+fast and loose with the solemn, divine law which makes sin and
+righteousness independent of men's notions. He is speaking of
+things indifferent---ceremonial observances and the like; and the
+modern analogies of these are conventional pieces of conduct, in
+regard to amusements and the like, which, in themselves, a
+Christian man can do or abstain from without sin.
+
+Verse 15 is difficult to understand, if the `for' at the beginning
+is taken strictly. Some commentators would read instead of it a
+simple `but' which smooths the flow of thought. But possibly the
+verse assigns a reason for the law in verse 13, rather than for
+the statements in verse 14. And surely there is no stronger reason
+for tender consideration for even the narrowest scruples of
+Christians than the obligation to walk in love. Our common
+brotherhood binds us to do nothing that would even grieve one of
+the family. For instance, Christian men have different views of
+the obligations of Sunday observance. It is conceivable that a
+very `broad' Christian might see no harm in playing lawn-tennis in
+his garden on a Sunday; but if his doing so scandalised, or, as
+Paul says, `grieved' Christian people of less advanced views, he
+would be sinning against the law of love if he did it.
+
+There are many other applications of the principle readily
+suggested. The principle is the thing to keep clearly in view. It
+has a wide field for its exercise in our times, and when the
+Christian brotherhood includes such diversities of culture and
+social condition. And that is a solemn deepening of it, `Destroy
+not with thy meat him for whom Christ died.' Note the almost
+bitter emphasis on `thy,' which brings out not only the smallness
+of the gratification for which the mischief is done, but the
+selfishness of the man who will not yield up so small a thing to
+shield from evil which may prove fatal, a brother for whom Christ
+did not shrink from yielding up life. If He is our pattern, any
+sacrifice of tastes and liberties for our brother's sake is plain
+duty, and cannot be neglected without selfish sin. One great
+reason, then, for the conduct enjoined, is set forth in verse 15.
+It is the clear dictate of Christian love.
+
+Another reason is urged in verses 16 to 18. It displays the true
+character of Christianity, and so reflects honour on the doer.
+`Your good' is an expression for the whole sum of the blessings
+obtained by becoming Christians, and is closely connected with
+what is here meant by the `kingdom of God.' That latter phrase
+seems here to be substantially equivalent to the inward condition
+in which they are who have submitted to the dominion of the will
+of God. It is `the kingdom within us' which is `righteousness,
+peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.' What have you won by your
+Christianity? the Apostle in effect says, Do you think that its
+purpose is mainly to give you greater licence in regard to these
+matters in question? If the most obvious thing in your conduct is
+your `eating and drinking,' your whole Christian standing will be
+misconceived, and men will fancy that your religion permits laxity
+of life. But if, on the other hand, you show that you are Christ's
+servants by righteousness, peace, and joy, you will be pleasing to
+God, and men will recognise that your religion is from Him, and
+that you are consistent professors of it.
+
+Modern liberal-minded brethren can easily translate all this for
+to-day's use. Take care that you do not give the impression that
+your Christianity has its main operation in permitting you to do
+what your weaker brethren have scruples about. If you do not yield
+to them, but flaunt your liberty in their and the world's faces,
+your advanced enlightenment will be taken by rough-and-ready
+observers as mainly cherished because it procures you these
+immunities. Show by your life that you have the true spiritual
+gifts. Think more about them than about your `breadth,' and
+superiority to `narrow prejudices.' Realise the purpose of the
+Gospel as concerns your own moral perfecting, and the questions in
+hand will fall into their right place.
+
+In verses 19 and 20 two more reasons are given for restricting
+liberty in deference to others' scruples. Such conduct contributes
+to peace. If truth is imperilled, or Christ's name in danger of
+being tarnished, counsels of peace are counsels of treachery; but
+there are not many things worth buying at the price of Christian
+concord. Such conduct tends to build up our own and others'
+Christian character. Concessions to the `weak' may help them to
+become strong, but flying in the face of their scruples is sure to
+hurt them, in one way or another.
+
+In verse 15, the case was supposed of a brother's being grieved by
+what he felt to be laxity. That case corresponded to the
+stumbling-block of verse 13. A worse result seems contemplated in
+verse 20,---that of the weak brother, still believing that laxity
+was wrong, and yet being tempted by the example of the stronger to
+indulge in it. In that event, the responsibility of overthrowing
+what God had built lies at the door of the tempter. The metaphor
+of `overthrowing' is suggested by the previous one of `edifying.'
+Christian duty is mutual building up of character; inconsiderate
+exercise of `liberty' may lead to pulling down, by inducing to
+imitation which conscience condemns.
+
+From this point onwards, the Apostle first reiterates in inverse
+order his two broad principles, that clean things are unclean to
+the man who thinks them so, and that Christian obligation requires
+abstinence from permitted things if our indulgence tends to a
+brother's hurt. The application of the latter principle to the
+duty of total abstinence from intoxicants for the sake of others
+is perfectly legitimate, but it is an application, not the direct
+purpose of the Apostle's injunctions.
+
+In verses 22 and 23, the section is closed by two exhortations, in
+which both parties, the strong and the weak, are addressed. The
+former is spoken to in verse 22, the latter in verse 23. The
+strong brother is bid to be content with having his wider views,
+or `faith'---that is, certainty that his liberty is in accordance
+with Christ's will. It is enough that he should enjoy that
+conviction, only let him make sure that he can hold it as in God's
+sight, and do not let him flourish it in the faces of brethren
+whom it would grieve, or might lead to imitating his practice,
+without having risen to his conviction. And let him be quite sure
+that his conscience is entirely convinced, and not bribed by
+inclination; for many a man condemns himself by letting wishes
+dictate to conscience.
+
+On the other hand, there is a danger that those who have scruples
+should, by the example of those who have not, be tempted to do
+what they are not quite sure is right. If you have any doubts,
+says Paul, the safe course is to abstain from the conduct in
+question. Perhaps a brother can go to the theatre without harm, if
+he believes it right to do so; but if you have any hesitation as
+to the propriety of going, you will be condemned as sinning if you
+do. You must not measure your corn by another man's bushel. Your
+convictions, not his, are to be your guides. `Faith' is used here
+in a somewhat unusual sense. It means certitude of judgment. The
+last words of verse 23 have no such meaning as is sometimes
+extracted from them; namely, that actions, however pure and good,
+done by unbelievers, are of the nature of sin. They simply mean
+that whatever a Christian man does without clear warrant of his
+judgment and conscience is sin to him, whatever it is to
+others.
+
+\chapter{Two Fountains, One Stream}
+\markright{ROMANS xv. 4, 13}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`That we, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, might
+have hope.... 13.\ The God of hope fill you with all joy and peace
+in believing, that ye may abound in hope.'---\textsc{Romans} xv.
+4, 13.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+There is a river in Switzerland fed by two uniting streams,
+bearing the same name, one of them called the `white,' one of them
+the `grey,' or dark. One comes down from the glaciers, and bears
+half-melted snow in its white ripple; the other flows through a
+lovely valley, and is discoloured by its earth. They unite in one
+common current. So in these two verses we have two streams, a
+white and a black, and they both blend together and flow out into
+a common hope. In the former of them we have the dark
+stream---`through patience and comfort,' which implies affliction
+and effort. The issue and outcome of all difficulty, trial,
+sorrow, ought to be hope. And in the other verse we have the other
+valley, down which the light stream comes: `The God of hope fill
+you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in
+hope.'
+
+So both halves of the possible human experience are meant to end
+in the same blessed result; and whether you go round on the one
+side of the sphere of human life, or whether you take the other
+hemisphere, you come to the same point, if you have travelled with
+God's hand in yours, and with Him for your Guide.
+
+Let us look, then, at these two contrasted origins of the same
+blessed gift, the Christian hope.
+
+I. We have, first of all, the hope that is the child of the night,
+and born in the dark.
+
+`Whatsoever things,' says the Apostle, `were written aforetime,
+were written for our learning, that we, through patience,'---or
+rather \textit{the brave perseverance}---`and consolation'---or
+rather perhaps \textit{encouragement}---`of the Scriptures might
+have hope.' The written word is conceived as the source of patient
+endurance which acts as well as suffers. This grace Scripture
+works in us through the encouragement which it ministers in
+manifold ways, and the result of both is hope.
+
+So, you see, our sorrows and difficulties are not connected with,
+nor do they issue in, bright hopefulness, except by reason of this
+connecting link. There is nothing in a man's troubles to make him
+hopeful. Sometimes, rather, they drive him into despair; but at
+all events, they seldom drive him to hopefulness, except where
+this link comes in. We cannot pass from the black frowning cliffs
+on one side of the gorge to the sunny tablelands on the other
+without a bridge---and the bridge for a poor soul from the
+blackness of sorrow, and the sharp grim rocks of despair, to the
+smiling pastures of hope, with all their half-open blossoms, is
+builded in that Book, which tells us the meaning and purpose of
+them all; and is full of the histories of those who have fought
+and overcome, have hoped and not been ashamed.
+
+Scripture is given for this among other reasons, that it may
+encourage us, and so may produce in us this great grace of active
+patience, if we may call it so.
+
+The first thing to notice is, how Scripture gives
+encouragement---for such rather than consolation is the meaning of
+the word. It is much to dry tears, but it is more to stir the
+heart as with a trumpet call. Consolation is precious, but we need
+more for well-being than only to be comforted. And, surely, the
+whole tone of Scripture in its dealing with the great mystery of
+pain and sorrow, has a loftier scope than even to minister
+assuagement to grief, and to stay our weeping. It seeks to make us
+strong and brave to face and to master our sorrows, and to infuse
+into us a high-hearted courage, which shall not merely be able to
+accept the biting blasts, but shall feel that they bring a glow to
+the cheek and oxygen to the blood, while wrestling with them
+builds up our strength, and trains us for higher service. It would
+be a poor aim to comfort only; but to encourage---to make strong
+in heart, resolved in will, and incapable of being overborne or
+crushed in spirit by any sorrows---that is a purpose worthy of the
+Book, and of the God who speaks through it.
+
+This purpose, we may say, is effected by Scripture in two ways. It
+encourages us by its records, and by its revelation of
+principles.
+
+Who can tell how many struggling souls have taken heart again, as
+they pondered over the sweet stories of sorrow subdued which stud
+its pages, like stars in its firmament? The tears shed long ago
+which God has put `in His bottle,' and recorded in `His book,'
+have truly been turned into pearls. That long gallery of portraits
+of sufferers, who have all trodden the same rough road, and been
+sustained by the same hand, and reached the same home, speaks
+cheer to all who follow them. Hearts wrung by cruel partings from
+those dearer to them than their own souls, turn to the pages which
+tell how Abraham, with calm sorrow, laid his Sarah in the cave at
+Macpelah; or how, when Jacob's eyes were dim that he could not
+see, his memory still turned to the hour of agony when Rachael
+died by him, and he sees clear in its light her lonely grave,
+where so much of himself was laid; or to the still more sacred
+page which records the struggle of grief and faith in the hearts
+of the sisters of Bethany. All who are anyways afflicted in mind,
+body, or estate find in the Psalms men speaking their deepest
+experiences before them; and the grand majesty of sorrow that
+marks `the patience of Job,' and the flood of sunshine that bathes
+him, revealing the `end of the Lord,' have strengthened countless
+sufferers to bear and to hold fast, and to hope. We are all enough
+of children to be more affected by living examples than by
+dissertations, however true, and so Scripture is mainly history,
+revealing God by the record of His acts, and disclosing the secret
+of human life by telling us the experiences of living men.
+
+But Scripture has another method of ministering encouragement to
+our often fainting and faithless hearts. It cuts down through all
+the complications of human affairs, and lays bare the innermost
+motive power. It not only shows us in its narratives the working
+of sorrow, and the power of faith, but it distinctly lays down the
+source and the purpose, the whence and the whither of all
+suffering. No man need quail or faint before the most torturing
+pains or most disastrous strokes of evil, who holds firmly the
+plain teaching of Scripture on these two points. They all come
+\textit{from} my Father, and they all come \textit{for} my good.
+It is a short and simple creed, easily apprehended. It pretends to
+no recondite wisdom. It is a homely philosophy which common
+intellects can grasp, which children can understand, and hearts
+half paralysed by sorrow can take in. So much the better. Grief
+and pain are so common that their cure had need to be easily
+obtained. Ignorant and stupid people have to writhe in agony as
+well as wise and clever ones, and until grief is the portion only
+of the cultivated classes, its healing must come from something
+more universal than philosophy; or else the nettle would be more
+plentiful than the dock; and many a poor heart would be stung to
+death. Blessed be God! the Christian view of sorrow, while it
+leaves much unexplained, focuses a steady light on these two
+points; its origin and its end. `He for our profit, that we may be
+partakers of His holiness,' is enough to calm all agitation, and
+to make the faintest heart take fresh courage. With that double
+certitude clear before us, we can face anything. The slings and
+arrows which strike are no more flung blindly by an `outrageous
+fortune,' but each bears an inscription, like the fabled bolts,
+which tells what hand drew the bow, and they come with His
+love.
+
+Then, further, the courage thus born of the Scriptures produces
+another grand thing---patience, or rather perseverance. By that
+word is meant more than simply the passive endurance which is the
+main element in patience, properly so called. Such passive
+endurance is a large part of our duty in regard to difficulties
+and sorrows, but is never the whole of it. It is something to
+endure and even while the heart is breaking, to submit
+unmurmuring, but, transcendent as that is, it is but half of the
+lesson which we have to learn and to put in practice. For if all
+our sorrows have a disciplinary and educational purpose, we shall
+not have received them aright, unless we have tried to make that
+purpose effectual, by appropriating whatsoever moral and spiritual
+teaching they each have for us. Nor does our duty stop there. For
+while one high purpose of sorrow is to deaden our hearts to
+earthly objects, and to lift us above earthly affections, no
+sorrow can ever relax the bonds which oblige us to duty. The
+solemn pressure of `I ought,' is as heavy on the sorrowful as on
+the happy heart. We have still to toil, to press forward, in the
+sweat of our brow, to gain our bread, whether it be food for our
+bodies, or sustenance for our hearts and minds. Our
+responsibilities to others do not cease because our lives are
+darkened. Therefore, heavy or light of heart, we have still to
+stick to our work, and though we may never more be able to do it
+with the old buoyancy, still to do it with our might.
+
+It is that dogged persistence in plain duty, that tenacious
+continuance in our course, which is here set forth as the result
+of the encouragement which Scripture gives. Many of us have all
+our strength exhausted in mere endurance, and have let obvious
+duties slip from our hands, as if we had done all that we could do
+when we had forced ourselves to submit. Submission would come
+easier if you took up some of those neglected duties, and you
+would be stronger for patience, if you used more of your strength
+for service. You do well if you do not sink under your burden, but
+you would do better if, with it on your shoulders, you would plod
+steadily along the road; and if you did, you would feel the weight
+less. It seems heaviest when you stand still doing nothing. Do not
+cease to toil because you suffer. You will feel your pain more if
+you do. Take the encouragement which Scripture gives, that it may
+animate you to bate no jot of heart or hope, but still bear up and
+steer right onward.
+
+And let the Scripture directly minister to you perseverance as
+well as indirectly supply it through the encouragement which it
+gives. It abounds with exhortations, patterns, and motives of such
+patient continuance in well-doing. It teaches us a solemn scorn of
+ills. It, angel-like, bears us up on soft, strong hands, lest we
+bruise ourselves on, or stumble over, the rough places on our
+roads. It summons us to diligence by the visions of the prize, and
+glimpses of the dread fate of the slothful, by all that is blessed
+in hope, and terrible in foreboding, by appeals to an enlightened
+self-regard, and by authoritative commands to conscience, by the
+pattern of the Master, and by the tender motives of love to Him to
+which He, Himself, has given voice. All these call on us to be
+followers of them who, through faith and perseverance, inherit the
+promises.
+
+But we have yet another step to take. These two, the encouragement
+and perseverance produced by the right use of Scripture, will lead
+to hope.
+
+It depends on how sorrow and trial are borne, whether they produce
+a dreary hopelessness which sometimes darkens into despair, or a
+brighter, firmer hope than more joyous days knew. We cannot say
+that sorrow produces hope. It does not, unless we have this
+connecting link---the experience in sorrow of a God-given courage
+which falters not in the onward course, nor shrinks from any duty.
+But if, in the very press and agony, I am able, by God's grace, to
+endure nor cease to toil, I have, in myself, a living proof of His
+power, which entitles me to look forward with the sure confidence
+that, through all the uproar of the storm, He will bring me to my
+harbour of rest where there is peace. The lion once slain houses a
+swarm of bees who lay up honey in its carcase. The trial borne
+with brave persistence yields a store of sweet hopes. If we can
+look back and say, `Thou hast been with me in six troubles,' it is
+good logic to look forward and say, `and in seven Thou wilt not
+forsake me.' When the first wave breaks over the ship, as she
+clears the heads and heels over before the full power of the open
+sea, inexperienced landsmen think they are all going to the
+bottom, but they soon learn that there is a long way between
+rolling and foundering, and get to watch the highest waves
+towering above the bows in full confidence that these also will
+slip quietly beneath the keel as the others have done, and be left
+harmless astern.
+
+The Apostle, in this very same letter, has another word parallel
+to this, in which he describes the issues of rightly-borne
+suffering when he says, `Tribulation worketh perseverance'---the
+same word that is used here---`and perseverance worketh' the proof
+in our experience of a sustaining God; and the proof in our
+experience of a sustaining God works hope. We know that of
+ourselves we could not have met tribulation, and therefore the
+fact that we have been able to meet and overcome it is
+demonstration of a mightier power than our own, working in us,
+which we know to be from God, and therefore inexhaustible and ever
+ready to help. That is foundation firm enough to build solid
+fabrics of hope upon, whose bases go down to the centre of all
+things, the purpose of God, and whose summits, like the upward
+shooting spire of some cathedral, aspire to, and seem almost to
+touch, the heavens.
+
+So hope is born of sorrow, when these other things come between.
+The darkness gives birth to the light, and every grief blazes up a
+witness to a future glory. Each drop that hangs on the wet leaves
+twinkles into rainbow light that proclaims the sun. The garish
+splendours of the prosperous day hide the stars, and through the
+night of our sorrow there shine, thickly sown and steadfast, the
+constellations of eternal hopes. The darker the midnight, the
+surer, and perhaps the nearer, the coming of the day. Sorrow has
+not had its perfect work unless it has led us by the way of
+courage and perseverance to a stable hope. Hope has not pierced to
+the rock, and builds only `things that can be shaken,' unless it
+rests on sorrows borne by God's help.
+
+II. So much then for the genealogy of one form of the Christian
+hope. But we have also a hope that is born of the day, the child
+of sunshine and gladness; and that is set before us in the second
+of the two verses which we are considering, `The God of hope fill
+you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in
+hope.'
+
+So then, `the darkness and the light are both alike' to our hope,
+in so far as each may become the occasion for its exercise. It is
+not only to be the sweet juice expressed from our hearts by the
+winepress of calamities, but that which flows of itself from
+hearts ripened and mellowed under the sunshine of God-given
+blessedness.
+
+We have seen that the bridge by which sorrow led to hope, is
+perseverance and courage; in this second analysis of the origin of
+hope, joy and peace are the bridge by which Faith passes over into
+it. Observe the difference: there is no direct connection between
+affliction and hope, but there is between joy and hope. We have no
+right to say, `Because I suffer, I shall possess good in the
+future'; but we have a right to say, `Because I rejoice'---of
+course with a joy in God---`I shall never cease to rejoice in
+Him.' Such joy is the prophet of its own immortality and
+completion. And, on the other hand, the joy and peace which are
+naturally the direct progenitors of Christian hope, are the
+children of faith. So that we have here two generations, as it
+were, of hope's ancestors;---Faith produces joy and peace, and
+these again produce hope.
+
+Faith leads to joy and peace. Paul has found, and if we only put
+it to the proof, we shall also find, that the simple exercise of
+simple faith fills the soul with `\textit{all} joy and peace.'
+Gladness in all its variety and in full measure, calm repose in
+every kind and abundant in its still depth, will pour into my
+heart as water does into a vessel, on condition of my taking away
+the barrier and opening my heart through faith. Trust and thou
+shalt be glad. Trust, and thou shalt be calm. In the measure of
+thy trust shall be the measure of thy joy and peace.
+
+Notice, further, how indissolubly connected the present exercise
+of faith is with the present experience of joy and peace. The
+exuberant language of this text seems a world too wide for
+anything that many professing Christians ever know even in the
+moments of highest elevation, and certainly far beyond the
+ordinary tenor of their lives. But it is no wonder that these
+should have so little joy, when they have so little faith. It is
+only while we are looking to Jesus that we can expect to have joy
+and peace. There is no flashing light on the surface of the
+mirror, but when it is turned full to the sun. Any interruption in
+the electric current is registered accurately by an interruption
+in the continuous line perforated on the telegraph ribbon; and so
+every diversion of heart and faith from Jesus Christ is recorded
+by the fading of the sunshine out of the heart, and the silencing
+of all the song-birds. Yesterday's faith will not bring joy
+to-day; you cannot live upon past experience, nor feed your souls
+with the memory of former exercises of Christian faith. It must be
+like the manna, gathered fresh every day, else it will rot and
+smell foul. A present faith, and a present faith only, produces a
+present joy and peace. Is there, then, any wonder that so much of
+the ordinary experience of ordinary Christians should present a
+sadly broken line---a bright point here and there, separated by
+long stretches of darkness? The gaps in the continuity of their
+joy are the tell-tale indicators of the interruptions in their
+faith. If the latter were continuous, the former would be
+unbroken. Always believe, and you will always be glad and
+calm.
+
+It is easy to see that this is the natural result of faith. The
+very act of confident reliance on another for all my safety and
+well-being has a charm to make me restful, so long as my reliance
+is not put to shame. There is no more blessed emotion than the
+tranquil happiness which, in the measure of its trust, fills every
+trustful soul. Even when its objects are poor, fallible, weak,
+ignorant dying men and women, trust brings a breath of more than
+earthly peace into the heart. But when it grasps the omnipotent,
+all-wise, immortal Christ, there are no bounds but its own
+capacity to the blessedness which it brings into the soul, because
+there is none to the all-sufficient grace of which it lays
+hold.
+
+Observe again how accurately the Apostle defines for us the
+conditions on which Christian experience will be joyful and
+tranquil. It is `in believing,' not in certain other exercises of
+mind, that these blessings are to be realised. And the
+forgetfulness of that plain fact leads to many good people's
+religion being very much more gloomy and disturbed than God meant
+it to be. For a large part of it consists in sadly testing their
+spiritual state, and gazing at their failures and imperfections.
+There is nothing cheerful or tranquillising in grubbing among the
+evils of your own heart, and it is quite possible to do that too
+much and too exclusively. If your favourite subject of
+contemplation in your religious thinking is yourself, no wonder
+that you do not get much joy and peace out of that. If you do, it
+will be of a false kind. If you are thinking more about your own
+imperfections than about Christ's pardon, more about the defects
+of your own love to Him than about the perfection of His love to
+you, if instead of practising faith you are absorbed in
+self-examination, and instead of saying to yourself, `I know how
+foul and unworthy I am, but I look away from myself to my
+Saviour,' you are bewailing your sins and doubting whether you are
+a Christian, you need not expect God's angels of joy and peace to
+nestle in your heart. It is `in believing,' and not in other forms
+of religious contemplation, however needful these may in their
+places be, that these fair twin sisters come to us and make their
+abode with us.
+
+Then, the second step in this tracing of the origin of the hope
+which has the brighter source is the consideration that the joy
+and peace which spring from faith, in their turn produce that
+confident anticipation of future and progressive good.
+
+Herein lies the distinguishing blessedness of the Christian joy
+and peace, in that they carry in themselves the pledge of their
+own eternity. Here, and here only, the mad boast which is doomed
+to be so miserably falsified when applied to earthly gladness is
+simple truth. Here `to-morrow \textit{shall} be as this day and
+much more abundant.' Such joy has nothing in itself which betokens
+exhaustion, as all the less pure joys of earth have. It is
+manifestly not born for death, as are they. It is not fated, like
+all earthly emotions or passions, to expire in the moment of its
+completeness, or even by sudden revulsion to be succeeded by its
+opposite. Its sweetness has no after pang of bitterness. It is not
+true of this gladness, that `Hereof cometh in the end despondency
+and madness,' but its destiny is to `remain' as long as the soul
+in which it unfolds shall exist, and `to be full' as long as the
+source from which it flows does not run dry.
+
+So that the more we experience the present blessedness, which
+faith in Christ brings us, the more shall we be sure that nothing
+in the future, either in or beyond time, can put an end to it; and
+hence a hope that looks with confident eyes across the gorge of
+death, to the `shining tablelands' on the other side, and is as
+calm as certitude, shall be ours. To the Christian soul, rejoicing
+in the conscious exercise of faith and the conscious possession of
+its blessed results, the termination of a communion with Christ,
+so real and spiritual, by such a trivial accident as death, seems
+wildly absurd and therefore utterly impossible. Just as Christ's
+Resurrection seems inevitable as soon as we grasp the truth of His
+divine nature, and it becomes manifestly impossible that He, being
+such as He is---should be holden of death,' being such as it is,
+so for His children, when once they come to know the realities of
+fellowship with their Lord, they feel the entire dissimilarity of
+these to anything in the realm which is subjected to the power of
+death, and to know it to be as impossible that these purely
+spiritual experiences should be reduced to inactivity, or meddled
+with by it, as that a thought should be bound with a cord or a
+feeling fastened with fetters. They, and death, belong to two
+different regions. It can work its will on `this wide world, and
+all its fading sweets'---but is powerless in the still place where
+the soul and Jesus hold converse, and all His joy passes into His
+servant's heart. I saw, not long since, in a wood a mass of blue
+wild hyacinths, that looked like a little bit of heaven dropped
+down upon earth. You and I may have such a tiny bit of heaven
+itself lying amidst all the tangle of our daily lives, if only we
+put our trust in Christ, and so get into our hearts some little
+portion of that joy that is unspeakable, and that peace that
+passeth understanding.
+
+Thus, then, the sorrows of the earthly experience and the joys of
+the Christian life will blend together to produce the one blessed
+result of a hope that is full of certainty, and is the assurance
+of immortality. There is no rainbow in the sky unless there be
+both a black cloud and bright sunshine. So, on the blackest,
+thickest thunder-mass of our sorrows, if smitten into moist light
+by the sunshine of joy and peace drawn from Jesus Christ by faith,
+there may be painted the rainbow of hope, the many-coloured,
+steadfast token of the faithful covenant of the faithful God.
+
+\chapter{Joy and Peace in Believing}
+\markright{ROMANS xv. 13}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`The God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,
+that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy
+Ghost.'---\textsc{Romans} xv. 13.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+With this comprehensive and lofty petition the Apostle closes his
+exhortation to the factions in the Roman Church to be at unity.
+The form of the prayer is moulded by the last words of a quotation
+which he has just made, which says that in the coming Messiah
+`shall the Gentiles hope.' But the prayer itself is not an
+instance of being led away by a word---in form, indeed, it is
+shaped by verbal resemblance; in substance it points to the true
+remedy for religious controversy. Fill the contending parties with
+a fuller spiritual life, and the ground of their differences will
+begin to dwindle, and look very contemptible. When the tide rises,
+the little pools on the rocks are all merged into one.
+
+But we may pass beyond the immediate application of these words,
+and see in them the wish, which is also a promise, and like the
+exhibition of every ideal is a command. This is Paul's conception
+of the Christian life as it might and should be, in one aspect.
+You notice that there is not a word in it about conduct. It goes
+far deeper than action. It deals with the springs of action in the
+individual life. It is the depths of spiritual experience here set
+forth which will result in actions that become a Christian. And in
+these days, when all around us we see a shallow conception of
+Christianity, as if it were concerned principally with conduct and
+men's relations with one another, it is well to go down into the
+depths, and to remember that whilst `Do, do, do!' is very
+important, `Be, be, be!' is the primary commandment. Conduct is a
+making visible of personality, and the Scripture teaching which
+says first faith and then works is profoundly philosophical as
+well as Christian. So we turn away here from externals altogether,
+and regard the effect of Christianity on the inward life.
+
+I. I wish to notice man's faith and God's filling as connected,
+and as the foundation of everything.
+
+`The God of hope fill you ...'---let us leave out the intervening
+words for a moment---`in believing.' Now, you notice that Paul
+does not stay to tell us what or whom we are to believe in, or on.
+He takes that for granted, and his thought is fastened, for the
+moment, not on the object but on the act of faith. And he wishes
+to drive home to us this, that the attitude of trust is the
+necessary prerequisite condition of God's being able to fill a
+man's soul, and that God's being able to fill a man's soul is the
+necessary consequence of a man's trust. Ah, brethren, we cannot
+altogether shut God out from our spirits. There are loving and
+gracious gifts that, as our Lord tells us, He makes to `fall on
+the unthankful and the evil.' His rain is not like the summer
+showers that we sometimes see, that fall in one spot and leave
+another dry; nor like the destructive thunderstorms, that come
+down bringing ruin upon one cane-brake and leave the plants in the
+next standing upright. But the best, the highest, the truly divine
+gifts which He is yearning to give to us all, cannot be given
+except there be consent, trust, and desire for them. You can shut
+your hearts or you can open them. And just as the wind will sigh
+round some hermetically closed chamber in vain search for a
+cranny, and the man within may be asphyxiated though the
+atmosphere is surging up its waves all round his closed domicile,
+so by lack of our faith, which is at once trust, consent, and
+desire, we shut out the gift with which God would fain fill our
+spirits. You can take a porous pottery vessel, wrap it up in
+waxcloth, pitch it all over, and then drop it into mid-Atlantic,
+and not a drop will find its way in. And that is what we can do
+with ourselves, so that although in Him `we live and move and have
+our being,' and are like the earthen vessel in the ocean, no drop
+of the blessed moisture will ever find its way into the heart.
+There must be man's faith before there can be God's filling.
+
+Further, this relation of the two things suggests to us that a
+consequence of a Christian man's faith is the direct action of God
+upon him. Notice how the Apostle puts that truth in a double form
+here, in order that he may emphasise it, using one form of
+expression, involving the divine, direct activity, at the
+beginning of his prayer, and another at the end, and so enclosing,
+as it were, within a great casket of the divine action, all the
+blessings, the flashing jewels, which he desires his Roman friends
+to possess. `The God of hope fill you ... through the power of the
+Holy Ghost.' I wish I could find words by which I could bear in
+upon the ordinary type of the Evangelical Christianity of this
+generation anything like the depth and earnestness of my own
+conviction that, for lack of a proportionate development of that
+great truth, of the direct action of the giving God on the
+believing heart, it is weakened and harmed in many ways. Surely He
+that made my spirit can touch my spirit; surely He who filleth all
+things according to their capacity can Himself enter into and fill
+the spirit which is opened for Him by simple faith. We do not need
+wires for the telegraphy between heaven and the believing soul,
+but He comes directly to, and speaks in, and moves upon, and
+moulds and blesses, the waiting heart. And until you know, by your
+own experience rightly interpreted, that there is such a direct
+communion between the giving God and the recipient believing
+spirit, you have yet to learn the deepest depth, and the most
+blessed blessedness, of Christian faith and experience. For lack
+of it a hundred evils beset modern Christianity. For lack of it
+men fix their faith so exclusively as that the faith is itself
+harmed thereby, on the past act of Christ's death on the Cross.
+You will not suspect me of minimising that, but I beseech you
+remember one climax of the Apostle's which, though not bearing the
+same message as my text, is in harmony with it, `Christ that died,
+yea, rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of
+God, who also maketh intercession for us.' And remember that
+Christ Himself bestows the gift of His Divine Spirit as the result
+of the humiliation and the agony of His Cross. Faith brings the
+direct action of the giving God.
+
+And one more word about this first part of my text: the result of
+that direct action is complete---`the God of hope fill you' with
+no shrunken stream, no painful trickle out of a narrow rift in the
+rock, but a great exuberance which will pass into a man's nature
+in the measure of his capacity, which is the measure of his trust
+and desire. There are two limits to God's gifts to men: the one is
+the limitless limit of God's infinitude, the other is the working
+limit---our capacity---and that capacity is precisely measured, as
+the capacity of some built-in vessel might be measured by a little
+gauge on the outside, by our faith. `The God of hope' fills you in
+`believing,' and `according to thy faith shall it be unto
+thee.'
+
+II. Notice the joy and peace which come from the direct action of
+the God of hope on the believer's soul.
+
+Now, it is not only towards God that we exercise trust, but
+wherever it is exercised, to some extent, and in the measure in
+which the object on which it rests is discovered by experience to
+be worthy, it produces precisely these results. Whoever trusts is
+at peace, just as much as he trusts. His confidence may be
+mistaken, and there will come a tremendous awakening if it is, and
+the peace will be shattered like some crystal vessel dashed upon
+an iron pavement, but so long as a man's mind and heart are in the
+attitude of dependence upon another, conceived to be dependable,
+one knows that there are few phases of tranquillity and
+blessedness which are sweeter and deeper than that. `The heart of
+her husband doth safely trust in her'---that is one illustration,
+and a hundred more might be given. And if you will take that
+attitude of trust which, even when it twines round some earthly
+prop, is upheld for a time, and bears bright flowers---if you take
+it and twine it round the steadfast foundations of the Throne of
+God, what can shake that sure repose? `Joy and peace' will come
+when the Christian heart closes with its trust, which is God in
+Christ.
+
+He that believes has found the short, sure road to joy and peace,
+because his relations are set right with God. For these relations
+are the disturbing elements in all earthly tranquillity, and like
+the skeleton at the feast in all earthly joy, and a man can never,
+down to the roots of his being, be at rest until he is quite sure
+that there is nothing wrong between him and God. And so believing,
+we come to that root of all real gladness which is anything better
+than a crackling of thorns under a pot, and to that beginning of
+all true tranquillity. Joy in the Lord and peace with God are the
+parents of all joy and peace that are worthy of the name.
+
+And that same faith will again bring these two bright-winged
+angels into the most saddened and troubled lives, because that
+faith brings right relations with ourselves. For our inward
+strifes stuff thorns into the pillow of our repose, and mingle
+bitterness with the sweetest, foaming draughts of our earthly
+joys. If a man's conscience and inclinations pull him two
+different ways, he is torn asunder as by wild horses. If a man has
+a hungry heart, for ever yearning after unattained and impossible
+blessings, then there is no rest there. If a man's little kingdom
+within him is all anarchical, and each passion and appetite
+setting up for itself, then there is no tranquillity. But if by
+faith we let the God of hope come in, then hungry hearts are
+satisfied, and warring dispositions are harmonised, and the
+conscience becomes quieted, and fair imaginations fill the chamber
+of the spirit, and the man is at rest, because he himself is
+unified by the faith and fear of God.
+
+And the same faith brings joy and peace because it sets right our
+relations with other people, and with all externals. If I am
+living in an atmosphere of trust, then sorrow will never be
+absolute, nor have exclusive monopoly and possession of my spirit.
+But there will be the paradox, and the blessedness, of Christian
+experience, `as sorrowful yet always rejoicing.' For the joy of
+the Christian life has its source far away beyond the swamps from
+which the sour drops of sorrow may trickle, and it is possible
+that, like the fabled fire that burned under water, the joy of the
+Lord may be bright in my heart, even when it is drenched in floods
+of calamity and distress.
+
+And so, brethren, the joy and peace that come from faith will fill
+the heart which trusts. Only remember how emphatically the Apostle
+here puts these two things together, `joy and peace in believing.'
+As long as, and not a moment longer than, you are exercising the
+Christian act of trust, will you be experiencing the Christian
+blessedness of `joy and peace.' Unscrew the pipe, and in an
+instant the water ceases to flow. Touch the button and switch off,
+and out goes the light. Some Christian people fancy they can live
+upon past faith. You will get no present joy and peace out of past
+faith. The rain of this day twelve months will not moisten the
+parched ground of to-day. Yesterday's religion was all used up
+yesterday. And if you would have a continuous flow of joy and
+peace through your lives, keep up a uniform habit and attitude of
+trust in God. You will get it then; you will get it in no other
+way.
+
+III. Lastly, note the hope which springs from this experience of
+joy and peace.
+
+`The God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,
+that ye may abound in hope.' Here, again, the Apostle does not
+trouble himself to define the object of the hope. In this, as in
+the former clause, his attention is fixed upon the emotion, not
+upon that towards which it goes out. And just as there was no need
+to say in whom it was that the Christian man was to believe, so
+there is no room to define what it is that the Christian man has a
+right to hope for. For his hope is intended to cover all the
+future, the next moment, or to-morrow, or the dimmest distance
+where time has ceased to be, and eternity stands unmoved. The
+attitude of the Christian mind ought to be a cheery optimism, an
+unconquerable hope. `The best has yet to be' is the true Christian
+thought in contemplating the future for myself, for my dear ones,
+for God's Church, and for God's universe.
+
+And the truest basis on which that hope can rest is the experience
+granted to us, on condition of our faith, of a present, abundant
+possession of the joy and peace which God gives. The gladder you
+are to-day, if the gladness comes from the right source, the surer
+you may be that that gladness will never end. That is not what
+befalls men who live by earthly joys. For the more poignant,
+precious, and, as we faithlessly think, indispensable some of
+these are to us, the more into their sweetest sweetness creeps the
+dread thought: `This is too good to last; this must pass.' We
+never need to think that about the peace and joy that come to us
+through believing. For they, in their sweetness, prophesy
+perpetuity. I need not dwell upon the thought that the firmest,
+most personally precious convictions of an eternity of future
+blessedness, rise and fall in a Christian consciousness with the
+purity and the depth of its own experience of the peace and joy of
+the Gospel. The more you have of Jesus Christ in your lives and
+hearts to-day, the surer you will be that whatever death may do,
+it cannot touch that, and the more ludicrously impossible it will
+seem that anything that befalls this poor body can touch the bond
+that knits us to Jesus Christ. Death can separate us from a great
+deal. Its sharp scythe cuts through all other bonds, but its edge
+is turned when it is tried against the golden chain that binds the
+believing soul to the Christ in whom he has believed.
+
+So, brethren, there is the ladder---begin at the bottom step, with
+faith in Jesus Christ. That will bring God's direct action into
+your spirit, through His Holy Spirit, and that one gift will break
+up into an endless multiplicity of blessings, just as a beam of
+light spilt upon the surface of the ocean breaks into diamonds in
+every wave, and that `joy and peace' will kindle in your hearts a
+hope fed by the great words of the Lord: `Peace I leave with you,
+my peace I give unto you,' `My joy shall remain in you, and your
+joy shall be full,' `He that liveth and believeth in Me shall
+never die.'
+
+\chapter{Ph\oe{}be}
+\markright{ROMANS xvi. 1, 2}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`I commend unto you Ph\oe{}be our sister, who is a servant of the
+Church that is at Cenchrea: 2.\ That ye receive her in the Lord,
+worthily of the Saints, and that ye assist her in whatsover matter
+she may have need of you: for she herself hath been a succourer of
+many, and of mine own self.'---\textsc{Romans} xvi. 1, 2 (R.~V.).
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+This is an outline picture of an else wholly unknown person. She,
+like most of the other names mentioned in the salutations in this
+chapter, has had a singular fate. Every name, shadowy and unreal
+as it is to us, belonged to a human life filled with hopes and
+fears, plunged sometimes in the depths of sorrows, struggling with
+anxieties and difficulties; and all the agitations have sunk into
+forgetfulness and calm. There is left to the world an immortal
+remembrance, and scarcely a single fact associated with the
+undying names.
+
+Note the person here disclosed.
+
+A little rent is made in the dark curtain through which we see as
+with an incandescent light concentrated for a moment upon her, one
+of the many good women who helped Paul, as their sisters had
+helped Paul's Master, and who thereby have won, little as either
+Paul or she thought it, an eternal commemoration. Her name is a
+purely idolatrous one, and stamps her as a Greek, and by birth
+probably a worshipper of Apollo. Her Christian associations were
+with the Church at Cenchrea, the port of Corinth, of which little
+Christian community nothing further is known. But if we take into
+account the hideous immoralities of Corinth, we shall deem it
+probable that the port, with its shifting maritime population,
+was, like most seaports, a soil in which goodness was hard put to
+it to grow, and a church had much against which to struggle. To be
+a Christian at Cenchrea can have been no light task. Travellers in
+Egypt are told that Port Said is the wickedest place on the face
+of the earth; and in Ph\oe{}be's home there would be a like drift
+of disreputables of both sexes and of all nationalities. It was
+fitting that one good woman should be recorded as redeeming
+womanhood there. We learn of her that she was a `servant,' or, as
+the margin preferably reads, a `deaconess of the Church which is
+at Cenchrea'; and in that capacity, by gentle ministrations and
+the exhibition of purity and patient love, as well as by the
+gracious administration of material help, had been a `succourer of
+many.' There is a whole world of unmentioned kindnesses and a life
+of self-devotion hidden away under these few words. Possibly the
+succour which she administered was her own gift. She may have been
+rich and influential, or perhaps she but distributed the Church's
+bounty; but in any case the gift was sweetened by the giver's
+hand, and the succour was the impartation of a woman's sympathy
+more than the bestowment of a donor's gift. Sometime or other, and
+somehow or other, she had had the honour and joy of helping Paul,
+and no doubt that opportunity would be to her a crown of service.
+She was now on the point of taking the long journey to Rome on her
+own business, and the Apostle bespeaks for her help from the Roman
+Church `in whatsoever matter she may have need of you,' as if she
+had some difficult affair on hand, and had no other friends in the
+city. Possibly then she was a widow, and perhaps had had some
+lawsuit or business with government authorities, with whom a word
+from some of her brethren in Rome might stand her in good stead.
+Apparently she was the bearer of this epistle, which would give
+her a standing at once in the Roman Church, and she came among
+them with a halo round her from the whole-hearted commendation of
+the Apostle.
+
+Mark the lessons from this little picture.
+
+We note first the remarkable illustration here given of the power
+of the new bond of a common faith. The world was then broken up
+into sections, which were sometimes bitterly antagonistic and at
+others merely rigidly exclusive. The only bond of union was the
+iron fetter of Rome, which crushed the people, but did not knit
+them together. But here are Paul the Jew, Ph\oe{}be the Greek, and
+the Roman readers of the epistle, all fused together by the power
+of the divine love that melted their hearts, and the common faith
+that unified their lives. The list of names in this chapter,
+comprising as it does men and women of many nationalities, and
+some slaves as well as freemen, is itself a wonderful testimony of
+the truth of Paul's triumphant exclamation in another epistle,
+that in Christ there is `neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free,
+male nor female.'
+
+The clefts have closed, and the very line of demarcation is
+obliterated; and these clefts were deeper than any of which we
+moderns have had experience. It remains something like a miracle
+that the members of Paul's churches could ever be brought
+together, and that their consciousness of oneness could ever
+overpower the tremendous divisive forces. We sometimes wonder at
+their bickerings; we ought rather to wonder at their unity, and be
+ashamed of the importance which we attach to our infinitely
+slighter mutual disagreements. The bond that was sufficient to
+make the early Christians all one in Christ Jesus seems to have
+lost its binding power to-day, and, like an used-up elastic band,
+to have no clasping grip left in it.
+
+Another thought which we may connect with the name of Ph\oe{}be is
+the characteristic place of women in Christianity.
+
+The place of woman amongst the Jews was indeed free and honourable
+as compared with her position either in Greece or Rome, but in
+none of them was she placed on the level of man, nor regarded
+mainly in the aspect of an equal possessor of the same life of the
+Spirit. But a religion which admits her to precisely the same
+position of a supernatural life as is granted to man, necessarily
+relegates to a subordinate position all differences of sex as it
+does all other natural distinctions. The women who ministered to
+Jesus of their substance, the two sisters of Bethany, the mourners
+at Calvary, the three who went through the morning twilight to the
+tomb, were but the foremost conspicuous figures in a great company
+through all the ages who have owed to Jesus their redemption, not
+only from the slavery of sin, but from the stigma of inferiority
+as man's drudge or toy. To the world in which Paul lived it was a
+strange, new thought that women could share with man in his
+loftiest emotions. Historically the emancipation of one half of
+the human race is the direct result of the Christian principle
+that all are one in Christ Jesus. In modern life the emancipation
+has been too often divorced from its one sure basis, and we have
+become familiar with the sight of the `advanced' women who have
+advanced so far as to have lost sight of the Christ to whom they
+owe their freedom. The picture of Ph\oe{}be in our text might well
+be commended to all such as setting forth the most womanlike
+ideal. She was `a succourer of many.' Her ministry was a ministry
+of help; and surely such gentle ministry is that which most befits
+the woman's heart and comes most graciously to the woman's
+fingers.
+
+Ph\oe{}be then may well represent to us the ministry of succour in
+this world of woe and need. There is ever a cry, even in
+apparently successful lives, for help and a helper. Man's clumsy
+hand is but too apt to hurt where it strives to soothe, and nature
+itself seems to devolve on the swifter sympathies and more
+delicate perceptions of woman the joy of binding up wounded
+spirits. In the verses immediately following our text we read of
+another woman to whom was entrusted a more conspicuous and direct
+form of service. Priscilla `taught Apollos the way of God more
+perfectly,' and is traditionally represented as being united with
+her husband in evangelistic work. But it is not merely prejudice
+which takes Ph\oe{}be rather than Priscilla as the characteristic
+type of woman's special ministry. We must remember our Lord's
+teaching, that the giver of `a cup of cold water in the name of a
+prophet' in some measure shares in the prophet's work, and will
+surely share in the prophet's reward. She who helped Paul must
+have entered into the spirit of Paul's labours; and He to whom all
+service that is done from the same motive is one in essence, makes
+no difference between him whose thirsty lips drink and her whose
+loving hand presents the cup of cold water. `Small service is true
+service while it lasts.' Paul and Ph\oe{}be were one in ministry
+and one in its recompense.
+
+We may further see in her a foreshadowing of the reward of lowly
+service, though it be only the service of help. Little did
+Ph\oe{}be dream that her name would have an eternal commemoration
+of her unnoticed deeds of kindness and aid, standing forth to
+later generations and peoples of whom she knew nothing, as worthy
+of eternal remembrance. For those of us who have to serve
+unnoticed and unknown, here is an instance and a prophecy which
+may stimulate and encourage. `Surely I will never forget any of
+their works' is a gracious promise which the most obscure and
+humble of us may take to heart, and sustained by which, we may
+patiently pursue a way on which there are `none to praise and very
+few to love.' It matters little whether our work be noticed or
+recorded by men, so long as we know that it is written in the
+Lamb's book of life and that He will one day proclaim it `before
+the Father in heaven and His angels.'
+
+\chapter{Priscilla and Aquila}
+\markright{ROMANS xvi. 3--5}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Greet Priscilla and Aquila my helpers in Christ Jesus; 4.\ (Who
+have for my life laid down their own necks: unto whom not only I
+give thanks, but so all the churches of the Gentiles:) 5.\
+Likewise greet the church that is in their
+house.'---\textsc{Romans} xvi. 3--5.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+It has struck me that this wedded couple present, even in the
+scanty notices that we have of them, some interesting points which
+may be worth while gathering together.
+
+Now, to begin with, we are told that Aquila was a Jew. We are not
+told whether Priscilla was a Jewess or no. So far as her name is
+concerned, she may have been, and very probably was, a Roman, and,
+if so, we have in their case a `mixed marriage' such as was not
+uncommon then, and of which Timothy's parents give another
+example. She is sometimes called Prisca, which was her proper
+name, and sometimes Priscilla, an affectionate diminutive. The two
+had been living in Rome, and had been banished under the decree of
+the Emperor, just as Jews have been banished from England and from
+every country in Europe again and again. They came from Rome to
+Corinth, and were, perhaps, intending to go back to Aquila's
+native place, Pontus, when Paul met them in the latter city, and
+changed their whole lives. His association with them began in a
+purely commercial partnership. But as they abode together and
+worked at their trade, there would be many earnest talks about the
+Christ, and these ended in both husband and wife becoming
+disciples. The bond thus knit was too close to be easily severed,
+and so, when Paul sailed across the \AE{}gean for Ephesus, his two
+new friends kept with him, which they would be the more ready to
+do, as they had no settled home. They remained with him during his
+somewhat lengthened stay in the great Asiatic city; for we find in
+the first Epistle to the Corinthians which was written from
+Ephesus about that time, that the Apostle sends greetings from
+`Priscilla and Aquila and the Church which is in their house.' But
+when Paul left Ephesus they seem to have stayed behind, and
+afterwards to have gone their own way.
+
+About a year after the first Epistle to the Corinthians was sent
+from Ephesus, the Epistle to the Romans was written, and we find
+there the salutation to Priscilla and Aquila which is my text. So
+this wandering couple were back again in Rome by that time, and
+settled down there for a while. They are then lost sight of for
+some time, but probably they returned to Ephesus. Once more we
+catch a glimpse of them in Paul's last letter, written some seven
+or eight years after that to the Romans. The Apostle knows that
+death is near, and, at that supreme moment, his heart goes out to
+these two faithful companions, and he sends them a parting token
+of his undying love. There are only two messages to friends in the
+second Epistle to Timothy, and one of these is to Prisca and
+Aquila. At the mouth of the valley of the shadow of death he
+remembered the old days in Corinth, and the, to us, unknown
+instance of devotion which these two had shown, when, for his
+life, they laid down their own necks.
+
+Such is all that we know of Priscilla and Aquila. Can we gather
+any lessons from these scattered notices thus thrown together?
+
+I. Here is an object lesson as to the hallowing effect of
+Christianity on domestic life and love.
+
+Did you ever notice that in the majority of the places where these
+two are named, if we adopt the better readings, Priscilla's name
+comes first? She seems to have been `the better man of the two'; and
+Aquila drops comparatively into the background. Now, such a couple,
+and a couple in which the wife took the foremost place, was an
+absolute impossibility in heathenism. They are a specimen of what
+Christianity did in the primitive age, all over the Empire, and is
+doing to-day, everywhere---lifting woman to her proper place. These
+two, yoked together in `all exercise of noble end,' and helping one
+another in Christian work, and bracketed together by the Apostle,
+who puts the wife first, as his fellow-helpers in Christ Jesus,
+stands before us as a living picture of what our sweet and sacred
+family life and earthly loves may be glorified into, if the light
+from heaven shines down upon them, and is thankfully received into
+them.
+
+Such a house as the house of Prisca and Aquila is the product of
+Christianity, and such ought to be the house of every professing
+Christian. For we should all make our homes as `tabernacles of the
+righteous,' in which the voice of joy and rejoicing is ever heard.
+Not only wedded love, but family love, and all earthly love, are
+then most precious, when into them there flows the ennobling, the
+calming, the transfiguring thought of Christ and His love to
+us.
+
+Again, notice that, even in these scanty references to our two
+friends, there twice occurs that remarkable expression `the church
+that is in their house.' Now, I suppose that that gives us a
+little glimpse into the rudimentary condition of public worship in
+the primitive church. It was centuries after the time of Priscilla
+and Aquila before circumstances permitted Christians to have
+buildings devoted exclusively to public worship. Up to a very much
+later period than that which is covered by the New Testament, they
+gathered together wherever was most convenient. And, I suppose,
+that both in Rome and Ephesus, this husband and wife had some
+room---perhaps the workshop where they made their tents, spacious
+enough for some of the Christians of the city to meet together in.
+One would like people who talk so much about `the Church,' and
+refuse the name to individual societies of Christians, and even to
+an aggregate of these, unless it has `bishops,' to explain how the
+little gathering of twenty or thirty people in the workshop
+attached to Aquila's house, is called by the Apostle without
+hesitation `the church which is in their house.' It was a part of
+the Holy Catholic Church, but it was also `a Church,' complete in
+itself, though small in numbers. We have here not only a glimpse
+into the manner of public worship in early times, but we may learn
+something of far more consequence for us, and find here a
+suggestion of what our homes ought to be. `The Church that is in
+thy house'---fathers and mothers that are responsible for your
+homes and their religious atmosphere, ask yourselves if any one
+would say that about your houses, and if they could not, why
+not?
+
+II. We may get here another object lesson as to the hallowing of
+common life, trade, and travel.
+
+It does not appear that, after their stay in Ephesus, Aquila and
+his wife were closely attached to Paul's person, and certainly
+they did not take any part as members of what we may call his
+evangelistic staff. They seem to have gone their own way, and as
+far as the scanty notices carry us, they did not meet Paul again,
+after the time when they parted in Ephesus. Their gipsy life was
+probably occasioned by Aquila's going about---as was the custom in
+old days when there were no trades-unions or organised centres of
+a special industry---to look for work where he could find it. When
+he had made tents in Ephesus for a while, he would go on somewhere
+else, and take temporary lodgings there. Thus he wandered about as
+a working man. Yet Paul calls him his `fellow worker in Christ
+Jesus'; and he had, as we saw, a Church in his house. A roving
+life of that sort is not generally supposed to be conducive to
+depth of spiritual life. But their wandering course did not hurt
+these two. They took their religion with them. It did not depend
+on locality, as does that of a great many people who are very
+religious in the town where they live, and, when they go away for
+a holiday, seem to leave their religion, along with their silver
+plate, at home. But no matter whether they were in Corinth or
+Ephesus or Rome, Aquila and Priscilla took their Lord and Master
+with them, and while working at their camel's-hair tents, they
+were serving God.
+
+Dear brethren, what we want is not half so much preachers such as
+my brethren and I, as Christian tradesmen and merchants and
+travellers, like Aquila and Priscilla.
+
+III. Again, we may see here a suggestion of the unexpected issues
+of our lives.
+
+Think of that complicated chain of circumstances, one end of which
+was round Aquila and the other round the young Pharisee in
+Jerusalem. It steadily drew them together until they met in that
+lodging at Corinth. Claudius, in the fullness of his absolute
+power, said, `Turn all these wretched Jews out of my city. I will
+not have it polluted with them any more. Get rid of them!' So
+these two were uprooted, and drifted to Corinth. We do not know
+why they chose to go thither; perhaps they themselves did not know
+why; but God knew. And while they were coming thither from the
+west, Paul was coming thither from the east and north. He was
+`prevented by the Spirit from speaking in Asia,' and driven across
+the sea against his intention to Neapolis, and hounded out of
+Philippi and Thessalonica and Ber\ae{}a; and turned superciliously
+away from Athens; and so at last found himself in Corinth, face to
+face with the tentmaker from Rome and his wife. Then one of the
+two men said, `Let us join partnership together, and set up here
+as tent-makers for a time.' What came out of this unintended and
+apparently chance meeting?
+
+The first thing was the conversion of Aquila and his wife; and the
+effects of that are being realised by them in heaven at this
+moment, and will go on to all eternity.
+
+So, in the infinite complexity of events, do not let us worry
+ourselves by forecasting, but let us trust, and be sure that the
+Hand which is pushing us is pushing us in the right direction, and
+that He will bring us, by a right, though a roundabout way, to the
+City of Habitation. It seems to me that we poor, blind creatures
+in this world are somewhat like a man in a prison, groping with
+his hand in the dark along the wall, and all unawares touching a
+spring which moves a stone, disclosing an aperture that lets in a
+breath of purer air, and opens the way to freedom. So we go on as
+if stumbling in the dark, and presently, without our knowing what
+we do, by some trivial act we originate a train of events which
+influences our whole future.
+
+Again, when Aquila and Priscilla reached Ephesus they formed
+another chance acquaintance in the person of a brilliant young
+Alexandrian, whose name was Apollos. They found that he had good
+intentions and a good heart, but a head very scantily furnished
+with the knowledge of the Gospel. So they took him in hand, just
+as Paul had taken them. If I may use such a phrase, they did not
+know how large a fish they had caught. They had no idea what a
+mighty power for Christ was lying dormant in that young man from
+Alexandria who knew so much less than they did. They instructed
+Apollos, and Apollos became second only to Paul in the power of
+preaching the Gospel. So the circle widens and widens. God's grace
+fructifies from one man to another, spreading onward and outward.
+And all Apollos' converts, and \textit{their} converts, and
+\textit{theirs} again, right away down the ages, we may trace back
+to Priscilla and Aquila.
+
+So do not let us be anxious about the further end of our
+deeds---viz. their results; but be careful about the nearer end of
+them---viz. their motives; and God will look after the other end.
+Seeing that `thou knowest not which shall prosper, whether this or
+that,' or how much any of them will prosper, let us grasp
+\textit{all} opportunities to do His will and glorify His name.
+
+IV. Further, here we have an instance of the heroic self-devotion
+which love to Christ kindles.
+
+`For my sake they laid down their own necks.' We do not know to
+what Paul is referring: perhaps to that tumult in Ephesus, where
+he certainly was in danger. But the language seems rather more
+emphatic than such danger would warrant. Probably it was at some
+perilous juncture of which we know nothing (for we know very
+little, after all, of the details of the Apostle's life), in which
+Aquila and Priscilla had said, `Take us and let him go. He can do
+a great deal more for God than we can do. We will put our heads on
+the block, if he may still live.' That magnanimous self-surrender
+was a wonderful token of the passionate admiration and love which
+the Apostle inspired, but its deepest motive was love to Christ
+and not to Paul only.
+
+Faith in Christ and love to Him ought to turn cowards into heroes,
+to destroy thoughts of self, and to make the utmost self-sacrifice
+natural, blessed, and easy. We are not called upon to exercise
+heroism like Priscilla's and Aquila's, but there is as much
+heroism needed for persistently Christian life, in our prosaic
+daily circumstances, as has carried many a martyr to the block,
+and many a tremulous woman to the pyre. We can all be heroes; and
+if the love of Christ is in us, as it should be, we shall all be
+ready to `yield ourselves living sacrifices, which is our
+reasonable service.'
+
+Long years after, the Apostle, on the further edge of life, looked
+back over it all; and, whilst much had become dim, and some
+trusted friends had dropped away, like Demas, he saw these two,
+and waved them his last greeting before he turned to the
+executioner---`Salute Prisca and Aquila.' Paul's Master is not
+less mindful of His friends' love, or less eloquent in the praise
+of their faithfulness, or less sure to reward them with the crown
+of glory. `Whoso confesseth Me before men, him will I also confess
+before the angels in heaven.'
+
+\chapter{Two Households}
+\markright{ROMANS xvi. 10, 11}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`... Salute them which are of Aristobulus' household. 11.\ ...
+Greet them that be of the household of Narcissus, which are in the
+Lord.'---\textsc{Romans} xvi. 10, 11.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+There does not seem much to be got out of these two sets of
+salutations to two households in Rome; but if we look at them with
+eyes in our heads, and some sympathy in our hearts, I think we
+shall get lessons worth the treasuring.
+
+In the first place, here are two sets of people, members of two
+different households, and that means mainly, if not exclusively,
+slaves. In the next place, in each case there was but a section of
+the household which was Christian. In the third place, in neither
+household is the master included in the greeting. So in neither case
+was \textit{he} a Christian.
+
+We do not know anything about these two persons, men of position
+evidently, who had large households. But the most learned of our
+living English commentators of the New Testament has advanced a
+very reasonable conjecture in regard to each of them. As to the
+first of them, Aristobulus: that wicked old King Herod, in whose
+life Christ was born, had a grandson of the name, who spent all
+his life in Rome, and was in close relations with the Emperor of
+that day. He had died some little time before the writing of this
+letter. As to the second of them, there is a very notorious
+Narcissus, who plays a great part in the history of Rome just a
+little while before Paul's period there, and he, too, was dead.
+And it is more than probable that the slaves and retainers of
+these two men were transferred in both cases to the emperor's
+household and held together in it, being known as Aristobulus' men
+and Narcissus' men. And so probably the Christians among them are
+the brethren to whom these salutations are sent.
+
+Be that as it may, I think that if we look at the two groups, we
+shall get out of them some lessons.
+
+I. The first of them is this: the penetrating power of Christian
+truth. Think of the sort of man that the master of the first
+household was, if the identification suggested be accepted. He is
+one of that foul Herodian brood, in all of whom the bad Idum\ae{}an
+blood ran corruptly. The grandson of the old Herod, the brother of
+Agrippa of the Acts of the Apostles, the hanger-on of the Imperial
+Court, with Roman vices veneered on his native wickedness, was not
+the man to welcome the entrance of a revolutionary ferment into his
+household; and yet through his barred doors had crept quietly, he
+knowing nothing about it, that great message of a loving God, and a
+Master whose service was freedom. And in thousands of like cases the
+Gospel was finding its way underground, undreamed of by the great
+and wise, but steadily pressing onwards, and undermining all the
+towering grandeur that was so contemptuous of it. So Christ's truth
+spread at first; and I believe that is the way it always spreads.
+Intellectual revolutions begin at the top and filter down; religious
+revolutions begin at the bottom and rise; and it is always the
+`lower orders' that are laid hold of first. `Ye see your calling,
+brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many
+mighty, not many noble are called,' but a handful of slaves in
+Aristobulus' household, with this living truth lodged in their
+hearts, were the bearers and the witnesses and the organs of the
+power which was going to shatter all that towered above it and
+despised it. And so it always is.
+
+Do not let us be ashamed of a Gospel that has not laid hold of the
+upper and the educated classes, but let us feel sure of this, that
+there is no greater sign of defective education and of superficial
+culture and of inborn vulgarity than despising the day of small
+things, and estimating truth by the position or the intellectual
+attainments of the men that are its witnesses and its lovers. The
+Gospel penetrated at first, and penetrates still, in the fashion
+that is suggested here.
+
+II. Secondly, these two households teach us very touchingly and
+beautifully the uniting power of Christian sympathy.
+
+A considerable proportion of the first of these two households would
+probably be Jews---if Aristobulus were indeed Herod's grandson. The
+probability that he was is increased by the greeting interposed
+between those to the two households---`Salute Herodion.' The name
+suggests some connection with Herod, and whether we suppose the
+designation of `my kinsman,' which Paul gives him, to mean `blood
+relation' or `fellow countryman,' Herodion, at all events, was a Jew
+by birth. As to the other members of these households, Paul may have
+met some of them in his many travels, but he had never been in Rome,
+and his greetings are more probably sent to them as conspicuous
+sections, numerically, of the Roman Church, and as tokens of his
+affection, though he had never seen them. The possession of a common
+faith has bridged the gulf between him and them. Slaves in those
+days were outside the pale of human sympathy, and almost outside the
+pale of human rights. And here the foremost of Christian teachers,
+who was a freeman born, separated from these poor people by a
+tremendous chasm, stretches a brother's hand across it and grasps
+theirs. The Gospel that came into the world to rend old associations
+and to split up society, and to make a deep cleft between fathers
+and children and husband and wife, came also to more than
+counterbalance its dividing effects by its uniting power. And in
+that old world that was separated into classes by gulfs deeper than
+any of which we have any experience, it, and it alone, threw a
+bridge across the abysses and bound men together. Think of what a
+revolution it must have been, when a master and his slave could sit
+down together at the table of the Lord and look each other in the
+face and say `Brother' and for the moment forget the difference of
+bond and free. Think of what a revolution it must have been when Jew
+and Gentile could sit down together at the table of the Lord, and
+forget circumcision and uncircumcision, and feel that they were all
+one in Jesus Christ. And as for the third of the great
+clefts---that, alas! which made so much of the tragedy and the
+wickedness of ancient life---viz. the separation between the
+sexes---think of what a revolution it was when men and women, in all
+purity of the new bond of Christian affection, could sit down
+together at the same table, and feel that they were brethren and
+sisters in Jesus Christ.
+
+The uniting power of the common faith and the common love to the one
+Lord marked Christianity as altogether supernatural and new, unique
+in the world's experience, and obviously requiring something more
+than a human force to produce it. Will anybody say that the
+Christianity of this day has preserved and exhibits that primitive
+demonstration of its superhuman source? Is there anything obviously
+beyond the power of earthly motives in the unselfish, expansive love
+of modern Christians? Alas! alas! to ask the question is to answer
+it, and everybody knows the answer, and nobody sorrows over it. Is
+any duty more pressingly laid upon Christian churches of this
+generation than that, forgetting their doctrinal janglings for a
+while, and putting away their sectarianisms and narrowness, they
+should show the world that their faith has still the power to do
+what it did in the old times, bridge over the gulf that separates
+class from class, and bring all men together in the unity of the
+faith and of the love of Jesus Christ? Depend upon it, unless the
+modern organisations of Christianity which call themselves
+`churches' show themselves, in the next twenty years, a great deal
+more alive to the necessity, and a great deal more able to cope with
+the problem, of uniting the classes of our modern complex
+civilisation, the term of life of these churches is comparatively
+brief. And the form of Christianity which another century will see
+will be one which reproduces the old miracle of the early days, and
+reaches across the deepest clefts that separate modern society, and
+makes all one in Jesus Christ. It is all very well for us to glorify
+the ancient love of the early Christians, but there is a vast deal
+of false sentimentality about our eulogistic talk of it. It were
+better to praise it less and imitate it more. Translate it into
+present life, and you will find that to-day it requires what it
+nineteen hundred years ago was recognised as manifesting, the
+presence of something more than human motive, and something more
+than man discovers of truth. The cement must be divine that binds
+men thus together.
+
+Again, these two households suggest for us the tranquillising
+power of Christian resignation.
+
+They were mostly slaves, and they continued to be slaves when they
+were Christians. Paul recognised their continuance in the servile
+position, and did not say a word to them to induce them to break
+their bonds. The Epistle to the Corinthians treats the whole
+subject of slavery in a very remarkable fashion. It says to the
+slave: `If you were a slave when you became a Christian, stop
+where you are. If you have an opportunity of being free, avail
+yourself of it; if you have not, never mind.' And then it adds
+this great principle: `He that is called in the Lord, being a
+slave, is Christ's freeman. Likewise he that is called, being
+free, is Christ's slave.' The Apostle applies the very same
+principle, in the adjoining verses, to the distinction between
+circumcision and uncircumcision. From all which there comes just
+the same lesson that is taught us by these two households of
+slaves left intact by Christianity---viz. that where a man is
+conscious of a direct, individual relation to Jesus Christ, that
+makes all outward circumstances infinitely insignificant. Let us
+get up to the height, and they all become very small. Of course,
+the principles of Christianity killed slavery, but it took
+eighteen hundred years to do it. Of course, there is no blinking
+the fact that slavery was an essentially immoral and unchristian
+institution. But it is one thing to lay down principles and leave
+them to be worked in and then to be worked out, and it is another
+thing to go blindly charging at existing institutions and throwing
+them down by violence, before men have grown up to feel that they
+are wicked. And so the New Testament takes the wise course, and
+leaves the foolish one to foolish people. It makes the tree good,
+and then its fruit will be good.
+
+But the main point that I want to insist upon is this: what was
+good for these slaves in Rome is good for you and me. Let us get
+near to Jesus Christ, and feel that we have got hold of His hand
+for our own selves, and we shall not mind very much about the
+possible varieties of human condition. Rich or poor, happy or sad,
+surrounded by companions or treading a solitary path, failures or
+successes as the world has it, strong or broken and weak and
+wearied---all these varieties, important as they are, come to be
+very small when we can say, `We are the Lord's.' That amulet makes
+all things tolerable; and the Christian submission which is the
+expression of our love to, and confidence in, His infinite
+sweetness and unerring goodness, raises us to a height from which
+the varieties of earthly condition seem to blend and melt into
+one. When we are down amongst the low hills, it seems a long way
+from the foot of one of them to the top of it; but when we are on
+the top they all melt into one dead level, and you cannot tell
+which is top and which is bottom. And so, if we only can rise high
+enough up the hill, the possible diversities of our condition will
+seem to be very small variations in the level.
+
+III. Lastly, these two groups suggest to us the conquering power
+of Christian faithfulness.
+
+The household of Herod's grandson was not a very likely place to
+find Christian people in, was it? Such flowers do not often grow,
+or at least do not easily grow, on such dunghills. And in both
+these cases it was only a handful of the people, a portion of each
+household, that was Christian. So they had beside them, closely
+identified with them---working, perhaps, at the same tasks, I
+might almost say, chained with the same chains---men who had no
+share in their faith or in their love. It would not be easy to
+pray and love and trust God and do His will, and keep clear of
+complicity with idolatry and immorality and sin, in such a pigsty
+as that; would it? But these men did it. And nobody need ever say,
+`I am in such circumstances that I cannot live a Christian life.'
+There are no such circumstances, at least none of God's
+appointing. There are often such that we bring upon ourselves, and
+then the best thing is to get out of them as soon as we can. But
+as far as He is concerned, He never puts anybody anywhere where he
+cannot live a holy life.
+
+There were no difficulties too great for these men to overcome;
+there are no difficulties too great for us to overcome. And wherever
+you and I may be, we cannot be in any place where it is so hard to
+live a consistent life as these people were. Young men in
+warehouses, people in business here in Manchester, some of us with
+unfortunate domestic or relative associations, and so on---we may
+all feel as if it would be so much easier for us if this, that, and
+the other thing were changed. No, it would not be any easier; and
+perhaps the harder the easier, because the more obviously the
+atmosphere is poisonous, the more we shall put some cloth over our
+mouths to prevent it from getting into our lungs. The dangerous
+place is the place where the vapours that poison are scentless as
+well as invisible. But whatever be the difficulties, there is
+strength waiting for us, and we may all win the praise which the
+Apostle gives to another of these Roman brethren, whom he salutes as
+`Apelles, approved in Christ'---a man that had been `tried' and had
+stood his trial. So in our various spheres of difficulty and of
+temptation we may feel that the greeting from heaven, like Paul's
+message to the slaves in Rome, comes to us with good cheer, and that
+the Master Himself sees us, sympathises with us, salutes us, and
+stretches out His hand to help and to keep us.
+
+\chapter{Tryphena and Tryphosa}
+\markright{ROMANS xvi. 12}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Salute Tryphena and Tryphosa, who labour in the
+Lord.'---\textsc{Romans} xvi. 12.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The number of salutations to members of the Roman Church is
+remarkable when we take into account that Paul had never visited
+it. The capital drew all sorts of people to it, and probably there
+had been personal intercourse between most of the persons here
+mentioned and the Apostle in some part of his wandering life. He
+not only displays his intimate knowledge of the persons saluted,
+but his beautiful delicacy and ingenuity in the varying epithets
+applied to them shows how in his great heart and tenacious memory
+individuals had a place. These shadowy saints live for ever by
+Paul's brief characterisation of them, and stand out to us almost
+as clearly and as sharply distinguished as they did to him.
+
+These two, Tryphena and Tryphosa, were probably sisters. That is
+rendered likely by their being coupled together here, as well as
+by the similarity of their names. These names mean luxurious, or
+delicate, and no doubt expressed the ideal for their daughters
+which the parents had had, and possibly indicate the kind of life
+from which these two women had come. We can scarcely fail to note
+the contrast between the meaning of their names and the Christian
+lives they had lived. Two dainty women, probably belonging to a
+class in which a delicate withdrawal from effort and toil was
+thought to be the woman's distinctive mark, had fled from luxury,
+which often tended to be voluptuous, and was always
+self-indulgent, and had chosen the better part of `labour in the
+Lord.' They had become untrue to their names, because they must be
+true to their Master and themselves. We may well take the lesson
+that lies here, and is eminently needful to-day amidst the
+senseless, and often sinful, tide of luxury which runs so strongly
+as to threaten the great and eternal Christian principle of
+self-denial.
+
+The first thing that strikes us in looking at these salutations is
+the illustration which it gives of the uniting power of a common
+faith. Tryphena and Tryphosa were probably Roman ladies of some
+social standing, and their names may indicate that they at least
+inherited a tendency to exclusiveness; yet here they occur
+immediately after the household of Narcissus and in close connection
+with that of Aristobulus, both of which are groups of slaves.
+Aristobulus was a grandson of Herod the Great, and Narcissus was a
+well-known freedman, whose slaves at his death would probably become
+the property of the Emperor. Other common slave names are those of
+Ampliatus and Urbanus; and here in these lists they stand side by
+side with persons of some distinction in the Roman world, and with
+men and women of widely differing nationalities. The Church of Rome
+would have seemed to any non-Christian observer a motley crowd in
+which racial distinctions, sex, and social conditions had all been
+swept away by the rising tide of a common fanaticism. In it was
+exemplified in actual operation Paul's great principle that in
+Christ Jesus `there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond
+nor free, but in Him all are one.' Roman society in that day, as
+Juvenal shows us, was familiar with the levelling and uniting power
+of common vice and immorality, and the few sternly patriotic Romans
+who were left lamented that `the Orontes flowed into the Tiber'; but
+such common wallowing in filth led to no real unity, whereas, in the
+obscure corner of the great city where there were members of the
+infant Church gathered together, there was the beginning of a common
+life in the one Lord which lifted each participant of it out of the
+dreary solitude of individuality, and imparted to each heart the
+tingling consciousness of oneness with all who held the one faith in
+the one Lord and had received the one baptism in the one Name. That
+fair dawn has been shadowed by many clouds, and the churches of
+to-day, however they may have developed doctrine, may look back with
+reproach and shame to the example of Rome, where Tryphena and
+Tryphosa, with all their inherited, fastidious delicacy, recognised
+in the household of Aristobulus and the household of Narcissus
+`brethren in the Lord,' and were as glad to welcome Jews, Asiatics,
+Persians, and Greeks, as Romans of the bluest blood, into the family
+of Christ. The Romish Church of our day has lost its early grace of
+welcoming all who love the one Lord into its fellowship; and we of
+the Protestant churches have been but too swift to learn the bad
+lesson of forbidding all who follow not with us.
+
+Another thought which may be suggested by Tryphena and Tryphosa is
+the blessed hallowing of natural family relations by common faith.
+They were probably sisters, or, at all events, as their names
+indicate, near relatives, and to them that faith must have been
+doubly precious because they shared it with each other. None of
+the trials to which the early Christians were exposed was more
+severe than the necessity which their Christianity so often
+imposed upon them of breaking the sacred family ties. It saddened
+even Christ's heart to think that He had come to rend families in
+sunder, and to make `a man's foes them of his own household'; and
+we can little imagine how bitter the pang must have been when
+family love had to be cast aside at the bidding of allegiance to
+Him.
+
+But though the stress of that separation between those most nearly
+related in blood by reason of unshared faith is alleviated in this
+day, it still remains; and that is but a feeble Christian life
+which does not feel that it is drawing a heart from closest human
+embraces and constituting a barrier between it and the dearest of
+earth. There is still need in these days of relaxed Christian
+sentiment for the stern austerity of the law, `He that loveth
+father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me'; and there are
+many Christian souls who would be infinitely stronger and more
+mature, if they did not yield to the seductions of family
+affections which are not rooted in Jesus Christ. But still, though
+our faith ought to be far more than it often is, the determining
+element in our affections and associations, its noblest work is
+not to separate but to unite; and whilst it often must divide, it
+is meant to draw more closely together hearts that are already
+knit by earthly love. Its legitimate effect is to make all earthly
+sweetnesses sweeter, all holy bonds more holy and more binding, to
+infuse a new constraint and preciousness into all earthly
+relationships, to make brothers tenfold more brotherly and sisters
+more sisterly. The heart, in which the deepest devotion is yielded
+to Jesus Christ, has its capacity for devotion infinitely
+increased, and they who, looking into each other's faces, see
+reflected there something of the Lord whom they both love, love
+each other all the more because they love Him most, and in their
+love to Him, and His to them, have found a new measure for all
+their affection. They who, looking on their dear ones, can `trust
+they live in God,' will there find them `worthier to be loved,'
+and will there find a power of loving them. Tryphena and Tryphosa
+were more sisterly than ever when they clung to their Elder
+Brother. `There is no man that hath left brethren, or sisters, or
+mother, or father, for My sake, but he shall receive a hundredfold
+more in this time, brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and in the
+world to come eternal life.'
+
+The contrast between the names of these two Roman ladies and the
+characterisation of their `labour in the Lord' may suggest to us
+the most formidable foe of Christian earnestness. Their names, as
+we have already noticed, point to a state of society in which the
+parents ideal for their daughters was dainty luxuriousness and a
+withdrawal from the rough and tumble of common life; but these two
+women, magnetised by the love of Jesus, had turned their backs on
+the parental ideal, and had cast themselves earnestly into a life
+of toil. That ideal was never more formidably antagonistic to the
+vigour of Christian life than it is to-day. Rome, in Paul's time,
+was not more completely honeycombed with worldliness than England
+is to-day; and the English churches are not far behind the English
+`world' in their paralysing love of luxury and self-indulgence. In
+all ages, earnest Christians have had to take up the same vehement
+remonstrance against the tendency of the average Christian to let
+his religious life be weakened by the love of the world and the
+things of the world. The protests against growing luxury have been
+a commonplace in all ages of the Church; but, surely, there has
+never been a time when it has reached a more senseless, sinful,
+and destroying height than in our day. The rapid growth of wealth,
+with no capacity of using it nobly, which modern commerce has
+brought, has immensely influenced all our churches for evil. It is
+so hard for us, aggregated in great cities, to live our own lives,
+and the example of our class has such immense power over us that
+it is very hard to pursue the path of `plain living and high
+thinking' in communities, all classes of which are more and more
+yielding to the temptation to ostentation, so-called comfort, and
+extravagant expenditure; and that this is a danger---we are
+tempted to say \textit{the} danger---to the purity, loftiness, and
+vigour of religious life among us, he must be blind who cannot
+see, and he must be strangely ignorant of his own life who cannot
+feel that it is the danger for him. I believe that for one
+professing Christian whose earnestness is lost by reason of
+intellectual doubts, or by some grave sin, there are a hundred
+from whom it simply oozes away unnoticed, like wind out of a
+bladder, so that what was once round and full becomes limp and
+flaccid. If Demas begins with loving the present world, it will
+not be long before he finds a reason for departing from Paul.
+
+We may take these two sisters, finally, as pointing for us the
+true victory over this formidable enemy. They had turned
+resolutely away from the heathen ideal enshrined in their names to
+a life of real hard toil, as is distinctly implied by the word
+used by the Apostle. What that toil consisted in we do not know,
+and need not inquire; but the main point to be noted is that their
+`labour' was `in the Lord.' That union with Christ makes labour
+for Him a necessity, and makes it possible. `The labour we delight
+in physics pain'; and if we are in Him, we shall not only `live in
+Him,' but all our work begun, continued, and ended in Him, will in
+Him and by Him be accepted. There is no victorious antagonist of
+worldly ease and self-indulgence comparable to the living
+consciousness of union with Jesus and His life in us. To dwell in
+the swamps at the bottom of the mountain is to live in a region
+where effort is impossible and malaria weakens vitality; to climb
+the heights brings bracing to the limbs and a purer air into the
+expanding lungs, and makes work delightsome that would have been
+labour down below. If we are `in the Lord,' He is our atmosphere,
+and we can draw from Him full draughts of a noble life in which we
+shall not need the stimulus of self-interest or worldly success to
+use it to the utmost in acts of service to Him. They who live in
+the Lord will labour in the Lord, and they who labour in the Lord
+will rest in the Lord.
+
+\chapter{Persis}
+\markright{ROMANS xvi. 12}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Salute the beloved Persis, who laboured much in the
+Lord.'---\textsc{Romans} xvi. 12.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+There are a great number of otherwise unknown Christians who pass
+for a moment before our view in this chapter. Their
+characterisations are like the slight outlines in the background
+of some great artist's canvas: a touch of the brush is all that is
+spared for each, and yet, if we like to look sympathetically, they
+live before us. Now, this good woman, about whom we never hear
+again, and for whom these few words are all her epitaph---was
+apparently, judging by her name, of Persian descent, and possibly
+had been brought to Rome as a slave. At all events, finding
+herself there, she had somehow or other become connected with the
+Church in that city, and had there distinguished herself by
+continuous and faithful Christian toil which had won the affection
+of the Apostle, though he had never seen her, and knew no more
+about her. That is all. She comes into the foreground for a
+moment, and then she vanishes. What does she say to us?
+
+First of all, like the others named by Paul, she helps us to
+understand, by her living example, that wonderful, new, uniting
+process that was carried on by means of Christianity. The simple
+fact of a Persian woman getting a loving message from a Jew, the
+woman being in Rome and the Jew in Corinth, and the message being
+written in Greek, brings before us a whole group of nationalities
+all fused together. They had been hammered together, or, if you
+like it better, chained together, by Roman power, but they were
+melted together by Christ's Gospel. This Eastern woman and this
+Jewish man, and the many others whose names and different
+nationalities pass in a flash before us in this chapter, were all
+brought together in Jesus Christ.
+
+If we run our eye over these salutations, what strikes one, even
+at the first sight, is the very small number of Jewish names; only
+one certain, and another doubtful. Four or five names are Latin,
+and then all the rest are Greek, but this woman seemingly came
+from further east than any of them. There they all were,
+forgetting the hostile nationalities to which they belonged,
+because they had found One who had brought them into one great
+community. We talk about the uniting influence of Christianity,
+but when we see the process going on before us, in a case like
+this, we begin to understand it better.
+
+But another point may be noticed in regard to this uniting
+process---how it brought into action the purest and truest love as
+a bond that linked men. There are four or five of the people
+commended in this chapter of whom the Apostle has nothing to say
+but that they are beloved. This is the only woman to whom he
+applies that term. And notice his instinctive delicacy: when he is
+speaking of men he says, `\textit{My} beloved'; when he is
+greeting Persis he says, `\textit{the} beloved,' that there may be
+no misunderstanding about the `my'---`the beloved Persis which
+laboured much in the Lord'---indicating, by one delicate touch,
+the loftiness, the purity, and truly Christian character of the
+bond that held them together. And that is no true Church, where
+anything but that is the bond---the love that knits us to one
+another, because we believe that each is knit to the dear Lord and
+fountain of all love.
+
+What more does this good woman say to us? She is an example living
+and breathing there before us, of what a woman may be in God's
+Church. Paul had never been in Rome; no Apostle, so far as we
+know, had had anything to do with the founding of the Church. The
+most important Church in the Roman Empire, and the Church which
+afterwards became the curse of Christendom, was founded by some
+anonymous Christians, with no commission, with no supervision,
+with no officials amongst them, but who just had the grace of God
+in their hearts, and found themselves in Rome, and could not help
+speaking about Jesus Christ. God helped them, and a little Church
+sprang into being. And the great abundance of salutations here,
+and the honourable titles which the Apostle gives to the
+Christians of whom he speaks, and many of whom he signalises as
+having done great service, are a kind of certificate on his part
+to the vigorous life which, without any apostolic supervision or
+official direction, had developed itself there in that Church.
+
+Now, it is to be noticed that this striking form of eulogium which
+is attached to our Persis she shares in common with others in the
+group. And it is to be further noticed that all those who are, as
+it were, decorated with this medal---on whom Paul bestows this
+honour of saying that they had `laboured,' or `laboured much in
+the Lord,' are women that stand alone in the list. There are
+several other women in it, but they are all coupled with
+men---husbands or brothers, or some kind of relative. But there
+are three sets of women, I do not say single women, but three sets
+of women, standing singly in the list, and it is about them, and
+them only, that Paul says they `laboured,' or `laboured much.'
+There is a Mary who stands alone, and she `bestowed much labour
+on' Paul and others. Then there are, in the same verse as my text,
+two sisters, Tryphena and Tryphosa, whose names mean `the
+luxurious.' And the Apostle seems to think, as he writes the two
+names that spoke of self-indulgence: `Perhaps these rightly
+described these two women once, but they do not now. In the bad
+old days, before they were Christians, they may have been rightly
+named luxurious-living. But here is their name now, the luxurious
+is turned into the self-sacrificing worker, and the two sisters
+``labour in the Lord.''\,' Then comes our friend Persis, who also
+stands alone, and she shares in the honour that only these other
+two companies of women share with her. She `laboured much in the
+Lord.' In that little community, without any direction from
+Apostles and authorised teachers, the brethren and sisters had
+every one found their tasks; and these solitary women, with nobody
+to say to them, `Go and do this or that,' had found out for
+themselves, or rather had been taught by the Spirit of Jesus, what
+they had to do, and they worked at it with a will. There are many
+things that Christian women can do a great deal better than men,
+and we are not to forget that this modern talk about the
+emancipation of women has its roots here in the New Testament. We
+are not to forget either that prerogative means obligation, and
+that the elevation of woman means the laying upon her of solemn
+duties to perform. I wonder how many of the women members of our
+Churches and congregations deserve such a designation as that? We
+hear a great deal about `women's rights' nowadays. I wish some of
+my friends would lay a little more to heart than they do, `women's
+duties.'
+
+And now, lastly, the final lesson that I draw from this eulogium
+of an otherwise altogether unknown woman is that she is a model of
+Christian service.
+
+First, in regard to its measure. She `laboured much in the Lord.'
+Now, both these two words, `laboured' and `much,' are extremely
+emphatic. The word rightly translated `laboured' will appear in
+its full force if I recall to you a couple of other places in
+which it is employed in the New Testament. You remember that
+touching incident about our Lord when, being `\textit{wearied}
+with His journey, He sat thus on the well.' `Wearied' is the same
+word as is here used. Then, you remember how the Apostle, after he
+had been hauling empty nets all night in the little, wet, dirty
+fishing-boat, said, perhaps with a yawn, `Master, we have
+\textit{toiled} all the night and caught nothing.' He uses the
+same word as is employed here. Such is the sort of work that these
+women had done---work carried to the point of exhaustion, work up
+to the very edge of their powers, work unsparing and continuous,
+and not done once in some flash of evanescent enthusiasm, but all
+through a dreary night, in spite of apparent failures.
+
+\textit{There} is the measure of service. Many of us seem to think
+that if we say `I am tired,' that is a reason for not doing
+anything. Sometimes it is, no doubt; and no man has a right so to
+labour as to impair his capacity for future labour, but subject to
+that condition I do not know that the plea of fatigue is a
+sufficient reason for idleness. And I am quite sure that the true
+example for us is the example of Him who, when He was most
+wearied, sitting on the well, was so invigorated and refreshed by
+the opportunity of winning another soul that, when His disciples
+came back to Him, they looked at His fresh strength with
+astonishment, and said to themselves, `Has any man brought Him
+anything to eat?' Ay, what He had to eat was work that He finished
+for the Father, and some of us know that the truest refreshment in
+toil is a change of toil. It is almost as good to shift the load
+on to the other shoulder, or to take a stick into the other hand,
+as it is to put away the load altogether. Oh, the careful limits
+which Christian people nowadays set to their work for Jesus! They
+are not afraid of being tired in their pursuit of business or
+pleasure, but in regard to Christ's work they will let anything go
+to wrack and ruin rather than that they should turn a hair, by
+persevering efforts to prevent it. Work to the limit of power if
+you live in the light of blessedness.
+
+She `laboured much in the Lord,' or, as Jesus Christ said about
+the other woman who was blamed by the people that did not love
+enough to understand the blessedness of self-sacrifice, `she had
+done what she could.' It was an apology for the form of Mary's
+service, but it was a stringent demand as to its amount. `What she
+could'---not \textit{half} of what she could; not what she
+\textit{conveniently} could. That is the measure of acceptable
+service.
+
+Then, still further, may we not learn from Persis the spring of
+all true Christian work? She `laboured much in the Lord,' because
+she \textit{was} `in Him,' and in union with Him there came to her
+power and desire to do things which, without that close
+fellowship, she neither would have desired nor been able to do. It
+is vain to try to whip up Christian people to forms of service by
+appealing to lower motives. There is only one motive that will
+last, and bring out from us all that is in us to do, and that is
+the appeal to our sense of union and communion with Jesus Christ,
+and the exhortation to live in Him, and then we shall work in Him.
+If you link the spindles in your mill, or the looms in your
+weaving-shed, with the engine, they will go. It is of no use to
+try to turn them by hand. You will only spoil the machinery, and
+it will be poor work that you will get off them.
+
+So, dear brethren, be `in the Lord.' That is the secret of
+service, and the closer we come to Him, and the more continuously,
+moment by moment, we realise our individual dependence upon Him,
+and our union with Him, the more will our lives effloresce and
+blossom into all manner of excellence and joyful service, and
+nothing else that Christian people are whipped up to do, from
+lower and more vulgar motives than that, will. It may be of a
+certain kind of inferior value, but it is far beneath the highest
+beauty of Christian service, nor will its issues reach the
+loftiest point of usefulness to which even our poor service may
+attain.
+
+Persis seems to me to suggest, too, the safeguard of work. Ah, if
+she had not `laboured in the Lord,' and been `in the Lord' whilst
+she was labouring, she would very soon have stopped work. Our
+Christian work, however pure its motive when we begin it, has in
+itself the tendency to become mechanical, and to be done from
+lower motives than those from which it was begun. That is true
+about a man in my position. It is true about all of us, in our
+several ways of trying to serve our dear Lord and Master. Unless
+we make a conscience of continually renewing our communion with
+Him, and getting our feet once more firmly upon the rock, we shall
+certainly in our Christian work, having begun in the spirit,
+continue in the flesh, and before we know where we are, we shall
+be doing work from habit, because we did it yesterday at this
+hour, because people expect it of us, because A, B, or C does it,
+or for a hundred other reasons, all of which are but too familiar
+to us by experience. They are sure to slip in; they change the
+whole character of the work, and they harm the workers. The only
+way by which we can keep the garland fresh is by continually
+dipping it in the fountain. The only way by which we can keep our
+Christian work pure, useful, worthy of the Master, is by seeing to
+it that our work itself does not draw us away from our fellowship
+with Him. And the more we have to do, the more needful is it that
+we should listen to Christ's voice when He says to us, `Come ye
+yourselves apart with Me into a solitary place, and there renew
+your communion with Me.'
+
+The last lesson about our work which I draw from Persis is the
+unexpected immortality of true Christian service. How Persis would
+have opened her eyes if anybody had told her that nearly 1900
+years after she lived, people in a far-away barbarous island would
+be sitting thinking about her, as you and I are doing now! How
+astonished she would have been if it had been said to her, `Now,
+Persis, wheresoever in the whole world the Gospel is preached,
+your name and your work and your epitaph will go with it, and as
+long as men know about Jesus Christ, your and their Master, they
+will know about you, His humble servant.' Well, we shall not have
+our names in that fashion in men's memories, but Jesus will have
+your name and mine, if we do His work as this woman did it, in
+\textit{His} memory. `I will never forget any of their works.' And
+if we---self-forgetful to the limit of our power, and as the
+joyful result of our personal union with that Saviour who has done
+everything for us---try to live for His praise and glory in any
+fashion, then be sure of this, that our poor deeds are as immortal
+as Him for whom they are done, and that we may take to ourselves
+the great word which He has spoken, when He has declared that at
+the last He will confess His confessors' names before the angels
+in heaven. Blessed are the living that `live in the Lord'; blessed
+are the workers that work `in the Lord,' for when they come to be
+the dead that `die in the Lord' and rest from their labours, their
+works shall follow them.
+
+\chapter{A Crushed Snake}
+\markright{ROMANS xvi. 20}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`The God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet
+shortly.'---\textsc{Romans} xvi. 20.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+There are three other Scriptural sayings which may have been
+floating in the Apostle's mind when he penned this triumphant
+assurance. `Thou shalt bruise his head'; the great first
+Evangel---we are to be endowed with Christ's power; `The lion and
+the adder thou shalt trample under foot'---all the strength that
+was given to ancient saints is ours; `Behold! I give you power to
+tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the
+enemy'---the charter of the seventy is the perennial gift to the
+Church. Echoing all these great words, Paul promises the Roman
+Christians that `the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your
+feet shortly.' Now, when any special characteristic is thus
+ascribed to God, as when He is called `the God of patience' or
+`the God of hope,' in the preceding chapter, the characteristic
+selected has some bearing on the prayer or promise following. For
+example, this same designation, `the God of peace,' united with
+the other, `that brought again from the dead the Lord Jesus, that
+great Shepherd of the sheep,' is laid as the foundation of the
+prayer for the perfecting of the readers of the Epistle to the
+Hebrews in every good work. It is, then, because of that great
+name that the Apostle is sure, and would have his Roman brethren
+to be sure, that Satan shall shortly be bruised under their feet.
+No doubt there may have been some reference in Paul's mind to what
+he had just said about those who caused divisions in the Church;
+but, if there is such reference, it is of secondary importance.
+Paul is gazing on all the great things in God which make Him the
+God of peace, and in them all he sees ground for the confident
+hope that His power will be exerted to crush all the sin that
+breaks His children's peace.
+
+Now the first thought suggested by these words is the solemn
+glimpse given of the struggle that goes on in every Christian
+soul.
+
+Two antagonists are at hand-grips in every one of us. On the one
+hand, the `God of peace,' on the other, `Satan.' If you believe in
+the personality of the One, do not part with the belief in the
+personality of the other. If you believe that a divine power and
+Spirit is ready to help and strengthen you, do not think so
+lightly of the enemies that are arrayed against you as to falter
+in the belief that there \textit{is} a great personal Power,
+rooted in evil, who is warring against each of us. Ah, brethren!
+we live far too much on the surface, and we neither go down deep
+enough to the dark source of the Evil, nor rise high enough to the
+radiant Fountain of the Good. It is a shallow life that strikes
+that antagonism of God and Satan out of itself. And though the
+belief in a personal tempter has got to be very unfashionable
+nowadays, I am going to venture to say that you may measure
+accurately the vitality and depth of a man's religion by the
+emphasis with which he grasps the thought of that great
+antagonism. There is a star of light, and there is a star of
+darkness; and they revolve, as it were, round one centre.
+
+But whilst, on the one hand, our Christianity is made shallow in
+proportion as we ignore this solemn reality, on the other hand, it
+is sometimes paralysed and perverted by our misunderstanding of
+it. For, notice, `the God of peace shall bruise Satan
+\textit{under your feet}.' Yes, it is God that bruises, but He
+uses our feet to do it. It is God from whom the power comes, but
+the power works through us, and we are neither merely the field,
+nor merely the prize, of the conflict between these two, but we
+ourselves have to put all our pith into the task of keeping down
+the flat, speckled head that has the poison gland in it. `The God
+of peace'---blessed be His Name---`shall bruise Satan under your
+feet,' but it will need the tension of your muscles, and the
+downward force of your heel, if the wriggling reptile is to be
+kept under.
+
+Turn, now, to the other thought that is here, the promise and
+pledge of victory in the name, the God of peace. I have already
+referred to two similar designations of God in the previous
+chapter, and if we take them in union with this one in our text,
+what a wonderfully beautiful and strengthening threefold view of
+that divine nature do we get! `The God of patience and
+consolation' is the first of the linked three. It heads the list,
+and blessed is it that it does, because, after all, sorrow makes
+up a very large proportion of the experience of us all, and what
+most men seem to themselves to need most is a God that will bear
+their sorrows with them and help them to bear, and a God that will
+comfort them. But, supposing that He has been made known thus as
+the source of endurance and the God of all consolation, He becomes
+`the God of hope,' for a dark background flings up a light
+foreground, and a comforted sorrow patiently endured is mighty to
+produce a radiant hope. The rising of the muddy waters of the Nile
+makes the heavy crops of `corn in Egypt.' So the name `the God of
+hope' fitly follows the name `the God of patience and
+consolation.'
+
+Then we come to the name in my text, built perhaps on the other
+two, or at least reminiscent of them, and recalling them, `the God
+of peace,' who, through patience and consolation, through hope,
+and through many another gift, breathes the benediction of His own
+great tranquillity and unruffled calm over our agitated,
+distracted, sinful hearts. In connection with one of those
+previous designations to which I have referred, the Apostle has a
+prayer very different in form from this, but identical in
+substance, when he says `the God of hope fill you with all joy and
+peace in believing.' Is not that closely allied to the promise of
+my text, `The God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet
+shortly'? Is there any surer way of `bruising Satan' under a man's
+feet than filling him `with joy and peace in believing'? What can
+the Devil do to that man? If his soul is saturated, and his
+capacities filled, with that pure honey of divine joy, will he
+have any taste for the coarse dainties, the leeks and the garlic,
+that the Devil offers him? Is there any surer way of delivering a
+man from the temptations of his own baser nature, and the
+solicitations of this busy intrusive world round about him, than
+to make him satisfied with the goodness of the Lord, and conscious
+in his daily experience of `all joy and peace'? Fill the vessel
+with wine, and there is no room for baser liquors or for poison. I
+suppose that the way by which you and I, dear friends, will most
+effectually conquer any temptations, is by falling back on the
+superior sweetness of divine joys. When we live upon manna we do
+not crave onions. So He `will bruise Satan under your feet' by
+giving that which will arm your hearts against all his temptations
+and all his weapons. Blessed be God for the way of conquest, which
+is the possession of a supremer good!
+
+But then, notice how beautifully too this name, `the God of
+peace,' comes in to suggest that even in the strife there may be
+tranquillity. I remember in an old church in Italy a painting of
+an Archangel with his foot on the dragon's neck, and his sword
+thrust through its scaly armour. It is perhaps the feebleness of
+the artist's hand, but I think rather it is the clearness of his
+insight, which has led him to represent the victorious angel, in
+the moment in which he is slaying the dragon, as with a smile on
+his face, and not the least trace of effort in the arm, which is
+so easily smiting the fatal blow. Perhaps if the painter could
+have used his brush better he would have put more expression into
+the attitude and the face, but I think it is better as it is. We,
+too, may achieve a conquest over the dragon which, although it
+requires effort, does not disturb peace. There is a possibility of
+bruising that slippery head under my foot, and yet not having to
+strain myself in the process. We may have `peace subsisting at the
+heart of endless agitation.' Do you remember how the Apostle, in
+another place, gives us the same beautiful---though at first sight
+contradictory---combination when he says, `The peace of God shall
+garrison your heart'?
+
+\begin{verse}
+`My soul! there is a country \\
+\ \ Far, far beyond the stars, \\
+Where stands an armed sentry, \\
+\ \ All skilful in the wars.'
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent And her name is Peace, as the poet goes on to tell us.
+Ah, brethren! if we lived nearer the Lord, we should find it more
+possible to `fight the good fight of faith,' and yet to have `our
+feet shod with the preparedness of the gospel of peace.'
+
+`The God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet'; and in
+bruising He will give you His peace to do it, and His peace in
+doing it, and in still greater measure after doing it. For every
+struggle of the Christian soul adds something to the subsequent
+depth of its tranquillity. And so the name of the God of peace is
+our pledge of victory in, and of deepened peace after, our warfare
+with sin and temptation.
+
+Lastly, note the swiftness with which Paul expects that this
+process shall he accomplished.
+
+I dare say that he was thinking about the coming of the Lord, when
+all the fighting and struggle would be over, and that when he said
+`God shall bruise him under your feet shortly,' there lay in the
+back of his mind the thought, `the Lord is at hand.' But be that
+as it may, there is another way of looking at the words. They are
+not in the least like our experience, are they? `Shortly!'---and
+here am I, a Christian man for the last half century perhaps; and
+have I got much further on in my course? Have I brought the sin
+that used to trouble me much down, and is my character much more
+noble, Christ-like, than it was long years ago? Would other people
+say that it is? Instead of `shortly' we ought to put `slowly' for
+the most of us. But, dear friend, the ideal is swift conquest, and
+it is our fault and our loss, if the reality is sadly
+different.
+
+There are a great many evils that, unless they are conquered
+suddenly, have very small chance of ever being conquered at all.
+You never heard of a man being cured of his love of intoxicating
+drink, for instance, by a gradual process. The serpent's life is
+not crushed out of it by gradual pressure, but by one vigorous
+stamp of a nervous heel.
+
+But if my experience as a Christian man does not enable me to set
+to my seal that this text is true, the text itself will tell me
+why. It is `the God of peace' that is going to `bruise Satan.' Do
+you keep yourself in touch with Him, dear friend? And do you let
+His powers come uninterruptedly and continuously into your spirit
+and life? It is sheer folly and self-delusion to wonder that the
+medicine does not work as quickly as was promised, if you do not
+take the medicine. The slow process by which, at the best, many
+Christian people `bruise Satan under their feet,' during which he
+hurts their heels more than they hurt his head, is mainly due to
+their breaking the closeness and the continuity of their communion
+with God in Jesus Christ.
+
+But, after all, it is Heaven's chronology that we have to do with
+here. `Shortly,' and it will be `shortly,' if we reckon by
+heavenly scales of duration. Weeping may endure for a night, but
+joy cometh in the morning. `The Lord will help her, and that right
+early.' `The Lord is at hand.' When we get yonder, ah! how all the
+long years of fighting will have dwindled down, and we shall say
+`the Lord did help me, and that right early,' and though there may
+have been more than threescore years and ten of fighting, that,
+while we were in the thick of it, did not seem to come to much, we
+shall then look back and say: `Yes, Lord, it was but for a moment,
+and it has brought me to the undying day of Eternal Peace.'
+
+\chapter{Tertius}
+\markright{ROMANS xvi. 22}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`I, Tertius, who write the epistle, salute you in the
+Lord.'---\textsc{Romans} xvi. 22 (R.~V.).
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+One sometimes sees in old religious pictures, in some obscure
+corner, a tiny kneeling figure, the portrait of the artist. So
+Tertius here gets leave to hold the pen for a moment on his own
+account, and from Corinth sends his greeting to his unknown
+brethren in Rome. Apparently he was a stranger to them, and needed
+to introduce himself. He is never heard of before or since. For
+one brief moment he is visible, like a star of a low magnitude,
+shining out for a moment between two banks of darkness and then
+swallowed up. Judging by his name, he was probably a Roman, and
+possibly had some connection with Italy, but clearly was a
+stranger to the Church in Rome. We do not know whether he was a
+resident in Corinth, where he wrote this epistle, or one of Paul's
+travelling companions. Probably he was the former, as his name
+never recurs in any of Paul's letters. One can understand the
+impulse which led him for one moment to come out of obscurity and
+to take up personal relations with those who had so long enjoyed
+his pen. He would fain float across the deep gulf of alienation a
+thread of love which looked like gossamer, but has proved to be
+stronger than centuries and revolutions.
+
+This humble and modest greeting is an expression of a sentiment
+which the world may smile at, but which, being `in the Lord,'
+partakes of immortality. No doubt the world's hate drove more
+closely together all the disciples in primitive times; but the
+yearning of Tertius for some little corner in the love of his
+Roman brethren might well influence us to-day. There ought to be
+an effort of imagination going out towards unknown brethren.
+Christian love is not meant to be kept within the limits of sight
+and personal knowledge; it should overleap the narrow bounds of
+the communities to which we belong, and expatiate over the whole
+wide field. The great Shepherd has prescribed for us the limits to
+the very edge of which our Christian love should consciously go
+forth, and has rebuked the narrowness to which we are prone, when
+He has said, `Other sheep I have which are not of this fold.' We
+are all too prone to let identities of opinion and of polity, or
+even the accident of locality, set bounds to our consciousness of
+brotherhood; and the example of this little gush of affection,
+that reaches out a hand across the ocean and grasps the hands of
+unknown partakers in the common life of the one Lord, may well
+shame us out of our narrowness, and quicken us into a wide
+perception and deepened feeling towards all who in every place
+call up Jesus Christ as their Lord---`both their Lord and
+ours.'
+
+Another lesson which we may learn from Tertius' characterisation
+of himself is the dignity of subordinate work towards a great end.
+His office as amanuensis was very humble, but it was quite as
+necessary as Paul's inspired fervour. It is to him that we owe our
+possession of the Epistle; it is to him that Paul owed it that he
+was able to record in imperishable words the thoughts that welled
+up in his mind, and would have been lost if Tertius had not been
+at his side. The power generated in the boilers does its work
+through machines of which each little cog-wheel is as
+indispensable as the great shafts. Members of the body which seem
+to be `more feeble, are necessary.' Every note in a great
+concerted piece of music, and every instrument, down to the
+triangle and the little drum in the great orchestra, is necessary.
+This lesson of the dignity of subordinate work needs to be laid to
+heart both by those who think themselves to be capable of more
+important service, and by those who have to recognise that the
+less honourable tasks are all for which they are fit. To the
+former it may preach humility, the latter it may encourage. We are
+all very ignorant of what is great and what is small in the matter
+of our Christian service, and we have sometimes to look very
+closely and to clear away a great many vulgar misconceptions
+before we can clearly discriminate between mites and talents. `We
+know not which may prosper, whether this or that'; and in our
+ignorance of what it may please God to bring out of any service
+faithfully rendered to Him, we had better not be too sure that
+true service is ever small, or that the work that attracts
+attention and is christened by men `great' is really so in His
+eyes. It is well to have the noble ambition to `desire earnestly
+the greater gifts,' but it is better to `follow the more excellent
+way,' and to seek after the love which knows nothing of great or
+small, and without which prophecy and the knowledge of all
+mysteries, and all conspicuous and all the shining qualities
+profit nothing.
+
+We can discern in Tertius' words a little touch of what we may
+call pride in his work. No doubt he knew it to be subordinate, but
+he also knew it to be needful; and no doubt he had put all his
+strength into doing it well. No man will put his best into any
+task which he does not undertake in such a spirit. It is a very
+plain piece of homely wisdom that `what is worth doing at all is
+worth doing well.' Without a lavish expenditure of the utmost care
+and effort, our work will tend to be slovenly and unpleasing to
+God, and man, and to ourselves. We may be sure there were no blots
+and bits of careless writing in Tertius' manuscript, and that he
+would not have claimed the friendly feelings of his Roman
+brethren, if he had not felt that he had put his best into the
+writing of this epistle. The great word of King David has a very
+wide application. `I will not take that which is thine for the
+Lord, nor offer burnt offerings without cost.'
+
+Tertius' salutation may suggest to us the best thing by which to
+be remembered. All his life before and after the hours spent at
+Paul's side has sunk in oblivion. He wished to be known only as
+having written the Epistle. Christian souls ought to desire to
+live chiefly in the remembrance of those to whom they have been
+known as having done some little bit of work for Jesus Christ. We
+may well ask ourselves whether there is anything in our lives by
+which we should thus wish to be remembered. All our many
+activities will sink into silence; but if the stream of our life,
+which has borne along down its course so much mud and sand, has
+brought some grains of gold in the form of faithful and loving
+service to Christ and men---these will not be lost in the ocean,
+but treasured by Him. What we do for Jesus and to spread the
+knowledge of His name is the immortal part of our mortal lives,
+and abides in His memory and in blessed results in our own
+characters, when all the rest that made our busy and often stormy
+days has passed into oblivion. All that we know of Tertius who
+wrote this Epistle is that he wrote it. Well will it be for us if
+the summary of our lives be something like that of his!
+
+\chapter{Quartus a Brother}
+\markright{ROMANS xvi. 23}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Quartus a brother.'---\textsc{Romans} xvi. 23.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+I am afraid very few of us read often, or with much interest,
+those long lists of names at the end of Paul's letters. And yet
+there are plenty of lessons in them, if anybody will look at them
+lovingly and carefully. There does not seem much in these three
+words; but I am very much mistaken if they will not prove to be
+full of beauty and pathos, and to open out into a wonderful
+revelation of what Christianity is and does, as soon as we try to
+freshen them up into some kind of human interest.
+
+It is easy for us to make a little picture of this brother
+Quartus. He is evidently an entire stranger to the Church in Rome.
+They had never heard his name before: none of them knew anything
+about him. Further, he is evidently a man of no especial
+reputation or position in the Church at Corinth, from which Paul
+writes. He contrasts strikingly with the others who send
+salutations to Rome. `Timotheus, my work-fellow'---the companion
+and helper of the Apostle, whose name was known everywhere among
+the Churches, heads the list. Then come other prominent men of his
+more immediate circle. Then follows a loving greeting from Paul's
+amanuensis, who, naturally, as the pen is in his own hand, says:
+`\textit{I}, Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the
+Lord.' Then Paul begins again to dictate, and the list runs on.
+Next comes a message from `Gaius mine host, and of the whole
+Church'---an influential man in the community, apparently rich,
+and willing, as well as able, to extend to them large and loving
+hospitality. Erastus, the chamberlain or treasurer of the city,
+follows---a man of consequence in Corinth. And then, among all
+these people of mark, comes the modest, quiet Quartus. He has no
+wealth like Gaius, nor civic position like Erastus, nor wide
+reputation like Timothy. He is only a good, simple, unknown
+Christian. He feels a spring of love open in his heart to these
+brethren far across the sea, whom he never met. He would like them
+to know that he thought lovingly of them, and to be lovingly
+thought of by them. So he begs a little corner in Paul's letter,
+and gets it; and there, in his little niche, like some statue of a
+forgotten saint, scarce seen amidst the glories of a great
+cathedral, `Quartus a brother' stands to all time.
+
+The first thing that strikes me in connection with these words is,
+how deep and real they show that new bond of Christian love to
+have been.
+
+A little incident of this sort is more impressive than any amount
+of mere talk about the uniting influence of the Gospel. Here we
+get a glimpse of the power in actual operation in a man's heart,
+and if we think of all that this simple greeting presupposes and
+implies, and of all that had to be overcome before it could have
+been sent, we may well see in it the sign of the greatest
+revolution that was ever wrought in men's relations to one
+another, Quartus was an inhabitant of Corinth, from which city
+this letter was written. His Roman name may indicate Roman
+descent, but of that we cannot be sure. Just as probably he may
+have been a Greek by birth, and so have had to stretch his hand
+across a deep crevasse of national antipathy, in order to clasp
+the hands of his brethren in the great city. There was little love
+lost between Rome, the rough imperious conqueror, and Corinth,
+prostrate and yet restive under her bonds, and nourishing
+remembrances of a freedom which Rome had crushed, and of a culture
+that Rome haltingly followed.
+
+And how many other deep gulfs of separation had to be bridged
+before that Christian sense of oneness could be felt! It is
+impossible for us to throw ourselves completely back to the
+condition of things which the Gospel found. The world then was
+like some great field of cooled lava on the slopes of a volcano,
+all broken up by a labyrinth of clefts and cracks, at the bottom
+of which one can see the flicker of sulphurous flames. Great gulfs
+of national hatred, of fierce enmities of race, language, and
+religion; wide separations of social condition, far profounder
+than anything of the sort which we know, split mankind into
+fragments. On the one side was the freeman, on the other, the
+slave; on the one side, the Gentile, on the other, the Jew; on the
+one side, the insolence and hard-handedness of Roman rule, on the
+other, the impotent, and therefore envenomed, hatred of conquered
+peoples.
+
+And all this fabric, full of active repulsions and disintegrating
+forces, was bound together into an artificial and unreal unity by
+the iron clamp of Rome's power, holding up the bulging walls that
+were ready to fall---the unity of the slave-gang manacled together
+for easier driving. Into this hideous condition of things the
+Gospel comes, and silently flings its clasping tendrils over the
+wide gaps, and binds the crumbling structure of human society with
+a new bond, real and living. We know well enough that that was so,
+but we are helped to apprehend it by seeing, as it were, the very
+process going on before our eyes, in this message from `Quartus a
+brother.'
+
+It reminds us that the very notion of humanity, and of the
+brotherhood of man, is purely Christian. A world-embracing
+society, held together by love, was not dreamt of before the
+Gospel came; and since the Gospel came it is more than a dream. If
+you wrench away the idea from its foundation, as people do who
+talk about fraternity, and seek to bring it to pass without
+Christ, it is a mere piece of Utopian sentiment---a fine dream.
+But in Christianity it worked. It works imperfectly enough, God
+knows. Still there is some reality in it, and some power. The
+Gospel first of all produced the thing and the practice, and then
+the theory came afterwards. The Church did not talk much about the
+brotherhood of man, or the unity of the race; but simply ignored
+all distinctions, and gathered into the fold the slave and his
+master, the Roman and his subject, fair-haired Goths and swarthy
+Arabians, the worshippers of Odin and of Zeus, the Jew and the
+Gentile. That actual unity, utterly irrespective of all
+distinctions, which came naturally in the train of the Gospel, was
+the first attempt to realise the oneness of the race, and first
+taught the world that all men were brethren.
+
+And before this simple word of greeting could have been sent, and
+the unknown man in Corinth felt love to a company of unknown men
+in Rome, some profound new impulse must have been given to the
+world; something altogether unlike any of the forces hitherto in
+existence. What was that? What should it be but the story of One
+who gave Himself for the whole world, who binds men into a unity
+because of His common relation to them all, and through whom the
+great proclamation can be made: `There is neither Jew nor Greek,
+there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female,
+for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.' Brother Quartus' message,
+like some tiny flower above-ground which tells of a spreading root
+beneath, is a modest witness to that mighty revolution, and
+presupposes the preaching of a Saviour in whom he and his unseen
+friends in Rome are one.
+
+So let us learn not to confine our sympathy and the play of our
+Christian affection within the limits of our personal knowledge.
+We must go further a-field than that. Like this man, let us
+sometimes send our thoughts across mountains and seas. He knew
+nobody in the Roman Church, and nobody knew him, but he wished to
+stretch out his hand to them, and to feel, as it were, the
+pressure of their fingers in his palm. That is a pattern for
+us.
+
+Let me suggest another thing. Quartus was a Corinthian. The
+Corinthian Church was remarkable for its quarrellings and
+dissensions. One said, `I am of Paul, and another, I of Apollos,
+and I of Cephas, and I of Christ.' I wonder if our friend Quartus
+belonged to any of these parties? There is nothing more likely
+than that he had a much warmer glow of Christian love to the
+brethren over there in Rome than to those who sat on the same
+bench with him in the upper room at Corinth. For you know that
+sometimes it is true about people, as well as about scenery, that
+`distance lends enchantment to the view.' A great many of us have
+much keener sympathies with `brethren' who are well out of our
+reach, and whose peculiarities do not jar against ours, than with
+those who are nearest. I do not say Quartus was one of these, but
+he may very well have been one of the wranglers in Corinth who
+found it much easier to love his brother whom he had not seen than
+his brother whom he had seen. So take the hint, if you need it. Do
+not let your Christian love go wandering away abroad only, but
+keep some for home consumption.
+
+Again, how simply, and with what unconscious beauty, the deep
+reason for our Christian unity is given in that one word, a
+`Brother.' As if he had said, Never mind telling them anything
+about what I am, what place I hold, or what I do. Tell them I am a
+brother, that will be enough. It is the only name by which I care
+to be known; it is the name which explains my love to them.
+
+We are brethren because we are sons of one Father. So that
+favourite name, by which the early Christians knew each other,
+rested upon and proclaimed the deep truth that they knew
+themselves to be all partakers of a common life derived from one
+Parent. When they said they were brethren, they implied, `We have
+been born again by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for
+ever.' The great Christian truth of regeneration, the
+communication of a divine life from God the Father, through Christ
+the Son, by the Holy Spirit, is the foundation of Christian
+brotherhood. So the name is no mere piece of effusive sentiment,
+but expresses a profound fact. `To as many as received Him, to
+them gave He power to become the sons of God,' and therein to
+become the brethren of all His sons.
+
+That is the true ground of our unity, and of our obligation to
+love all who are begotten of Him. You cannot safely put them on
+any other footing. All else---identity of opinion, similarity of
+practice and ceremonial, local or national ties, and the
+like---all else is insufficient. It may be necessary for Christian
+communities to require in addition a general identity of opinion,
+and even some uniformity in government and form of worship; but if
+ever they come to fancy that such subordinate conditions of
+visible oneness are the grounds of their spiritual unity, and to
+enforce these as such, they are slipping off the real foundation,
+and are perilling their character as Churches of Christ. The true
+ground of the unity of all Christians is here: `Have we not all
+one Father?' We possess a kindred life derived from Him. We are a
+family of brethren because we are sons.
+
+Another remark is, how strangely and unwittingly this good man has
+got himself an immortality by that passing thought of his. One
+loving message has won for him the prize for which men have
+joyfully given life itself,---an eternal place in history.
+Wheresoever the Gospel is preached there also shall this be told
+as a memorial of him. How much surprised he would have been if, as
+he leaned forward to Tertius hurrying to end his task and said,
+`Send my love too,' anybody had told him that that one act of his
+would last as long as the world, and his name be known for ever!
+And how much ashamed some of the other people in the New Testament
+would have been if they had known that their passing faults---the
+quarrel of Euodia and Syntyche for instance---were to be gibbeted
+for ever in the same fashion! How careful they would have been,
+and we would be, of our behaviour if we knew that it was to be
+pounced down upon and made immortal in that style! Suppose you
+were to be told---Your thoughts and acts to-morrow at twelve
+o'clock will be recorded for all the world to read---you would be
+pretty careful how you behaved. When a speaker sees the reporters
+in front of him, he weighs his words.
+
+Well, Quartus' little message is written down here, and the world
+knows it. All our words and works are getting put down too, in
+another Book up there, and it is going to be read out one day. It
+does seem wonderful that you and I should live as we do, knowing
+that all the while that God is recording it all. If we are not
+ashamed to do things, and let Him note them on His tablets that
+they may be for the time to come, for ever and ever, it is strange
+that we should be more careful to attitudinise and pose ourselves
+before one another than before Him. Let us then keep ever in mind
+`those pure eyes and perfect witness of the all-judging' God. The
+eternal record of this little message is only a symbol of the
+eternal life and eternal record of all our transient and trivial
+thoughts and deeds before Him. Let us live so that each act, if
+recorded, would shine with some modest ray of true light like
+brother Quartus' greeting, and let us seek that, like him,---all
+else about us being forgotten, position, talents, wealth, buried
+in the dust,---we may be remembered, if we are remembered at all,
+by such a biography as is condensed into these three words. Who
+would not wish to be embalmed, so to speak, in such a record? Who
+would not wish to have such an epitaph as this? A sweet fate to
+live for ever in the world's memory by three words which tell his
+name, his Christianity, and his brotherly love! So far as we are
+remembered at all, may the like be our life's history and our
+epitaph!
+
+%% EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE
+%% ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D.D., Litt.D.
+%% CORINTHIANS
+%% \textit{(To II Corinthians, Chap. V)}
+%% TABLE OF CONTENTS
+%% CALLING ON THE NAME (1 COR. i. 2)
+%% PERISHING OR BEING SAVED (1 COR. i. 18)
+%% THE APOSTLE'S THEME (1 COR. ii. 2)
+%% GOD'S FELLOW-WORKERS (1 COR. iii. 9)
+%% THE TESTING FIRE (1 COR. iii. 12, 13)
+%% TEMPLES OF GOD (1 COR. iii. 16)
+%% DEATH, THE FRIEND (1 COR. iii. 21, 22)
+%% SERVANTS AND LORDS (1 COR. iii. 21-23)
+%% THE THREE TRIBUNALS (1 COR. iv. 3, 4)
+%% THE FESTAL LIFE (1 COR. v. 8)
+%% FORMS \textit{VERSUS} CHARACTER (1 COR. vii. 19, GAL. v. 6, GAL. vi. 15, R. V.)
+%% SLAVES AND FREE (1 COR. vii. 22)
+%% THE CHRISTIAN LIFE (1 COR. vii. 24)
+%% `LOVE BUILDETH UP' (1 COR. viii. 1-13)
+%% THE SIN OF SILENCE (1 COR. ix. 16, 17)
+%% A SERVANT OF MEN (1 COR. ix. 19-23)
+%% HOW THE VICTOR RUNS (1 COR. ix. 24)
+%% `CONCERNING THE CROWN' (1 COR. ix. 25)
+%% THE LIMITS OF LIBERTY (1 COR. x. 23-33)
+%% `IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME' (1 COR. xi. 24)
+%% THE UNIVERSAL GIFT (1 COR. xii. 7)
+%% WHAT LASTS</a> (1 COR. xiii. 8, 13)
+%% THE POWER OF THE RESURRECTION (1 COR. xv. 3, 4)
+%% REMAINING AND FALLING ASLEEP (1 COR. xv. 6)
+%% PAUL'S ESTIMATE OF HIMSELF (1 COR. xv. 10)
+%% THE UNITY OF APOSTOLIC TEACHING (1 COR. xv. 11)
+%% THE CERTAINTY AND JOY OF THE RESURRECTION (1 COR. xv. 20)
+%% THE DEATH OF DEATH (1 COR. xv. 20, 21; 50-58)
+%% STRONG AND LOVING (1 COR. xvi. 13, 14)
+%% ANATHEMA AND GRACE (1 COR. xvi. 21-24)
+%% GOD'S YEA; MAN'S AMEN (2 COR. i. 20, R. V.)
+%% ANOINTED AND STABLISHED (2 COR. i. 21)
+%% SEAL AND EARNEST (2 COR. i. 22)
+%% THE TRIUMPHAL PROCESSION (2 COR. ii. 14, R. V.)
+%% TRANSFORMATION BY BEHOLDING (2 COR. iii. 18)
+%% LOOKING AT THE UNSEEN (2 COR. iv. 18)
+%% TENT AND BUILDING (2 COR. v. 1)
+%% THE PATIENT WORKMAN (2 COR. v. 5)
+%% THE OLD HOUSE AND THE NEW (2 COR. v. 8)
+%% PLEASING CHRIST (2 COR. v. 9)
+%% THE LOVE THAT CONSTRAINS (2 COR. v. 14)
+%% THE ENTREATIES OF GOD (2 COR. v. 20)
+
+\newpage
+\addcontentsline{toc}{part}{I. CORINTHIANS}
+
+\chapter{Calling on the Name}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS i. 2}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`All that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our
+Lord, both theirs and ours.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} i. 2.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+There are some difficulties, with which I need not trouble you,
+about both the translation and the connection of these words. One
+thing is quite clear, that in them the Apostle associates the
+church at Corinth with the whole mass of Christian believers in
+the world. The question may arise whether he does so in the sense
+that he addresses his letter both to the church at Corinth and to
+the whole of the churches, and so makes it a catholic epistle.
+That is extremely unlikely, considering how all but entirely this
+letter is taken up with dealing with the especial conditions of
+the Corinthian church. Rather I should suppose that he is simply
+intending to remind `the Church of God at Corinth ... sanctified
+in Christ Jesus, called to be saints,' that they are in real,
+living union with the whole body of believers. Just as the water
+in a little land-locked bay, connected with the sea by some narrow
+strait like that at Corinth, is yet part of the whole ocean that
+rolls round the world, so that little community of Christians had
+its living bond of union with all the brethren in every place that
+called upon the name of Jesus Christ.
+
+Whichever view on that detail of interpretation be taken, this
+phrase, as a designation of Christians, is worth considering. It
+is one of many expressions found in the New Testament as names for
+them, some of which have now dropped out of general use, while
+some are still retained. It is singular that the name of
+`Christian,' which has all but superseded all others, was
+originally invented as a jeer by sarcastic wits at Antioch, and
+never appears in the New Testament, as a name by which believers
+called themselves. Important lessons are taught by these names,
+such as disciples, believers, brethren, saints, those of the way,
+and so on, each of which embodies some characteristic of a
+follower of Jesus. So this appellation in the text, `those who
+call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,' may yield not
+unimportant lessons if it be carefully weighed, and to some of
+these I would ask your attention now.
+
+I. First, it gives us a glimpse into the worship of the primitive
+Church.
+
+To `call on the name of the Lord' is an expression that comes
+straight out of the Old Testament. It means there distinctly
+adoration and invocation, and it means precisely these things when
+it is referred to Jesus Christ.
+
+We find in the Acts of the Apostles that the very first sermon
+that was preached at Pentecost by Peter all turns upon this
+phrase. He quotes the Old Testament saying, `Whosoever shall call
+on the name of the Lord shall be saved,' and then goes on to prove
+that `the Lord,' the `calling on whose Name' is salvation, is
+Jesus Christ; and winds up with `Therefore let all the house of
+Israel know assuredly that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye
+have crucified, both Lord and Christ.'
+
+Again we find that Ananias of Damascus, when Jesus Christ appeared
+to him and told him to go to Paul and lay his hands upon him,
+shrank from the perilous task because Paul had been sent to `bind
+them that call upon the name of the Lord,' and to persecute them.
+We find the same phrase recurring in other connections, so that,
+on the whole, we may take the expression as a recognised
+designation of Christians.
+
+This was their characteristic, that they prayed to Jesus Christ.
+The very first word, so far as we know, that Paul ever heard from
+a Christian was, `Lord Jesus! receive my spirit.' He heard that
+cry of calm faith which, when he heard it, would sound to him as
+horrible blasphemy from Stephen's dying lips. How little he
+dreamed that he himself was soon to cry to the same Jesus, `Lord,
+what wilt thou have me to do?' and was in after-days to beseech
+Him thrice for deliverance, and to be answered by sufficient
+grace. How little he dreamed that, when his own martyrdom was
+near, he too would look to Jesus as Lord and righteous Judge, from
+whose hands all who loved His appearing should receive their
+crown! Nor only Paul directs desires and adoration to Jesus as
+Lord; the last words of Scripture are a cry to Him as Lord to come
+quickly, and an invocation of His `grace' on all believing souls.
+
+Prayer to Christ from the very beginning of the Christian Church
+was, then, the characteristic of believers, and He to whom they
+prayed, thus, from the beginning, was recognised by them as being
+a Divine Person, God manifest in the flesh.
+
+The object of their worship, then, was known by the people among
+whom they lived. Singing hymns to Christus as a god is nearly all
+that the Roman proconsul in his well-known letter could find to
+tell his master of their worship. They were the worshippers---not
+merely the disciples---of one Christ. That was their peculiar
+distinction. Among the worshippers of the false gods they stood
+erect; before Him, and Him only, they bowed. In Corinth there was
+the polluted worship of Aphrodite and of Zeus. These men called
+not on the name of these lustful and stained deities, but on the
+name of the Lord Jesus Christ. And everybody knew whom they
+worshipped, and understood whose men they were. Is that true about
+us? Do we Christian men so habitually cultivate the remembrance of
+Jesus Christ, and are we so continually in the habit of invoking
+His aid, and of contemplating His blessed perfections and
+sufficiency, that every one who knew us would recognise us as
+meant by those who call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ?
+
+If this be the proper designation of Christian people, alas! alas!
+for so many of the professing Christians of this day, whom neither
+bystanders nor themselves would think of as included in such a
+name!
+
+Further, the connection here shows that the divine worship of
+Christ was universal among the churches. There was no `place'
+where it was not practised, no community calling itself a church
+to whom He was not the Lord to be invoked and adored. This witness
+to the early and universal recognition in the Christian
+communities of the divinity of our Lord is borne by an
+undisputedly genuine epistle of Paul's. It is one of the four
+which the most thorough-going destructive criticism accepts as
+genuine. It was written before the Gospels, and is a voice from
+the earlier period of Paul's apostleship. Hence the importance of
+its attestation to this fact that all Christians everywhere, both
+Jewish, who had been trained in strict monotheism, and Gentile,
+who had burned incense at many a foul shrine, were perfectly
+joined together in this, that in all their need they called on the
+name of Jesus Christ as Lord and brought to Him, as divine,
+adoration not to be rendered to any creatures. From the day of
+Pentecost onwards, a Christian was not merely a disciple, a
+follower, or an admirer, but a worshipper of Christ, the Lord.
+
+II. We may see here an unfolding of the all-sufficiency of Jesus
+Christ.
+
+Note that solemn accumulation, in the language of my text, of all
+the designations by which He is called, sometimes separately and
+sometimes unitedly, the name of `our Lord Jesus Christ.' We never
+find that full title given to Him in Scripture except when the
+writer's mind is labouring to express the manifoldness and
+completeness of our Lord's relations to men, and the largeness and
+sufficiency of the blessings which He brings. In this context I
+find in the first nine or ten verses of this chapter, so full is
+the Apostle of the thoughts of the greatness and wonderfulness of
+his dear Lord on whose name he calls, that six or seven times he
+employs this solemn, full designation.
+
+Now, if we look at the various elements of this great name we
+shall get various aspects of the way in which calling on Christ is
+the strength of our souls.
+
+`Call on the name of---the Lord.' That is the Old Testament
+Jehovah. There is no mistaking nor denying, if we candidly
+consider the evidence of the New Testament writings, that, when we
+read of Jesus Christ as `Lord,' in the vast majority of cases, the
+title is not a mere designation of human authority, but is an
+attribution to Him of divine nature and dignity. We have, then, to
+ascribe to Him, and to call on Him as possessing, all which that
+great and incommunicable Name certified and sealed to the Jewish
+Church as their possession in their God. The Jehovah of the Old
+Testament is our Lord of the New. He whose being is eternal,
+underived, self-sufficing, self-determining, knowing no variation,
+no diminution, no age, He who is because He is and that He is,
+dwells in His fulness in our Saviour. To worship Him is not to
+divert worship from the one God, nor is it to have other gods
+besides Him. Christianity is as much monotheistic as Judaism was,
+and the law of its worship is the old law---Him only shalt thou
+serve. It is the divine will that all men should honour the Son,
+even as they honour the Father.
+
+But what is it to call on the name of Jesus? That name implies all
+the sweetness of His manhood. He is our Brother. The name `Jesus'
+is one that many a Jewish boy bore in our Lord's own time and
+before it; though, afterwards, of course, abhorrence on the part
+of the Jew and reverence on the part of the Christian caused it
+almost entirely to disappear. But at the time when He bore it it
+was as undistinguished a name as Simeon, or Judas, or any other of
+His followers' names. To call upon the name of Jesus means to
+realise and bring near to ourselves, for our consolation and
+encouragement, for our strength and peace, the blessed thought of
+His manhood, so really and closely knit to ours; to grasp the
+blessedness of the thought that He knows our frame because He
+Himself has worn it, and understands and pities our weakness,
+being Himself a man. To Him whom we adore as Lord we draw near in
+tenderer, but not less humble and prostrate, adoration as our
+brother when we call on the name of the Lord Jesus, and thus
+embrace as harmonious, and not contradictory, both the divinity of
+the Lord and the humanity of Jesus.
+
+To call on the name of Christ is to embrace in our faith and to
+beseech the exercise on our behalf of all which Jesus is as the
+Messiah, anointed by God with the fulness of the Spirit. As such
+He is the climax, and therefore the close of all revelation, who
+is the long-expected fruition of the desire of weary hearts, the
+fulfilment, and therefore the abolition, of sacrifice and temple
+and priesthood and prophecy and all that witnessed for Him ere He
+came. We further call on the name of Christ the Anointed, on whom
+the whole fulness of the Divine Spirit dwelt in order that,
+calling upon Him, that fulness may in its measure be granted to
+us.
+
+So the name of the Lord Jesus Christ brings to view the divine,
+the human, the Messiah, the anointed Lord of the Spirit, and Giver
+of the divine life. To call on His name is to be blessed, to be
+made pure and strong, joyous and immortal. `The name of the Lord
+is a strong tower, the righteous runneth into it and is safe.'
+Call on His name in the day of trouble and ye shall be heard and
+helped.
+
+III. Lastly, this text suggests what a Christian life should be.
+
+We have already remarked that to call on the name of Jesus was the
+distinctive peculiarity of the early believers, which marked them
+off as a people by themselves. Would it be a true designation of
+the bulk of so-called Christians now? You do not object to profess
+yourself a Christian, or, perhaps, even to say that you are a
+disciple of Christ, or even to go the length of calling yourself a
+follower and imitator. But are you a worshipper of Him? In your
+life have you the habit of meditating on Him as Lord, as Jesus, as
+Christ, and of refreshing and gladdening dusty days and fainting
+strength by the living water, drawn from the one unfailing stream
+from these triple fountains? Is the invocation of His aid habitual
+with you?
+
+There needs no long elaborate supplication to secure His aid. How
+much has been done in the Church's history by short bursts of
+prayer, as `Lord, help me!' spoken or unspoken in the moment of
+extremity! `They cried unto God in the battle.' They would not
+have time for very lengthy petitions then, would they? They would
+not give much heed to elegant arrangement of them or suiting them
+to the canons of human eloquence. `They cried unto God in the
+battle'; whilst the enemy's swords were flashing and the arrows
+whistling about their ears. These were circumstances to make a
+prayer a `cry'; no composed and stately utterance of an elegantly
+modulated voice, nor a languid utterance without earnestness, but
+a short, sharp, loud call, such as danger presses from panting
+lungs and parched throats. Therefore the cry was answered, `and He
+was entreated of them.' `Lord, save us, we perish!' was a very
+brief prayer, but it brought its answer. And so we, in like
+manner, may go through our warfare and work, and day by day as we
+encounter sudden bursts of temptation may meet them with sudden
+jets of petition, and thus put out their fires. And the same help
+avails for long-continuing as for sudden needs. Some of us may
+have to carry lifelong burdens and to fight in a battle ever
+renewed. It may seem as if our cry was not heard, since the
+enemy's assault is not weakened, nor our power to beat it back
+perceptibly increased. But the appeal is not in vain, and when the
+fight is over, if not before, we shall know what reinforcements of
+strength to our weakness were due to our poor cry entering into
+the ears of our Lord and Brother. No other `name' is permissible
+as our plea or as recipient of our prayer. In and on the name of
+the Lord we must call, and if we do, anything is possible rather
+than that the promise which was claimed for the Church and
+referred to Jesus, in the very first Christian preaching on
+Pentecost, should not be fulfilled---`Whosoever shall call on the
+name of the Lord shall be saved.'
+
+`In every place.' We may venture to subject the words of my text
+to a little gentle pressure here. The Apostle only meant to
+express the universal characteristics of Christians everywhere.
+But we may venture to give a different turn to the words, and
+learn from them the duty of devout communion with Christ as a duty
+for each of us wherever we are. If a place is not fit to pray in
+it is not fit to be in. We may carry praying hearts, remembrances
+of the Lord, sweet, though they may be swift and short,
+contemplations of His grace, His love, His power, His sufficiency,
+His nearness, His punctual help, like a hidden light in our
+hearts, into all the dusty ways of life, and in every place call
+on His name. There is no place so dismal but that thoughts of Him
+will make sunshine in it; no work so hard, so commonplace, so
+prosaic, so uninteresting, but that it will become the opposite of
+all these if whatever we do is done in remembrance of our Lord.
+Nothing will be too hard for us to do, and nothing too bitter for
+us to swallow, and nothing too sad for us to bear, if only over
+all that befalls us and all that we undertake and endeavour we
+make the sign of the Cross and call upon the name of the Lord. If
+`in every place' we have Him as the object of our faith and
+desire, and as the Hearer of our petition, in `every place' we
+shall have Him for our help, and all will be full of His bright
+presence; and though we have to journey through the wilderness we
+shall ever drink of that spiritual rock that will follow us, and
+that Rock is Christ. In every place call upon His name, and every
+place will be a house of God, and a gate of heaven to our waiting
+souls.
+
+\chapter{Perishing or Being Saved}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS i. 18}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`For the preaching of the Cross is to them that perish
+foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of
+God.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} i. 18.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The starting-point of my remarks is the observation that a slight
+variation of rendering, which will be found in the Revised
+Version, brings out the true meaning of these words. Instead of
+reading `them that perish' and `us which are saved,' we ought to
+read `them that \textit{are perishing},' and `us which \textit{are
+being} saved.' That is to say, the Apostle represents the two
+contrasted conditions, not so much as fixed states, either present
+or future, but rather as processes which are going on, and are
+manifestly, in the present, incomplete. That opens some very
+solemn and intensely practical considerations.
+
+Then I may further note that this antithesis includes the whole of
+the persons to whom the Gospel is preached. In one or other of
+these two classes they all stand. Further, we have to observe that
+the consideration which determines the class to which men belong,
+is the attitude which they respectively take to the preaching of
+the Cross. If it be, and because it is, `foolishness' to some,
+they belong to the catalogue of the perishing. If it be, and
+because it is, `the power of God' to others, they belong to the
+class of those who are in process of being saved.
+
+So, then, we have the ground cleared for two or three very simple,
+but, as it seems to me, very important thoughts.
+
+I. I desire, first, to look at the two contrasted conditions,
+`perishing' and `being saved.'
+
+Now we shall best, I think, understand the force of the darker of
+these two terms if we first ask what is the force of the brighter
+and more radiant. If we understand what the Apostle means by
+`saving' and `salvation' we shall understand also what he means by
+`perishing.'
+
+If, then, we turn for a moment to Scripture analogy and teaching,
+we find that that threadbare word `salvation,' which we all take
+it for granted that we understand, and which, like a well-worn
+coin, has been so passed from hand to hand that it scarcely
+remains legible---that well-worn word `salvation' starts from a
+double metaphorical meaning. It means either---and is used for
+both---being healed or being made safe. In the one sense it is
+often employed in the Gospel narratives of our Lord's miracles,
+and it involves the metaphor of a sick man and his cure; in the
+other it involves the metaphor of a man in peril and his
+deliverance and security. The negative side, then, of the Gospel
+idea of salvation is the making whole from a disease, and the
+making safe from a danger. Negatively, it is the removal from each
+of us of the one sickness, which is sin; and the one danger, which
+is the reaping of the fruits and consequences of sin, in their
+variety as guilt, remorse, habit, and slavery under it, perverted
+relation to God, a fearful apprehension of penal consequences
+here, and, if there be a hereafter, there, too. The sickness of
+soul and the perils that threaten life, flow from the central fact
+of sin, and salvation consists, negatively, in the sweeping away
+of all of these, whether the sin itself, or the fatal facility
+with which we yield to it, or the desolation and perversion which
+it brings into all the faculties and susceptibilities, or the
+perversion of relation to God, and the consequent evils, here and
+hereafter, which throng around the evil-doer. The sick man is
+healed, and the man in peril is set in safety.
+
+But, besides that, there is a great deal more. The cure is
+incomplete till the full tide of health follows convalescence.
+When God saves, He does not only bar up the iron gate through
+which the hosts of evil rush out upon the defenceless soul, but He
+flings wide the golden gate through which the glad troops of
+blessings and of graces flock around the delivered spirit, and
+enrich it with all joys and with all beauties. So the positive
+side of salvation is the investiture of the saved man with
+throbbing health through all his veins, and the strength that
+comes from a divine life. It is the bestowal upon the delivered
+man of everything that he needs for blessedness and for duty. All
+good conferred, and every evil banned back into its dark den, such
+is the Christian conception of salvation. It is much that the
+negative should be accomplished, but it is little in comparison
+with the rich fulness of positive endowments, of happiness, and of
+holiness which make an integral part of the salvation of God.
+
+This, then, being the one side, what about the other? If this be
+salvation, its precise opposite is the Scriptural idea of
+`perishing.' Utter ruin lies in the word, the entire failure to be
+what God meant a man to be. That is in it, and no contortions of
+arbitrary interpretation can knock that solemn significance out of
+the dreadful expression. If salvation be the cure of the sickness,
+perishing is the fatal end of the unchecked disease. If salvation
+be the deliverance from the outstretched claws of the harpy evils
+that crowd about the trembling soul, then perishing is the fixing
+of their poisoned talons into their prey, and their rending of it
+into fragments.
+
+Of course that is metaphor, but no metaphor can be half so
+dreadful as the plain, prosaic fact that the exact opposite of the
+salvation, which consists in the healing from sin and the
+deliverance from danger, and in the endowment with all gifts good
+and beautiful, is the Christian idea of the alternative
+`perishing.' Then it means the disease running its course. It
+means the dangers laying hold of the man in peril. It means the
+withdrawal, or the non-bestowal, of all which is good, whether it
+be good of holiness or good of happiness. It does not mean, as it
+seems to me, the cessation of conscious existence, any more than
+salvation means the bestowal of conscious existence. But he who
+perishes knows that he has perished, even as he knows the process
+while he is in the process of perishing. Therefore, we have to
+think of the gradual fading away from consciousness, and dying out
+of a life, of many things beautiful and sweet and gracious, of the
+gradual increase of distance from Him, union with whom is the
+condition of true life, of the gradual sinking into the pit of
+utter ruin, of the gradual increase of that awful death in life
+and life in death in which living consciousness makes the
+conscious subject aware that he is lost; lost to God, lost to
+himself.
+
+Brethren, it is no part of my business to enlarge upon such awful
+thoughts, but the brighter the light of salvation, the darker the
+eclipse of ruin which rings it round. This, then, is the first
+contrast.
+
+II. Now note, secondly, the progressiveness of both members of the
+alternative.
+
+All states of heart or mind tend to increase, by the very fact of
+continuance. Life is a process, and every part of a spiritual
+being is in living motion and continuous action in a given
+direction. So the law for the world, and for every man in it, in
+all regions of his life, quite as much as in the religious, is `To
+him that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.'
+
+Look, then, at this thought of the process by which these two
+conditions become more and more confirmed, consolidated, and
+complete. Salvation is a progressive fact. In the New Testament we
+have that great idea looked at from three points of view.
+Sometimes it is spoken of as having been accomplished in the past
+in the case of every believing soul---`Ye have been saved' is said
+more than once. Sometimes it is spoken of as being accomplished in
+the present---`Ye are saved' is said more than once. And sometimes
+it is relegated to the future---`Now is our salvation nearer than
+when we believed,' and the like. But there are a number of New
+Testament passages which coincide with this text in regarding
+salvation as, not the work of any one moment, but as a continuous
+operation running through life, not a point either in the past,
+present, or future, but a continued life. As, for instance, `The
+Lord added to the Church daily those that were being saved.' By
+one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are being
+sanctified. And in a passage in the Second Epistle to the
+Corinthians, which, in some respects, is an exact parallel to that
+of my text, we read of the preaching of the Gospel as being a
+`savour of Christ in them that are being saved, and in them that
+are perishing.'
+
+So the process of being saved is going on as long as a Christian
+man lives in this world; and every one who professes to be
+Christ's follower ought, day by day, to be growing more and more
+saved, more fully filled with that Divine Spirit, more entirely
+the conqueror of his own lusts and passions and evil, more and
+more invested with all the gifts of holiness and of blessedness
+which Jesus Christ is ready to bestow upon him.
+
+Ah, brethren! that notion of a progressive salvation at work in all
+true Christians has all but faded away out of the beliefs, as it has
+all but disappeared from the experience, of hosts of you that call
+yourselves Christ's followers, and are not a bit further on than you
+were ten years ago; are no more healed of your corruptions (perhaps
+less so, for relapses are dangerous) than you were then---have not
+advanced any further into the depths of God than when you first got
+a glimpse of Him as loving, and your Father, in Jesus Christ---are
+contented to linger, like some weak band of invaders in a strange
+land, on the borders and coasts, instead of pressing inwards and
+making it all your own. Growing Christians---may I venture to
+say?---are not the majority of professing Christians.
+
+And, on the other side, as certainly, there are progressive
+deterioration and approximation to disintegration and ruin. How
+many men there are listening to me now who were far nearer being
+delivered from their sins when they were lads than they have ever
+been since! How many in whom the sensibility to the message of
+salvation has disappeared, in whom the world has ossified their
+consciences and their hearts, in whom there is a more entire and
+unstruggling submission to low things and selfish things and
+worldly things and wicked things, than there used to be! I am sure
+that there are not a few among us now who were far better, and far
+happier, when they were poor and young, and could still thrill
+with generous emotion and tremble at the Word of God, than they
+are to-day. Why! there are some of you that could no more bring
+back your former loftier impulses, and compunction of spirit and
+throbs of desire towards Christ and His salvation, than you could
+bring back the birds' nests or the snows of your youthful years.
+You are perishing, in the very process of going down and down into
+the dark.
+
+Now, notice, that the Apostle treats these two classes as covering
+the whole ground of the hearers of the Word, and as alternatives.
+If not in the one class we are in the other. Ah, brethren! life is
+no level plane, but a steep incline, on which there is no standing
+still, and if you try to stand still, down you go. Either up or
+down must be the motion. If you are not more of a Christian than
+you were a year ago, you are less. If you are not more saved---for
+there is a degree of comparison---if you are not more saved, you
+are less saved.
+
+Now, do not let that go over your head as pulpit thunder, meaning
+nothing. It means \textit{you}, and, whether you feel or think it
+or not, one or other of these two solemn developments is at this
+moment going on in you. And that is not a thought to be put
+lightly on one side.
+
+Further, note what a light such considerations as these, that
+salvation and perishing are vital processes---`going on all the
+time,' as the Americans say---throw upon the future. Clearly the
+two processes are incomplete here. You get the direction of the
+line, but not its natural termination. And thus a heaven and a
+hell are demanded by the phenomena of growing goodness and of
+growing badness which we see round about us. The arc of the circle
+is partially swept. Are the compasses going to stop at the point
+where the grave comes in? By no means. Round they will go, and
+will complete the circle. But that is not all. The necessity for
+progress will persist after death; and all through the duration of
+immortal being, goodness, blessedness, holiness, Godlikeness,
+will, on the one hand, grow in brighter lustre; and on the other,
+alienation from God, loss of the noble elements of the nature, and
+all the other doleful darknesses which attend that conception of a
+lost man, will increase likewise. And so, two people, sitting side
+by side here now, may start from the same level, and by the
+operation of the one principle the one may rise, and rise, and
+rise, till he is lost in God, and so finds himself, and the other
+sink, and sink, and sink, into the obscurity of woe and evil that
+lies beneath every human life as a possibility.
+
+III. And now, lastly, notice the determining attitude to the Cross
+which settles the class to which we belong.
+
+Paul, in my text, is explaining his reason for not preaching the
+Gospel with what he calls `the words of man's wisdom,' and he
+says, in effect, `It would be of no use if I did, because what
+settles whether the Cross shall look ``foolishness'' to a man or
+not is the man's whole moral condition, and what settles whether a
+man shall find it to be ``the power of God'' or not is whether he
+has passed into the region of those that are being saved.'
+
+So there are two thoughts suggested which sound as if they were
+illogically combined, but which yet are both true. It is true that
+men perish, or are saved, because the Cross is to them
+respectively `foolishness' or `the power of God'; and the other
+thing is also true, that the Cross is to them `foolishness,' or
+`the power of God' because, respectively, they are perishing or
+being saved. That is not putting the cart before the horse, but
+both aspects of the truth are true.
+
+If you see nothing in Jesus Christ, and His death for us all,
+except `foolishness,' something unfit to do you any good, and
+unnecessary to be taken into account in your lives---oh, my
+friends! \textit{that} is the condemnation of your eyes, and not
+of the thing you look at. If a man, gazing on the sun at twelve
+o'clock on a June day, says to me, `It is not bright,' the only
+thing I have to say to him is, `Friend, you had better go to an
+oculist.' And if to us the Cross is `foolishness,' it is because
+already a process of `perishing' has gone so far that it has
+attacked our capacity of recognising the wisdom and love of God
+when we see them.
+
+But, on the other hand, if we clasp that Cross in simple trust, we
+find that it is the power which saves us out of all sins, sorrows,
+and dangers, and `shall save us' at last `into His heavenly
+kingdom.'
+
+Dear friends, that message leaves no man exactly as it found him. My
+words, I feel, in this sermon, have been very poor, set by the side
+of the greatness of the theme; but, poor as they have been, you will
+not be exactly the same man after them, if you have listened to
+them, as you were before. The difference may be very imperceptible,
+but it will be real. One more, almost invisible, film, over the
+eyeball; one more thin layer of wax in the ear; one more fold of
+insensibility round heart and conscience---or else some yielding to
+the love; some finger put out to take the salvation; some lightening
+of the pressure of the sickness; some removal of the peril and the
+danger. The same sun hurts diseased eyes, and gladdens sound ones.
+The same fire melts wax and hardens clay. `This Child is set for the
+rise and fall of many in Israel.' `To the one He is the savour of
+life unto life; to the other He is the savour of death unto death.'
+\textit{Which} is He, for He \emph{is} one of them, to you?
+
+\chapter{The Apostle's Theme}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS ii. 2}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ,
+and Him crucified.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} ii. 2.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+Many of you are aware that to-day I close forty years of ministry
+in this city---I cannot say to this congregation, for there are
+very, very few that can go back with me in memory to the beginning
+of these years. You will bear me witness that I seldom intrude
+personal references into the pulpit, but perhaps it would be
+affectation not to do so now. Looking back over these long years,
+many thoughts arise which cannot be spoken in public. But one
+thing I may say, and that is, that I am grateful to God and to
+you, dear friends, for the unbroken harmony, confidence,
+affection, and forbearance which have brightened and lightened my
+work. Of its worth I cannot judge; its imperfections I know better
+than the most unfavourable critic; but I can humbly take the words
+of this text as expressive, not, indeed, of my attainments, but of
+my aims. One of my texts, on my first Sunday in Manchester, was
+`We preach Christ and Him crucified,' and I look back, and venture
+to say that the noble words of this text have been, however
+imperfectly followed, my guiding star.
+
+Now, I wish to say a word or two, less personal perhaps, and yet,
+as you can well suppose, not without a personal reference in my
+own consciousness.
+
+I. Note here first, then, the Apostolic theme---Jesus Christ and
+Him crucified.
+
+Now, the Apostle, in this context, gives us a little
+autobiographical glimpse which is singularly and interestingly
+confirmed by some slight incidental notices in the Book of the
+Acts. He says, in the context, that he was with the Corinthians
+`in weakness and in fear and in much trembling,' and, if we turn
+to the narrative, we find that a singular period of silence,
+apparent abandonment of his work and dejection, seems to have
+synchronised with his coming to the great city of Corinth. The
+reasons were very plain. He had recently come into Europe for the
+first time and had had to front a new condition of things, very
+different from what he had found in Palestine or in Asia Minor.
+His experience had not been encouraging. He had been imprisoned in
+Philippi; he had been smuggled away by night from Thessalonica; he
+had been hounded from Berea; he had all but wholly failed to make
+any impression in Athens, and in his solitude he came to Corinth,
+and lay quiet, and took stock of his adversaries. He came to the
+conclusion which he records in my text; he felt that it was not
+for him to argue with philosophers, or to attempt to vie with
+Sophists and professional orators, but that his only way to meet
+Greek civilisation, Greek philosophy, Greek eloquence, Greek
+self-conceit, was to preach `Christ and Him crucified.' The
+determination was not come to in ignorance of the conditions that
+were fronting him. He knew Corinth, its wealth, its wickedness,
+its culture, and knowing these he said, `I have made up my mind
+that I will know nothing amongst you save Jesus Christ and Him
+crucified.'
+
+So, then, this Apostle's conception of his theme was---the
+biography of a Man, with especial emphasis laid on one act in His
+history---His death. Christianity is Christ, and Christ is
+Christianity. His relation to the truth that He proclaimed, and to
+the truths that may be deducible from the story of His life and
+death, is altogether different from the relation of any other
+founder of a religion to the truths that he has proclaimed. For in
+these you can accept the teaching, and ignore the teacher. But you
+cannot do that with Christianity; `I am the Way, and the Truth,
+and the Life'; and in that revealing biography, which is the
+preacher's theme, the palpitating heart and centre is the death
+upon the Cross. So, whatever else Christianity comes to be---and
+it comes to be a great deal else---the principle of its growth,
+and the germ which must vitalise the whole, lie in the personality
+and the death of Jesus Christ.
+
+That is not all. The history of the life and the death want
+something more to make them a gospel. The fact, I was going to
+say, is the least part of the fact; as in some vegetable growths,
+there is far more underground than above. For, unless along with,
+involved in, and deducible from, but capable of being stated
+separately from, the external facts, there is a certain commentary
+or explanation of them: the history is a history, the biography is
+a biography, the story of the Cross is a touching narrative, but
+it is no gospel.
+
+And what was Paul's commentary which lifted the bare facts up into
+the loftier region? This---as for the person, Jesus Christ
+`declared to be the son of God with power'---as for the fact of
+the death, `died for our sins according to the Scriptures.' Let in
+these two conceptions into the facts---and they are the necessary
+explanation and presupposition of the facts---the Incarnation and
+the Sacrifice, and then you get what Paul calls `my gospel,' not
+because it was his invention, but because it was the trust
+committed to him. That is the Gospel which alone answers to the
+facts which he deals with; and that is the Gospel which, God
+helping me, I have for forty years tried to preach.
+
+We hear a great deal at present, or we did a few years ago, about
+this generation having recovered Jesus Christ, and about the
+necessity of going `back to the Christ of the Gospels.' By all
+means, I say, if in the process you do not lose the Christ of the
+Epistles, who is the Christ of the Gospels, too. I am free to
+admit that a past generation has wrapped theological cobwebs round
+the gracious figure of Christ with disastrous results. For it is
+perfectly possible to know the things that are said about Him, and
+not to know Him about whom these things are said. But the mistake
+into which the present generation is far more likely to fall than
+that of substituting theology for Christ, is the converse
+one---that of substituting an undefined Christ for the Christ of
+the Gospels and the Epistles, the Incarnate Son of God, who died
+for our salvation. And that is a more disastrous mistake than the
+other, for you can know nothing about Him and He can be nothing to
+you, except as you grasp the Apostolic explanation of the bare
+facts---seeing in Him the Word who became flesh, the Son who died
+that we might receive the adoption of sons.
+
+I would further point out that a clear conception of what the theme
+is, goes a long way to determine the method in which it shall be
+proclaimed. The Apostle says, in the passage which is parallel to
+the present one, in the previous chapter, `We preach Christ
+crucified'; with strong emphasis on the word `preach.' `The Jew
+required a sign'; he wanted a man who would do something. The Greek
+sought after wisdom; he wanted a man who would perorate and argue
+and dissertate. Paul says, `No!' `We have nothing to \textit{do}. We
+do not come to philosophise and to argue. We come with a message of
+fact that has occurred, of a Person that has lived.' And, as most of
+you know, the word which he uses means in its full signification,
+`to proclaim as a herald does.'
+
+Of course, if my business were to establish a set of principles,
+theological or otherwise, then argumentation would be my weapon,
+proofs would be my means, and my success would be that I should
+win your credence, your intellectual consent, and conviction. If I
+were here to proclaim simply a morality, then the thing that I
+would aim to secure would be obedience, and the method of securing
+it would be to enforce the authority and reasonableness of the
+command. But, seeing that my task is to proclaim a living Person
+and a historical fact, then the way to do that is to do as the
+herald does when in the market-place he stands, trumpet in one
+hand and the King's message in the other---proclaim it loudly,
+confidently, not `with bated breath and whispering humbleness,' as
+if apologising, nor too much concerned to buttress it up with
+argumentation out of his own head, but to say, `Thus saith the
+Lord,' and to what the Lord saith conscience says, `Amen.'
+Brethren, we need far more, in all our pulpits, of that
+unhesitating confidence in the plain, simple proclamation,
+stripped, as far as possible, of human additions and accretions,
+of the great fact and the great Person on whom all our salvation
+depends.
+
+II. So let me ask you to notice the exclusiveness which this theme
+demands.
+
+`Nothing but,' says Paul. I might venture to say---though perhaps
+the tone of the personal allusions in this sermon may seem to
+contradict it---that this exclusiveness is to be manifested in one
+very difficult direction, and that that is, the herald shall
+efface himself. We have to hold up the picture; and if I might
+take such a metaphor, like a man in a gallery who is displaying
+some masterpiece to the eyes of the beholders, we have to keep
+ourselves well behind it; and it will be wise if not even a
+finger-tip is allowed to steal in front and come into sight. One
+condition, I believe, of real power in the ministration of the
+Gospel, is that people shall be convinced that the preacher is
+thinking not at all about himself, but altogether about his
+message. You remember that wonderfully pathetic utterance from
+John the Baptist's stern lips, which derives much additional
+pathos and tenderness from the character of the man from whom it
+came, when they asked him, `Who art thou?' and his answer was, `I
+am a Voice.' I am a Voice; that is all! Ah, that is the example!
+We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord. We must efface
+ourselves if we would proclaim Christ.
+
+But I turn to another direction in which this theme demands
+exclusiveness, and I revert to the previous chapter where in the
+parallel portion to the words of my text, we find the Apostle very
+clearly conscious of the two great streams of expectation and wish
+which he deliberately thwarted and set at nought. `The Jews
+require a sign---but we preach Christ crucified. The Greeks seek
+after wisdom,' but again, `we preach Christ crucified.' Now, take
+these two. They are representations, in a very emphatic way, of
+two sets of desires and mental characteristics, which divide the
+world between them.
+
+On the one hand, there is the sensuous tendency that wants
+something done for it, something to see, something that sense can
+grasp at; and so, as it fancies, work itself upwards into a higher
+region. `The Jew requires a sign'---that is, not merely a miracle,
+but something to look at. He wants a visible sacrifice; he wants a
+priest. He wants religion to consist largely in the doing of
+certain acts which may be supposed to bring, in some magical
+fashion, spiritual blessings. And Paul opposes to that, `We preach
+Christ crucified.' Brethren, the tendency is strong to-day, not
+only in those parts of the Anglican communion where sacramentarian
+theories are in favour, but amongst all sections of the Christian
+Church, in which there is obvious a drift towards more ornate
+ritual, and aesthetic services, as means of attracting to church
+or chapel, and as more important than proclaiming Christ. I am
+free to confess that possibly some of us, with our Puritan
+upbringing and tendency, too much disregard that side of human
+nature. Possibly it is so. But for all that I profoundly believe
+that if religion is to be strong it must have a very, very small
+infusion of these external aids to spiritual worship, and that few
+things more weaken the power of the Gospel that Paul preached than
+the lowering of the flag in conformity with desires of men of
+sense, and substituting for the simple glory of the preached Word
+the meretricious, and in time impotent, and always corrupting,
+attractions of a sensuous worship.
+
+Further, `The Greeks seek after wisdom.' They wanted
+demonstration, abstract principles, systematised philosophies, and
+the like. Paul comes again with his `We preach Christ and Him
+crucified.' The wisdom is there, as I shall have to say in a
+moment, but the form that it takes is directly antagonistic to the
+wishes of these wisdom-seeking Greeks. The same thing in modern
+guise besets us to-day. We are called upon, on all sides, to bring
+into the pulpit what they call an ethical gospel; putting it into
+plain English, to preach morality, and to leave out Christ. We are
+called upon, on all sides, to preach an applied Christianity, a
+social gospel---that is to say, largely to turn the pulpit into a
+Sunday supplement to the daily newspaper. We are asked to deal
+with the intellectual difficulties which spring from the collision
+of science, true or false, with religion, and the like. All that
+is right enough. But I believe from my heart that the thing to do
+is to copy Paul's example, and to preach Christ and Him crucified.
+You may think me right or you may think me wrong, but here and
+now, at the end of forty years, I should like to say that I have
+for the most part ignored that class of subjects deliberately, and
+of set purpose, and with a profound conviction, be it erroneous or
+not, that a ministry which listens much to the cry for `wisdom' in
+its modern forms, has departed from the true perspective of
+Christian teaching, and will weaken the churches which depend upon
+it. Let who will turn the pulpit into a professor's chair, or a
+lecturer's platform, or a concert-room stage or a politician's
+rostrum, I for one determine to know nothing among you save Jesus
+Christ and Him crucified.
+
+III. Lastly, observe the all-sufficient comprehensiveness which
+this theme secures.
+
+Paul says `nothing but'; he might have said `everything in.' For
+`Jesus Christ and Him crucified' covers all the ground of men's
+needs. No doubt many of you will have been saying to yourselves
+whilst you have been listening, if you have been listening, to
+what I have been saying, `Ah! old-fashioned narrowness; quite out
+of date in this generation.' Brethren, there are two ways of
+adapting one's ministry to the times. One is falling in with the
+requirements of the times, and the other is going dead against
+them, and both of these methods have to be pursued by us.
+
+But the exclusiveness of which I have been speaking, is no narrow
+exclusiveness. Paul felt that, if he was to give the Corinthians
+what they needed, he must refuse to give them what they wanted,
+and that whilst he crossed their wishes he was consulting their
+necessities. That is true yet, for the preaching that bases itself
+upon the life and death of Jesus Christ, conceived as Paul had
+learned from Jesus Christ to conceive them, that Gospel, whilst it
+brushes aside men's superficial wishes, goes straight to the heart
+of their deep-lying universal necessities, for what the Jew needs
+most is not a sign, and what the Greek needs most is not wisdom,
+but what they both need most is deliverance from the guilt and
+power of sin. And we all, scholars and fools, poets and
+common-place people, artists and ploughmen, all of us, in all
+conditions of life, in all varieties of culture, in all stages of
+intellectual development, in all diversities of occupation and of
+mental bias, what we all have in common is that human heart in
+which sin abides, and what we all need most to have is that evil
+drop squeezed out of it, and our souls delivered from the burden
+and the bondage. Therefore, any man that comes with a sign, and
+does not deal with the sin of the human heart, and any man that
+comes with a philosophical system of wisdom, and does not deal
+with sin, does not bring a Gospel that will meet the necessities
+even of the people to whose cravings he has been aiming to adapt
+his message.
+
+But, beyond that, in this message of Christ and Him crucified,
+there lies in germ the satisfaction of all that is legitimate in
+these desires that at first sight it seems to thwart. `A sign?'
+Yes, and where is there power like the power that dwells in Him
+who is the Incarnate might of omnipotence? `Wisdom?' Yes, and
+where is there wisdom, except `in Him in whom are hid all the
+treasures of wisdom and knowledge'? Let the Jew come to the Cross,
+and in the weak Man hanging there, he will find a mightier
+revelation of the power of God than anywhere else. Let the Greek
+come to the Cross, and there he will find wisdom and
+righteousness, sanctification and redemption. The bases of all
+social, economical, political reform and well-being, lie in the
+understanding and the application to social and national life, of
+the principles that are wrapped in, and are deduced from, the
+Incarnation and the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We have not learned
+them all yet. They have not all been applied to national and
+individual life yet. I plead for no narrow exclusiveness, but for
+one consistent with the widest application of Christian principles
+to all life. Paul determined to know nothing but Jesus, and to
+know everything in Jesus, and Jesus in everything. Do not begin
+your building at the second-floor windows. Put in your foundations
+first, and be sure that they are well laid. Let the Sacrifice of
+Christ, in its application to the individual and his sins, be ever
+the basis of all that you say. And then, when that foundation is
+laid, exhibit, to your heart's content, the applications of
+Christianity and its social aspects. But be sure that the
+beginning of them all is the work of Christ for the individual
+sinful soul, and the acceptance of that work by personal faith.
+
+Dear friends, ours has been a long and happy union but it is a
+very solemn one. My responsibilities are great; yours are not
+small. Let me beseech you to ask yourselves if, with all your
+kindness to the messenger, you have given heed to the message.
+Have you passed beyond the voice that speaks, to Him of whom it
+speaks? Have you taken the truth---veiled and weakened as I know
+it has been by my words, but yet in them---for what it is, the
+word of the living God? My occupancy of this pulpit must in the
+nature of things, before long, come to a close, but the message
+which I have brought to you will survive all changes in the voice
+that speaks here. `All flesh is grass ... the Word of the Lord
+endureth for ever.' And, closing these forty years, during a long
+part of which some of you have listened most lovingly and most
+forbearingly, I leave with you this, which I venture to quote,
+though it is my Master's word about Himself, `I judge you not; the
+word which I have spoken unto you, the same shall judge you in the
+last day.'
+
+\chapter{God's Fellow-workers}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS iii. 9}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Labourers together with God.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} iii. 9.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The characteristic Greek tendency to factions was threatening to
+rend the Corinthian Church, and each faction was swearing by a
+favourite teacher. Paul and his companion, Apollos, had been taken
+as the figureheads of two of these parties, and so he sets himself
+in the context, first of all to show that neither of the two was
+of any real importance in regard to the Church's life. They were
+like a couple of gardeners, one of whom did the planting, and the
+other the watering; but neither the man that put the little plant
+into the ground, nor the man that came after him with a
+watering-pot, had anything to do with originating the mystery of
+the life by which the plant grew. That was God's work, and the
+pair that had planted and watered were nothing. So what was the
+use of fighting which of two nothings was the greater?
+
+But then he bethinks himself that that is not quite all. The man
+that plants and the man that waters are something after all. They
+do not communicate life, but they do provide for its nourishment.
+And more than that, the two operations---that of the man with the
+dibble and that of the man with the watering-pot---are one in
+issue; and so they are partners, and in some respects may be
+regarded as one. Then what is the sense of pitting them against
+each other?
+
+But even that is not quite all; though united in operation, they
+are separate in responsibility and activity, and will be separate
+in reward. And even that is not all; for, being nothing and yet
+something, being united and yet separate, they are taken into
+participation and co-operation with God; and as my text puts it,
+in what is almost a presumptuous phrase, they are `labourers
+together with Him.' That partnership of co-operation is not merely
+a partnership of the two, but it is a partnership of the
+three---God and the two who, in some senses, are one.
+
+Now whilst this text is primarily spoken in regard to the
+apostolic and evangelistic work of these early teachers, the
+principle which it embodies is a very wide one, and it applies in
+all regions of life and activity, intellectual, scholastic,
+philanthropic, social. Where-ever men are thinking God's thoughts
+and trying to carry into effect any phase or side of God's
+manifold purposes of good and blessing to the world, there it is
+true. We claim no special or exclusive prerogative for the
+Christian teacher. Every man that is trying to make men understand
+God's thought, whether it is expressed in creation, or whether it
+is written in history, or whether it is carven in half-obliterated
+letters on the constitution of human nature, every man who, in any
+region of society or life, is seeking to effect the great designs
+of the universal loving Father---can take to himself, in the
+measure and according to the manner of his special activity, the
+great encouragement of my text, and feel that he, too, in his
+little way, is a fellow-helper to the truth and a fellow-worker
+with God. But then, of course, according to New Testament
+teaching, and according to the realities of the case, the highest
+form in which men thus can co-operate with God, and carry into
+effect His purposes is that in which men devote themselves, either
+directly or indirectly, to spreading throughout the whole world
+the name and the power of the Saviour Jesus Christ, in whom all
+God's will is gathered, and through whom all God's blessings are
+communicated to mankind. So the thought of my text comes
+appropriately when I have to bring before you the claims of our
+missionary operations.
+
+Now, the first way in which I desire to look at this great idea
+expressed in these words, is that we find in it
+
+I. A solemn thought.
+
+`Labourers together with God.' Cannot He do it all Himself? No.
+God needs men to carry out His purposes. True, on the Cross, Jesus
+spoke the triumphant word, `It is finished!' He did not thereby
+simply mean that He had completed all His suffering; but He meant
+that He had then done all which the world needed to have done in
+order that it should be a redeemed world. But for the distribution
+and application of that finished work God depends on men. You all
+know, in your own daily businesses, how there must be a middleman
+between the mill and the consumer. The question of organising a
+distributing agency is quite as important as any other part of the
+manufacturer's business. The great reservoir is full, but there
+has to be a system of irrigating-channels by which the water is
+carried into every corner of the field that is to be watered.
+Christian men individually, and the Church collectively,
+supply---may I call it the missing link?---between a redeeming
+Saviour and the world which He has redeemed in act, but which is
+not actually redeemed, until it has received the message of the
+great Redemption that is wrought. The supernatural is implanted in
+the very heart of the mass of leaven by the Incarnation and
+Sacrifice of Jesus Christ; but the spreading of that supernatural
+revelation is left in the hands of men who work through natural
+processes, and who thus become labourers together with God, and
+enable Christ to be to single souls, in blessed reality, what He
+is potentially to the world, and has been ever since. He died upon
+the Cross. `It is finished.' Yes---because it is finished, our
+work begins.
+
+Let me remind you of the profound symbolism in that incident where
+our Lord for once appeared conspicuously, and almost
+ostentatiously, before Israel as its true King. He had need---as
+He Himself said---of the meek beast on which He rode. He cannot
+pass, in His coronation procession, through the world unless He
+has us, by whom He may be carried into every corner of the earth.
+So `the Lord has need' of us, and we are `fellow-labourers with
+Him.'
+
+But this same thought suggests another point. We have here a
+solemn call addressed to every Christian man and woman.
+
+Do not let us run away with the idea that, because here the Apostle
+is speaking in regard to himself and Apollos, he is enunciating a
+truth which applies only to Apostles and evangelists. It is true of
+all Christians. My knowledge of and faith in Jesus Christ as my own
+personal Saviour impose upon me the obligation, in so far as my
+opportunities and capacities extend, thus to co-operate with Him in
+spreading His great Name. Every Christian man, just because he is a
+Christian, is invested with the power---and power to its last
+particle is duty---and is, therefore, burdened with the honourable
+obligation to work for God. There is such a thing as `coming to the
+help of the Lord,' though that phrase seems to reverse altogether
+the true relation. It is the duty of every Christian, partly because
+of loyalty to Jesus, and partly because of the responsibility which
+the very constitution of society lays upon every one of us, to
+diffuse what he possesses, and to be a distributing agent for the
+life that he himself enjoys. Brethren! there is no possibility of
+Christian men or women being fully faithful to the Saviour, unless
+they recognise that the duty of being a fellow-labourer with God
+inevitably follows on being a possessor of Christ's salvation; and
+that no Apostle, no official, no minister, no missionary, has any
+more necessity laid upon him to preach the Gospel, nor pulls down
+any heavier woe on himself if he is unfaithful, than has and does
+each one of Christ's servants.
+
+So `we are fellow-labourers with God.' Alas! alas! how poorly the
+average Christian realises---I do not say discharges, but
+realises---that obligation! Brethren, I do not wish to find fault,
+but I do beseech you to ask yourselves whether, if you are
+Christians, you are doing anything the least like what my text
+contemplates as the duty of all Christians.
+
+May I say a word or two with regard to another aspect of this
+solemn call? Does not the thought of working along with God
+prescribe for us the sort of work that we ought to do? We ought to
+work in God's fashion, and if we wish to know what God's fashion
+is, we have but to look at Jesus Christ. We ought to work in Jesus
+Christ's fashion. We all know what that involved of
+self-sacrifice, of pain, of weariness, of utter self-oblivious
+devotion, of gentleness, of tenderness, of infinite pity, of love
+running over. `The master's eye makes a good servant.' The
+Master's hand working along with the servant ought to make the
+servant work after the Master's fashion. `As My Father hath sent
+Me, so send I you.' If we felt that side by side with us, like two
+sailors hauling on one rope, `the Servant of the Lord' was
+toiling, do you not think it would burn up all our selfishness,
+and light up all our indifference, and make us spend ourselves in
+His service? A fellow-labourer with God will surely never be lazy
+and selfish. Thus my text has in it, to begin with, a solemn call.
+
+It suggests
+
+II. A signal honour.
+
+Suppose a great painter, a Raphael or a Turner, taking a little
+boy that cleaned his brushes, and saying to him, `Come into my
+studio, and I will let you do a bit of work upon my picture.'
+Suppose an aspirant, an apprentice in any walk of life, honoured
+by being permitted to work along with some one who was recognised
+all over the world as being at the very top of that special
+profession. Would it not be a feather in the boy's cap all his
+life? And would he not think it the greatest honour that ever had
+been done him that he was allowed to co-operate, in however
+inferior a fashion, with such an one? Jesus Christ says to us,
+`Come and work here side by side with Me,' But Christian men,
+plenty of them, answer, `It is a perpetual nuisance, this
+continual application for money! money! money! work! work! work!
+It is never-ending, and it is a burden!' Yes, it is a burden, just
+because it is an honour. Do you know that the Hebrew word which
+means `glory' literally means `weight'? There is a great truth in
+that. You cannot get true honours unless you are prepared to carry
+them as burdens. And the highest honour that Jesus Christ gives to
+men when He says to them, not only `Go work to-day in My
+vineyard,' but `Come, work here side by side with Me,' is a heavy
+weight which can only be lightened by a cheerful heart.
+
+Is it not the right way to look at all the various forms of
+Christian activity which are made imperative upon Christian
+people, by their possession of Christianity as being tokens of
+Christ's love to us? Do you remember that this same Apostle said,
+`Unto me who am less than the least of all saints is this grace
+given, that I should preach the unsearchable riches of Christ?' He
+could speak about burdens and heavy tasks, and being `persecuted
+but not forsaken,' almost crushed down and yet not in despair, and
+about the weights that came upon him daily, `the care of all the
+churches,' but far beneath all the sense of his heavy load lay the
+thrill of thankful wonder that to him, of all men in the world,
+knowing as he did better than anybody else could do his own
+imperfection and insufficiency, this distinguishing honour had
+been bestowed, that he was made the Apostle to the Gentiles. That
+is the way in which the true man will always look at what the
+selfish man, and the half-and-half Christian, look at as being a
+weight and a weariness, or a disagreeable duty, which is to be
+done as perfunctorily as possible. One question that a great many
+who call themselves Christians ask is, `With how little service
+can I pass muster?' Ah, it is because we have so little of the
+Spirit of Christ in us that we feel burdened by His command, `Go
+ye into all the world,' as being so heavy; and that so many of
+us---I leave you to judge if you are in the class---so many of us
+make it criminally light if we do not ignore it altogether. I
+believe that, if it were possible to conceive of the duty and
+privilege of spreading Christ's name in the world being withdrawn
+from the Church, all His real servants would soon be yearning to
+have it back again. It is a token of His love; it is a source of
+infinite blessings to ourselves; `if the house be not worthy, your
+peace shall return to you again.'
+
+And now, lastly, we have suggested by this text
+
+III. A strong encouragement.
+
+`Fellow-labourers with God'---then, God is a Fellow-labourer with
+us. The co-operation works both ways, and no man who is seeking to
+spread that great salvation, to distribute that great wealth, to
+irrigate some little corner of the field by some little channel
+that he has dug, needs to feel that he is labouring alone. If I am
+working with God, God is working with me. Do you remember that
+most striking picture which is drawn in the verses appended to
+Mark's Gospel, which tells how the universe seemed parted into two
+halves, and up above in the serene the Lord `sat on the right hand
+of God,' while below, in the murky and obscure, `they went
+everywhere preaching the Word.' The separation seems complete, but
+the two halves are brought together by the next word---`The Lord
+also,' sitting up yonder, `working with them' the wandering
+preachers down here, `confirming the words with signs following.'
+Ascended on high, entered into His rest, having finished His work,
+He yet is working with us, if we are labourers together with God.
+If we turn to the last book of Scripture, which draws back the
+curtain from the invisible world which is all filled with the
+glorified Christ, and shows its relations to the earthly militant
+church, we read no longer of a Christ enthroned in apparent ease,
+but of a Christ walking amidst the candlesticks, and of a Lamb
+standing in the midst of the Throne, and opening the seals,
+launching forth into the world the sequences of the world's
+history, and of the Word of God charging His enemies on His white
+horse, and behind Him the armies of God following. The workers who
+labour with God have the ascended Christ labouring with them.
+
+But if God works with us, success is sure. Then comes the old
+question that Gideon asked with bitterness of heart, when he was
+threshing out his handful of wheat in a corner to avoid the
+oppressors, `If the Lord be with us, wherefore is all this come
+upon us? Will any one say that the progress of the Gospel in the
+world has been at the rate which its early believers expected, or
+at the rate which its own powers warranted them to expect?
+Certainly not. And so it comes to this, that whilst every true
+labourer has God working with him, and therefore success is
+certain, the planter and the waterer can delay the growth of the
+plant by their unfaithfulness, by not expecting success, by not so
+working as to make it likely, or by neutralising their
+evangelistic efforts by their worldly lives. When Jesus Christ was
+on earth, it is recorded, `He could there do no mighty works
+because of their unbelief, save that He laid His hands on a few
+sick folk and healed them.' A faithless Church, a worldly Church,
+a lazy Church, an unspiritual Church, an un-Christlike
+Church---which, to a large extent, is the designation of the
+so-called Church of to day---can clog His chariot-wheels, can
+thwart the work, can hamper the Divine Worker. If the Christians
+of Manchester were revived, they could win Manchester for Jesus.
+If the Christians of England lived their Christianity, they could
+make England what it never has been but in name---a Christian
+country. If the Church universal were revived, it could win the
+world. If the single labourer, or the community of such, is
+labouring `in the Lord,' their labour will not be in vain; and if
+they thus plant and water, God will give the increase.
+
+\chapter{The Testing Fire}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS iii. 12, 13}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious
+stones, wood, hay, stubble: 13.\ Every man's work shall be made
+manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be
+revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what
+sort it is.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} iii. 12, 13.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+Before I enter upon the ideas which the words suggest, my
+exegetical conscience binds me to point out that the original
+application of the text is not exactly that which I purpose to
+make of it now. The context shows that the Apostle is thinking
+about the special subject of Christian teachers and their work,
+and that the builders of whom he speaks are the men in the
+Corinthian Church, some of them his allies and some of them his
+rivals, who were superimposing upon the foundation of the
+preaching of Jesus Christ other doctrines and principles. The
+`wood, hay, stubble' are the vapid and trivial doctrines which the
+false teachers were introducing into the Church. The `gold,
+silver, and precious stones' are the solid and substantial
+verities which Paul and his friends were proclaiming. And it is
+about these, and not about the Christian life in the general, that
+the tremendous metaphors of my text are uttered.
+
+But whilst that is true, the principles involved have a much wider
+range than the one case to which the Apostle applies them. And,
+though I may be slightly deflecting the text from its original
+direction, I am not doing violence to it, if I take it as declaring
+some very plain and solemn truths applicable to all Christian
+people, in their task of building up a life and character on the
+foundation of Jesus Christ; truths which are a great deal too much
+forgotten in our modern popular Christianity, and which it concerns
+us all very clearly to keep in view. There are three things here
+that I wish to say a word about---the patchwork building, the
+testing fire, the fate of the builders.
+
+I. First, the patchwork structure.
+
+`If any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious
+stones, wood, hay, stubble.' In the original application of the
+metaphor, Paul is thinking of all these teachers in that church at
+Corinth as being engaged in building the one structure---I venture
+to deflect here, and to regard each of us as rearing our own
+structure of life and character on the foundation of the preached
+and accepted Christ.
+
+Now, what the Apostle says is that these builders were, some of
+them, laying valuable things like gold and silver and costly
+stones---by which he does not mean jewels, but marbles,
+alabasters, polished porphyry or granite, and the like; sumptuous
+building materials, which were employed in great palaces or
+temples---and that some of them were bringing timber, hay,
+stubble, reeds gathered from the marshes or the like, and filling
+in with such trash as that. That is a picture of what a great many
+Christian people are doing in their own lives---the same man
+building one course of squared and solid and precious stones, and
+topping them with rubbish. You will see in the walls of Jerusalem,
+at the base, five or six courses of those massive blocks which are
+the wonders of the world yet; well jointed, well laid, well
+cemented, and then on the top of them a mass of poor stuff, heaped
+together anyhow; scamped work---may I use a modern
+vulgarism?---`jerry-building.' You may go to some modern village,
+on an ancient historic site, and you will find built into the mud
+walls of the hovels in which the people are living, a marble slab
+with fair carving on it, or the drum of a great column of veined
+marble, and on the top of that, timber and clay mixed together.
+
+That is the type of the sort of life that hosts of Christian
+people are living. For, mark, all the builders are on the
+foundation. Paul is not speaking about mere professed Christians
+who had no faith at all in them, and no real union with Jesus
+Christ. These builders were `on the foundation'; they were
+building on the foundation, there was a principle deep down in
+their lives---which really lay at the bottom of their lives---and
+yet had not come to such dominating power as to mould and purify
+and make harmonious with itself the life that was reared upon it.
+We all know that that is the condition of many men, that they have
+what really are the fundamental bases of their lives, in belief
+and aim and direction; and which yet are not strong enough to
+master the whole of the life, and to manifest themselves through
+it. Especially it is the condition of some Christian people. They
+have a real faith, but it is of the feeblest and most rudimentary
+kind. They are on the foundation, but their lives are interlaced
+with the most heterogeneous mixty-maxty of good and evil, of
+lofty, high, self-sacrificing thoughts and heavenward aspirations,
+of resolutions never carried out into practice; and side by side
+with these there shall be meannesses, selfishnesses, tempers,
+dispositions all contradictory of the former impulses. One moment
+they are all fire and love, the next moment ice and selfishness.
+One day they are all for God, the next day all for the world, the
+flesh, and the devil. Jacob sees the open heavens and the face of
+God and vows; to-morrow he meets Laban and drops to shifty ways.
+Peter leaves all and follows his Master, and in a little while the
+fervour has gone, and the fire has died down into grey ashes, and
+a flippant servant-girl's tongue leads him to say `I know not the
+man.' `Gold, silver, precious stones,' and topping them, `wood,
+hay, stubble!'
+
+The inconsistencies of the Christian life are what my text, in the
+application that I am venturing to make of it, suggests to us. Ah,
+dear friends! we do not need to go to Jacob and Peter; let us look
+at our own hearts, and if we will honestly examine one day of our
+lives, I think we shall understand how it is possible for a man,
+on the foundation, yet to build upon it these worthless and
+combustible things, `wood, hay, stubble.'
+
+We are not to suppose that one man builds \textit{only} `gold,
+silver, precious stones.' There is none of us that does that. And
+we are not to suppose that any man who \textit{is} on the
+foundations has so little grasp of it, as that he builds
+\textit{only} `wood, hay, stubble.'
+
+There is none of us who has not intermingled his building, and
+there is none of us, if we are Christians at all, who has not
+sometimes laid a course of `precious stones.' If your faith is
+doing \textit{nothing} for you except bringing to you a belief
+that you are not going to hell when you die, then it is no faith
+at all. `Faith without works is dead.' So there is a mingling in
+the best, and---thank God!---there is a mingling of good with
+evil, in the worst of real Christian people.
+
+II. Note here, the testing fire.
+
+Paul points to two things, the day and the fire.
+
+`The day shall declare it,' that is the day on which Jesus Christ
+comes to be the Judge; and it, that is `the day,' `shall be
+revealed in fire; and the fire shall test every man's work.' Now,
+it is to be noticed that here we are moving altogether in the
+region of lofty symbolism, and that the metaphor of the testing
+fire is suggested by the previous enumeration of building
+materials, gold and silver being capable of being assayed by
+flame; and `wood, hay, stubble' being combustible, and sure to be
+destroyed thereby. The fire here is not an emblem of punishment;
+it is not an emblem of cleansing. There is no reference to
+anything in the nature of what Roman Catholics call purgatorial
+fires. The allusion is simply to some stringent and searching
+means of testing the quality of a man's work, and of revealing
+that quality.
+
+So then, we come just to this, that for people `on the
+foundation,' there is a Day of revelation and testing of their
+life's work. It is a great misfortune that so-called Evangelical
+Christianity does not say as much as the New Testament says about
+the judgment that is to be passed on `the house of God.' People
+seem to think that the great doctrine of salvation, `not by works
+of righteousness which we have done, but by His mercy,' is,
+somehow or other, interfered with when we proclaim, as Paul
+proclaims, speaking to Christian people, `We must be manifested
+before the judgment seat of Christ,' and declares that `Every man
+will receive the things done in his body, according to that he has
+done, whether it be good or bad.' Paul saw no contradiction, and
+there is no contradiction. But a great many professing Christians
+seem to think that the great blessing of their salvation by faith
+is, that they are exempt from that future revelation and testing
+and judgment of their acts. That is not the New Testament
+teaching. But, on the contrary, `Whatsoever a man soweth that
+shall he also reap,' was originally said to a church of Christian
+people. And here we come full front against that solemn truth,
+that the Lord will `gather together His saints, those that have
+made a covenant with Him by sacrifice, that He may judge His
+people.' Never mind about the drapery, the symbolism, the
+expression in material forms with which that future judgment is
+arranged, in order that we may the more easily grasp it. Remember
+that these pictures in the New Testament of a future judgment are
+highly symbolical, and not to be interpreted as if they were plain
+prose; but also remember that the heart of them is this, that
+there comes for Christian people as for all others, a time when
+the light will shine down upon their past, and will flash its rays
+into the dark chambers of memory, and when men will---to
+themselves if not to others---be revealed `in the day when the
+Lord shall judge the secrets of men according to my Gospel.'
+
+We have all experience enough of how but a few years, a change of
+circumstances, or a growth into another stage of development, give
+us fresh eyes with which to estimate the moral quality of our
+past. Many a thing, which we thought to be all right at the time
+when we did it, looks to us now very questionable and a plain
+mistake. And when we shift our stations to up yonder, and get rid
+of all this blinding medium of flesh and sense, and have the
+issues of our acts in our possession, and before our sight---ah!
+we shall think very differently of a great many things from what
+we think of them now. Judgment will begin at the house of God.
+
+And there is the other thought, that the fire which reveals and
+tests has also in it a power of destruction. Gold and silver will
+lose no atom of their weight, and will be brightened into greater
+lustre as they flash back the beams. The timber and the stubble
+will go up in a flare, and die down into black ashes. That is
+highly metaphorical, of course. What does it mean? It means that
+some men's work will be crumpled up and perish, and be as of none
+effect, leaving a great, black sorrowful gap in the continuity of
+the structure, and that other men's work will stand. Everything
+that we do is, in one sense, immortal, because it is represented
+in our final character and condition, just as a thin stratum of
+rock will represent forests of ferns that grew for one summer
+millenniums ago, or clouds of insects that danced for an hour in
+the sun. But whilst that is so, and nothing human ever dies, on
+the other hand, deeds which have been in accordance, as it were,
+with the great stream that sweeps the universe on its bosom will
+float on that surface and never sink. Acts which have gone against
+the rush of God's will through creation will be like a child's
+go-cart that comes against the engine of an express train---be
+reduced, first, to stillness, all the motion knocked out of them,
+and then will be crushed to atoms. Deeds which stand the test will
+abide in blessed issue for the doer, and deeds which do not will
+pass away in smoke, and leave only ashes. Some of us, building on
+the foundation, have built more rubbish than solid work, and that
+will be
+
+\begin{verse}
+`Cast as rubbish to the void \\
+When God has made the pile complete.'
+\end{verse}
+
+III. So, lastly, we have here the fate of the two builders.
+
+The one man gets wages. That is not the bare notion of salvation,
+for both builders are conceived of as on the foundation, and both
+are saved. He gets wages. Yes, of course! The architect has to
+give his certificate before the builder gets his cheque. The
+weaver, who has been working his hand-loom at his own house, has
+to take his web to the counting-house and have it overlooked
+before he gets his pay. And the man who has built `gold, silver,
+precious stones,' will have---over and above the initial
+salvation---in himself the blessed consequences, and unfold the
+large results, of his faithful service; while the other man,
+inasmuch as he has not such work, cannot have the consequences of
+it, and gets no wages; or at least his pay is subject to heavy
+deductions for the spoiled bits in the cloth, and for the gaps in
+the wall.
+
+The Apostle employs a tremendous metaphor here, which is masked in
+our Authorised Version, but is restored in the Revised. `He shall
+be saved, yet so as' (not `by' but) `through fire'; the picture
+being that of a man surrounded by a conflagration, and making a
+rush through the flames to get to a place of safety. Paul says
+that he will get through, because down \textit{below} all
+inconsistency and worldliness, there was a little of that which
+ought to have been \textit{above} all the inconsistency and the
+worldliness---a true faith in Jesus Christ. But because it was so
+imperfect, so feeble, so little operative in his life as that it
+could not keep him from piling up inconsistencies into his wall,
+therefore his salvation is so as through the fire.
+
+Brethren, I dare not enlarge upon that great metaphor. It is meant
+for us professing Christians, real and imperfect Christians---it
+is meant for us; and it just tells us that there are degrees in
+that future blessedness proportioned to present faithfulness. We
+begin there where we left off here. That future is not a dead
+level; and they who have earnestly striven to work out their faith
+into their lives shall `summer high upon the hills of God.' One
+man, like Paul in his shipwreck, shall lose ship and lading,
+though `on broken pieces of the ship' he may `escape safe to
+land'; and another shall make the harbour with full cargo of works
+of faith, to be turned into gold when he lands. If we build, as we
+all may, `on that foundation, gold and silver and precious
+stones,' an entrance `shall be ministered unto us abundantly into
+the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ';
+whilst if we bring a preponderance of `wood, hay, stubble,' we
+shall be `saved, yet so as through the fire.'
+
+\chapter{Temples of God}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS iii. 16}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Know ye not that ye are the temple of God?'---1 \textsc{Cor.}
+iii. 16
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The great purpose of Christianity is to make men like Jesus
+Christ. As He is the image of the invisible God we are to be the
+images of the unseen Christ. The Scripture is very bold and
+emphatic in attributing to Christ's followers likeness to Him, in
+nature, in character, in relation to the world, in office, and in
+ultimate destiny. Is He the anointed of God? We are
+anointed---Christs in Him. Is He the Son of God? We in Him receive
+the adoption of sons. Is He the Light of the world? We in Him are
+lights of the world too. Is He a King? A Priest? He hath made us
+to be kings and priests.
+
+Here we have the Apostle making the same solemn assertion in
+regard to Christian men, `Know ye not that ye are'---as your
+Master, and because your Master is---`that ye are the temple of
+God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?'
+
+Of course the allusion in my text is to the whole aggregate of
+believers---what we call the Catholic Church, as being
+collectively the habitation of God. But God cannot dwell in an
+aggregate of men, unless He dwells in the individuals that compose
+the aggregate. And God has nothing to do with institutions except
+through the people who make the institutions. And so, if the
+Church as a whole is a Temple, it is only because all its members
+are temples of God.
+
+Therefore, without forgetting the great blessed lesson of the
+unity of the Church which is taught in these words, I want rather
+to deal with them in their individual application now; and to try
+and lay upon your consciences, dear brethren, the solemn
+obligations and the intense practical power which this Apostle
+associated with the thought that each Christian man was, in very
+deed, a temple of God.
+
+It would be very easy to say eloquent things about this text, but
+that is no part of my purpose.
+
+I. Let me deal, first of all, and only for a moment or two, with
+the underlying thought that is here---that every Christian is a
+dwelling-place of God.
+
+Now, do not run away with the idea that that is a metaphor. It was
+the outward temple that was the metaphor. The reality is that
+which you and I, if we are God's children in Jesus Christ,
+experience. There was no real sense in which that Mighty One whom
+the Heaven of Heavens cannot contain, dwelt in any house made with
+hands. But the Temple, and all the outward worship, were but
+symbolical of the facts of the Christian life, and the realities
+of our inward experience. These are the truths whereof the other
+is the shadow. We use words to which it is difficult for us to
+attach any meaning, when we talk about God as being locally
+present in any material building; but we do not use words to which
+it is so difficult to attach a meaning, when we talk about the
+Infinite Spirit as being present and abiding in a spirit shaped to
+hold Him, and made on purpose to touch Him and be filled by Him.
+
+All creatures have God dwelling in them in the measure of their
+capacity. The stone that you kick on the road would not be there
+if there were not a present God. Nothing would happen if there
+were not abiding in creatures the force, at any rate, which is
+God. But just as in this great atmosphere in which we all live and
+move and have our being, the eye discerns undulations which make
+light, and the ear catches vibrations which make sound, and the
+nostrils are recipient of motions which bring fragrance, and all
+these are in the one atmosphere, and the sense that apprehends one
+is utterly unconscious of the other, so God's creatures, each
+through some little narrow slit, and in the measure of their
+capacity, get a straggling beam from Him into their being, and
+therefore they are.
+
+But high above all other ways in which creatures can lie patent to
+God, and open for the influx of a Divine Indweller, lies the way
+of faith and love. Whosoever opens his heart in these
+divinely-taught emotions, and fixes them upon the Christ in whom
+God dwells, receives into the very roots of his being---as the
+water that trickles through the soil to the rootlets of the
+tree---the very Godhead Himself. `He that is joined to the Lord is
+one spirit.'
+
+That God shall dwell in my heart is possible only from the fact
+that He dwelt in all His fulness in Christ, through whom I touch
+Him. That Temple consecrates all heart-shrines; and all
+worshippers that keep near to Him, partake with Him of the Father
+that dwelt in Him.
+
+Only remember that in Christ God dwelt completely, all `the
+fulness of the Godhead bodily' was there, but in us it is but
+partially; that in Christ, therefore, the divine indwelling was
+uniform and invariable, but in us it fluctuates, and sometimes is
+more intimate and blessed, and sometimes He leaves the habitation
+when we leave Him; that in Christ, therefore, there was no
+progress in the divine indwelling, but that in us, if there be any
+true inhabitation of our souls by God, that abiding will become
+more and more, until every corner of our being is hallowed and
+filled with the searching effulgence of the all-pervasive Light.
+And let us remember that God dwelt in Christ, but that in us it is
+God in Christ who dwells. So to Him we owe it all, that our poor
+hearts are made the dwelling-place of God; or, as this Apostle
+puts it, in other words conveying the same idea, `Ye are built
+upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ
+Himself being the chief Corner-stone; in whom all the building
+fitly framed together groweth ... for a habitation of God through
+the Spirit.'
+
+II. Now then, turning from this underlying idea of the passage,
+let us look, for a moment, at some of the many applications of
+which the great thought is susceptible. I remark, then, in the
+second place, that as temples all Christians are to be manifesters
+of God.
+
+The meaning of the Temple as of all temples was, that there the
+indwelling Deity should reveal Himself; and if it be true that we
+Christian men and women are, in this deep and blessed reality of
+which I have been speaking, the abiding places and habitations of
+God, then it follows that we shall stand in the world as the great
+means by which God is manifested and made known, and that in a
+two-fold way; \textit{to ourselves} and \textit{to other people}.
+
+The real revelation of God to our hearts must be His abiding in
+our hearts. We do not learn God until we possess God. He must fill
+our souls before we know His sweetness. The answer that our Lord
+made to one of His disciples is full of the deepest truth. `How is
+it,' said one of them in his blundering way, `how is it that Thou
+wilt manifest Thyself to us?' And the answer was, `We will come
+and make Our abode with him.' You do not know God until, if I
+might so say, He sits at your fireside and talks with you in your
+hearts. Just as some wife may have a husband whom the world knows
+as hero, or sage, or orator, but she knows him as nobody else can;
+so the outside, and if I may so say, the public character of God
+is but the surface of the revelation that He makes to us, when in
+the deepest secrecy of our own hearts He pours Himself into our
+waiting spirits. O brethren! it is within the curtains of the
+Holiest of all that the Shekinah flashes; it is within our own
+hearts, shrined and templed there, that God reveals Himself to us,
+as He does not unto the world.
+
+And then, further, Christian men, as the temples and habitations
+of God, are appointed to be the great means of making Him known to
+the world around. The eye that cannot look at the sun can look at
+the rosy clouds that lie on either side of it, and herald its
+rising; their opalescent tints and pearly lights are beautiful to
+dim vision, to which the sun itself is too bright to be looked
+upon. Men will believe in a gentle Christ when they see you
+gentle. They will believe in a righteous love when they see it
+manifesting itself in you. You are `the secretaries of God's
+praise,' as George Herbert has it. He dwells in your hearts that
+out of your lives He may be revealed. The pictures in a book of
+travels, or the diagrams in a mathematical work, tell a great deal
+more in half a dozen lines than can be put into as many pages of
+dry words. And it is not books of theology nor eloquent sermons,
+but it is a Church glowing with the glory of God, and manifestly
+all flushed with His light and majesty, that will have power to
+draw men to believe in the God whom it reveals. When explorers
+land upon some untravelled island and meet the gentle inhabitants
+with armlets of rough gold upon their wrists, they say there must
+be many a gold-bearing rock of quartz crystal in the interior of
+the land. And if you present yourselves, Christian men and women,
+to the world with the likeness of your Master plain upon you, then
+people will believe in the Christianity that you profess. You have
+to popularise the Gospel in the fashion in which go-betweens and
+middlemen between students and the populace popularise science.
+You have to make it possible for men to believe in the Christ
+because they see Christ in you. `Know ye not that ye are the
+temples of the living God?' Let His light shine from you.
+
+III. I remark again that as temples all Christian lives should be
+places of sacrifice.
+
+What is the use of a temple without worship? And what kind of
+worship is that in which the centre point is not an altar? That is
+the sort of temple that a great many professing Christians are. They
+have forgotten the altar in their spiritual architecture. Have you
+got one in your heart? It is but a poor, half-furnished sanctuary
+that has not. Where is yours? The key and the secret of all noble
+life is to yield up one's own will, to sacrifice oneself. There
+never was anything done in this world worth doing, and there never
+will be till the end of time, of which sacrifice is not the centre
+and inspiration. And the difference between all other and lesser
+nobilities of life, and the supreme beauty of a true Christian life
+is that the sacrifice of the Christian is properly a
+\textit{sacrifice}---that is, an offering to \emph{God}, done for
+the sake of the great love wherewith He has loved us. As Christ is
+the one true Temple, and we become so by partaking of Him, so He is
+the one Sacrifice for sins for ever, and we become sacrifices only
+through Him. If there be any lesson which comes out of this great
+truth of Christians as temples, it is not a lesson of pluming
+ourselves on our dignity, or losing ourselves in the mysticisms
+which lie near this truth, but it is the hard lesson---If a temple,
+then an altar; if an altar, then a sacrifice. `Ye are built up a
+spiritual house, a holy priesthood, that ye may offer spiritual
+sacrifices, acceptable to God'---sacrifice, priest, temple, all in
+one; and all for the sake and by the might of that dear Lord who has
+given Himself a bleeding Sacrifice for the sins of the whole world,
+that we might offer a Eucharistic sacrifice of thanks and praise and
+self-surrender unto Him, and to His Father God.
+
+IV. And, lastly, this great truth of my text enforces the solemn
+lesson of the necessary sanctity of the Christian life.
+
+`The temple of God,' says the context, `the temple of God is holy,
+which (holy persons) ye are.' The plain first idea of the temple
+is a place set apart and consecrated to God.
+
+Hence, of course, follows the idea of purity, but the parent idea
+of `holiness' is not purity, which is the consequence, but
+consecration or separation to God, which is the root.
+
+And so in very various applications, on which I have not time to
+dwell now, this idea of the necessary sanctity of the Temple is
+put forth in these two letters to the Corinthian Church. Corinth
+was a city honeycombed with the grossest immoralities; and hence,
+perhaps, to some extent the great emphasis and earnestness and
+even severity of the Apostle in dealing with some forms of evil.
+
+But without dwelling on the details, let me just point you to
+three directions in which this general notion of sanctity is
+applied. There is that of our context here `Know ye not that ye
+are the temple of God? If any man \textit{destroy} the temple of
+God, him shall God destroy, for the temple of God is holy, and
+such ye are.'
+
+He is thinking here mainly, I suppose, about the devastation and
+destruction of this temple of God, which was caused by
+schismatical and heretical teaching, and by the habit of forming
+parties, `one of Paul, one of Apollos, one of Cephas, one of
+Christ,' which was rending that Corinthian Church into pieces. But
+we may apply it more widely than that, and say that anything which
+corrupts and defiles the Christian life and the Christian
+character assumes a darker tint of evil when we think that it is
+sacrilege---the profanation of the temple, the pollution of that
+which ought to be pure as He who dwells in it.
+
+Christian men and women, how that thought darkens the blackness of
+all sin! How solemnly there peals out the warning, `If any man
+destroy or impair the temple,' by any form of pollution, `him'
+with retribution in kind, `him shall God destroy.' Keep the temple
+clear; keep it clean. Let Him come with His scourge of small cords
+and His merciful rebuke. You Manchester men know what it is to let
+the money-changers into the sanctuary. Beware lest, beginning with
+making your hearts `houses of merchandise,' you should end by
+making them `dens of thieves.'
+
+And then, still further, there is another application of this same
+principle, in the second of these Epistles. `What agreement hath
+the temple of God with idols?' `Ye are the temple of the living
+God.'
+
+Christianity is intolerant. There is to be one image in the
+shrine. One of the old Roman Stoic Emperors had a pantheon in his
+palace with Jesus Christ upon one pedestal and Plato on the one
+beside Him. And some of us are trying the same kind of thing.
+Christ there, and somebody else here. Remember, Christ must be
+everything or nothing! Stars may be sown by millions, but for the
+earth there is one sun. And you and I are to shrine one dear
+Guest, and one only, in the inmost recesses of our hearts.
+
+And there is another application of this metaphor also in our
+letter. `Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy
+Ghost which is in you?' Christianity despises `the flesh';
+Christianity reverences the body; and would teach us all that,
+being robed in that most wonderful work of God's hands, which
+becomes a shrine for God Himself if He dwell in our hearts, all
+purity, all chastisement and subjugation of animal passion is our
+duty. Drunkenness, and gluttony, lusts of every kind, impurity of
+conduct, and impurity of word and look and thought, all these
+assume a still darker tint when they are thought of as not only
+crimes against the physical constitution and the moral law of
+humanity, but insults flung in the face of the God that would
+inhabit the shrine.
+
+And in regard to sins of this kind, which it is so difficult to
+speak of in public, and which grow unchecked in secrecy, and are
+ruining hundreds of young lives, the words of this context are
+grimly true, `If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God
+destroy.' I speak now mainly in brotherly or fatherly warning to
+young men---did you ever read this, `His bones are full of the
+iniquities of his youth, which shall lie down with him in the
+dust'? `Know ye not that ye are the temple of God?'
+
+And so, brethren, our text tells us what we may all be. There is
+no heart without its deity. Alas! alas! for the many listening to
+me now whose spirits are like some of those Egyptian temples,
+which had in the inmost shrine a coiled-up serpent, the mummy of a
+monkey, or some other form as animal and obscene.
+
+Oh! turn to Christ and cry, `Arise, O Lord, into Thy rest, Thou
+and the ark of Thy strength.' Open your hearts and let Christ come
+in. And before Him, as of old, the bestial Dagon will be found,
+dejected and truncated, lying on the sill there; and all the vain,
+cruel, lustful gods that have held riot and carnival in your
+hearts will flee away into the darkness, like some foul ghosts at
+cock-crow. `If any man hear My voice and open the door I will come
+in.' And the glory of the Lord shall fill the house.
+
+\chapter{Death, The Friend}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS iii. 21, 22}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`... All things are yours ... death.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} iii. 21,
+22.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+What Jesus Christ is to a man settles what everything else is to
+Him. Our relation to Jesus determines our relation to the
+universe. If we belong to Him, everything belongs to us. If we are
+His servants, all things are our servants. The household of Jesus,
+which is the whole Creation, is not divided against itself, and
+the fellow-servants do not beat one another. Two bodies moving in
+the same direction, and under the impulse of the same force,
+cannot come into collision, and since `all things work together,'
+according to the counsel of His will, `all things work together
+for good' to His lovers. The triumphant words of my text are no
+piece of empty rhetoric, but the plain result of two
+facts---Christ's rule and the Christian's submission. `All things
+are yours, and ye are Christ's,' so the stars in their courses
+fight against those who fight against Him, and if we are at peace
+with Him we shall `make a league with the beasts of the field, and
+the stones of the field,' which otherwise would be hindrances and
+stumbling-blocks, `shall be at peace with' us.
+
+The Apostle carries his confidence in the subservience of all
+things to Christ's servants very far, and the words of my text, in
+which he dares to suggest that `the Shadow feared of man' is,
+after all, a veiled friend, are hard to believe, when we are
+brought face to face with death, either when we meditate on our
+own end, or when our hearts are sore and our hands are empty. Then
+the question comes, and often is asked with tears of blood, Is it
+true that this awful force, which we cannot command, does indeed
+serve us? Did it serve those whom it dragged from our sides; and
+in serving them, did it serve us? Paul rings out his `Yes'; and if
+we have as firm a hold of Paul's Lord as Paul had, our answer will
+be the same. Let me, then, deal with this great thought that lies
+here, of the conversion of the last enemy into a friend, the
+assurance that we may all have that death is ours, though not in
+the sense that we can command it, yet in the sense that it
+ministers to our highest good.
+
+That thought may be true about ourselves when it comes to our turn
+to die, and, thank God, has been true about all those who have
+departed in His faith and fear. Some of you may have seen two very
+striking engravings by a great, though somewhat unknown artist,
+representing Death as the Destroyer, and Death as the Friend. In
+the one case he comes into a scene of wild revelry, and there at
+his feet lie, stark and stiff, corpses in their gay clothing and
+with garlands on their brows, and feasters and musicians are
+flying in terror from the cowled Skeleton. In the other he comes
+into a quiet church belfry, where an aged saint sits with folded
+arms and closed eyes, and an open Bible by his side, and endless
+peace upon the wearied face. The window is flung wide to the
+sunrise, and on its sill perches a bird that gives forth its
+morning song. The cowled figure has brought rest to the weary, and
+the glad dawning of a new life to the aged, and is a friend. The
+two pictures are better than all the poor words that I can say. It
+depends on the people to whom he comes, whether he comes as a
+destroyer or as a helper. Of course, for all of us the mere
+physical facts remain the same, the pangs and the pain, the slow
+torture of the loosing of the bond, or the sharp agony of its
+instantaneous rending apart. But we have gone but a very little
+way into life and its experiences, if we have not learnt that
+identity of circumstances may cover profound difference of
+essentials, and that the same experiences may have wholly
+different messages and meanings to two people who are equally
+implicated in them. Thus, while the physical fact remains the same
+for all, the whole bearing of it may so differ that Death to one
+man will be a Destroyer, while to another it is a Friend.
+
+For, if we come to analyse the thoughts of humanity about the last
+act in human life on earth, what is it that makes the dread
+darkness of death, which all men know, though they so seldom think
+of it? I suppose, first of all, if we seek to question our
+feelings, that which makes Death a foe to the ordinary experience
+is, that it is like a step off the edge of a precipice in a fog; a
+step into a dim condition of which the imagination can form no
+conception, because it has no experience, and all imagination's
+pictures are painted with pigments drawn from our past. Because it
+is impossible for a man to have any clear vision of what it is
+that is coming to meet him, and he cannot tell `in that sleep what
+dreams may come,' he shrinks, as we all shrink, from a step into
+the vast Inane, the dim Unknown. But the Gospel comes and says,
+`It \textit{is} a land of great darkness,' but `To the people that
+sit in darkness a great light hath shined.'
+
+\begin{verse}
+`Our knowledge of that life is small, \\
+ The eye of faith is dim.'
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent But faith has an eye, and there is light, and this we
+can see---One face whose brightness scatters all the gloom, One
+Person who has not ceased to be the Sun of Righteousness with
+healing in His beams, even in the darkness of the grave.
+Therefore, one at least of the repellent features which, to the
+timorous heart, makes Death a foe, is gone, when we know that the
+known Christ fills the Unknown.
+
+Then, again, another of the elements, as I suppose, which
+constitute the hostile aspect that Death assumes to most of us, is
+that it apparently hales us away from all the wholesome activities
+and occupations of life, and bans us into a state of apparent
+inaction. The thought that death is rest does sometimes attract
+the weary or harassed, or they fancy it does, but that is a morbid
+feeling, and much more common in sentimental epitaphs than among
+the usual thoughts of men. To most of us there is no joy, but a
+chill, in the anticipation that all the forms of activity which
+have so occupied, and often enriched, our lives here, are to be
+cut off at once. `What am I to do if I have no books?' says the
+student. `What am I to do if I have no mill?' says the spinner.
+`What am I to do if I have no nursery or kitchen?' say the women.
+What are you to do? There is only one quieting answer to such
+questions. It tells us that what we are doing here is learning our
+trade, and that we are to be moved into another workshop there, to
+practise it. Nothing can bereave us of the force we made our own,
+being here; and `there is nobler work for us to do' when the
+Master of all the servants stoops from His Throne and says: `Thou
+hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over
+many things; have thou authority over ten cities.' Then the
+faithfulness of the steward will be exchanged for the authority of
+the ruler, and the toil of the servant for a share in the joy of
+the Lord.
+
+So another of the elements which make Death an enemy is turned
+into an element which makes it a friend, and instead of the
+separation from this earthly body, the organ of our activity and
+the medium of our connection with the external universe being the
+condemnation of the naked spirit to inaction, it is the
+emancipation of the spirit into greater activity. For nothing
+drops away at death that does not make a man the richer for its
+loss, and when the dross is purged from the silver, there remains
+`a vessel unto honour, fit for the Master's use.' This mightier
+activity is the contribution to our blessedness, which Death makes
+to them who use their activities here in Christ's service.
+
+Then, still further, another of the elements which is converted
+from being a terror into a joy is that Death, the separator,
+becomes to Christ's servants Death, the uniter. We all know how
+that function of death is perhaps the one that makes us shrink
+from it the most, dread it the most, and sometimes hate it the
+most. But it will be with us as it was with those who were to be
+initiated into ancient religious rites. Blindfolded, they were led
+by a hand that grasped theirs but was not seen, through dark,
+narrow, devious passages, but they were led into a great company
+in a mighty hall. Seen from this side, the ministry of Death parts
+a man from dear ones, but, oh! if we could see round the turn in
+the corridor, we should see that the solitude is but for a moment,
+and that the true office of Death is not so much to part from
+those beloved on earth as to carry to, and unite with, Him that is
+best Beloved in the heavens, and in Him with all His saints. They
+that are joined to Christ, as they who pass from earth are joined,
+are thereby joined to all who, in like manner, are knit to Him.
+Although other dear bonds are loosed by the bony fingers of the
+Skeleton, his very loosing of them ties more closely the bond that
+unites us to Jesus, and when the dull ear of the dying has ceased
+to hear the voices of earth that used to thrill it in their lowest
+whisper, I suppose it hears another Voice that says: `When thou
+passest through the fire I will be with thee, and through the
+waters they shall not overflow thee.' Thus the Separator unites,
+first to Jesus, and then to `the general assembly and Church of
+the first-born,' and leads into the city of the living God, the
+pilgrims who long have lived, often isolated, in the desert.
+
+There is a last element in Death which is changed for the
+Christian, and that is that to men generally, when they think
+about it, there is an instinctive recoil from Death, because there
+is an instinctive suspicion that after Death is the Judgment, and
+that, somehow or other---never mind about the drapery in which the
+idea may be embodied for our weakness---when a man dies he passes
+to a state where he will reap the consequences of what he has sown
+here. But to Christ's servant that last thought is robbed of its
+sting, and all the poison sucked out of it, for he can say: `He
+that died for me makes it possible for me to die undreading, and
+to pass thither, knowing that I shall meet as my Judge Him whom I
+have trusted as my Saviour, and so may have boldness before Him in
+the Day of Judgment.'
+
+Knit these four contrasts together. Death as a step into a dim
+unknown \textit{versus} Death as a step into a region lighted by
+Jesus; Death as the cessation of activity \textit{versus} Death as
+the introduction to nobler opportunities, and the endowment with
+nobler capacities of service; Death as the separator and isolator
+\textit{versus} Death as uniting to Jesus and all His lovers;
+Death as haling us to the judgment-seat of the adversary
+\textit{versus} Death as bringing us to the tribunal of the
+Christ; and I think we can understand how Christians can venture
+to say, `All things are ours, whether life or death' which leads
+to a better life.
+
+And now let me add one word more. All this that I have been
+saying, and all the blessed strength for ourselves and calming in
+our sorrows which result therefrom, stand or fall with the
+Resurrection of Jesus Christ. There is nothing else that makes
+these things certain. There are, of course, instincts,
+peradventures, hopes, fears, doubts. But in this region, and in
+regard to all this cycle of truths, the same thing applies which
+applies round the whole horizon of Christian Revelation---if you
+want not speculations but certainties, you have to go to Jesus
+Christ for them. There were many men who thought that there were
+islands of the sea beyond the setting sun that dyed the western
+waves, but Columbus went and came back again, and brought their
+products---and then the thought became a fact. Unless you believe
+that Jesus Christ has come back from `the bourne from which no
+traveller returns,' and has come laden with the gifts of `happy
+isles of Eden' far beyond the sea, there is no certitude upon
+which a dying man can lay his head, or by which a bleeding heart
+can be staunched. But when He draws near, alive from the dead, and
+says to us, as He did to the disciples on the evening of the day
+of Resurrection, `Peace be unto you,' and shows us His hands and
+His side, then we do not only speculate or think a future life
+possible or probable, or hesitate to deny it, or hope or fear, as
+the case may be, but we \textit{know}, and we can say: `All things
+are ours ... death' amongst others. The fact that Jesus Christ has
+died changes the whole aspect of death to His servant, inasmuch as
+in that great solitude he has a companion, and in the valley of
+the shadow of death sees footsteps that tell him of One that went
+before.
+
+Nor need I do more than remind you how the manner of our Lord's
+death shows that He is Lord not only of the dead but of the Death
+that makes them dead. For His own tremendous assertion, `I have
+power to lay down My life, and I have power to take it again,' was
+confirmed by His attitude and His words at the last, as is hinted
+at by the very expressions with which the Evangelists record the
+fact of His death: `He yielded up His spirit,' `He gave up the
+ghost,' `He breathed out His life.' It is confirmed to us by such
+words as those remarkable ones of the Apocalypse, which speak of
+Him as `the Living One,' who, by His own will, `became dead.' He
+died because He would, and He would die because He loved you and
+me. And in dying, He showed Himself to be, not the Victim, but the
+Conqueror, of the Death to which He submitted. The Jewish king on
+the fatal field of Gilboa called his sword-bearer, and the servant
+came, and Saul bade him smite, and when his trembling hand shrank
+from such an act, the king fell on his own sword. The Lord of life
+and death summoned His servant Death, and He came obedient, but
+Jesus died not by Death's stroke, but by His own act. So that Lord
+of Death, who died because He would, is the Lord who has the keys
+of death and the grave. In regard to one servant He says, `I will
+that he tarry till I come,' and that man lives through a century,
+and in regard to another He says, `Follow thou Me,' and that man
+dies on a cross. The dying Lord is Lord of Death, and the living
+Lord is for us all the Prince of Life.
+
+Brethren, we have to take His yoke upon us by the act of faith
+which leads to a love that issues in an obedience which will
+become more and more complete, as we become more fully Christ's.
+Then death will be ours, for then we shall count that the highest
+good for us will be fuller union with, a fuller possession of, and
+a completer conformity to, Jesus Christ our King, and that
+whatever brings us these, even though it brings also pain and
+sorrow and much from which we shrink, is all on our side. It is
+possible---may it be so with each of us!---that for us Death may
+be, not an enemy that bans us into darkness and inactivity, or
+hales us to a judgment-seat, but the Angel who wakes us, at whose
+touch the chains fall off, and who leads us through `the iron gate
+that opens of its own accord,' and brings us into the City.
+
+\chapter{Servants and Lords}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS iii. 21--23}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`All things are yours; 22.\ Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas,
+or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to
+come; all are yours; 23.\ And ye are Christ's.'---1 \textsc{Cor.}
+iii. 21--23.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The Corinthian Christians seem to have carried into the Church
+some of the worst vices of Greek---and English---political life.
+They were split up into wrangling factions, each swearing by the
+name of some person. Paul was the battle-cry of one set; Apollos
+of another. Paul and Apollos were very good friends, their
+admirers bitter foes---according to a very common experience. The
+springs lie close together up in the hills, the rivers may be
+parted by half a continent.
+
+These feuds were all the more detestable to the Apostle because
+his name was dragged into them; and so he sets himself, in the
+first part of this letter, with all his might, to shame and to
+argue the Corinthian Christians out of their wrangling. This great
+text is one of the considerations which he adduces with that
+purpose. In effect he says, `To pin your faith to any one teacher
+is a wilful narrowing of the sources of your blessing and your
+wisdom. You say you are Paul's men. Has Apollos got nothing that
+he could teach you? and may you not get any good out of brave
+brother Cephas? Take them all; they were all meant for your good.
+Let no man glory in individuals.'
+
+That is all that his argument required him to say. But in his
+impetuous way he goes on into regions far beyond. His thought,
+like some swiftly revolving wheel, catches fire of its own rapid
+motion; and he blazes up into this triumphant enumeration of all
+the things that serve the soul which serves Jesus Christ. `You are
+lords of men, of the world of time, of death, of eternity; but you
+are not lords of yourselves. You belong to Jesus, and in the
+measure in which you belong to Him do all things belong to you.'
+
+I. I think, then, that I shall best bring out the fulness of these
+words by simply following them as they lie before us, and asking
+you to consider, first, how Christ's servants are men's lords.
+
+`All things are yours, Paul, Apollos, Cephas.' These three
+teachers were all lights kindled at the central Light, and
+therefore shining. They were fragments of His wisdom, of Him that
+spoke; varying, but yet harmonious, and mutually complementary
+aspects of the one infinite Truth had been committed to them. Each
+was but a part of the mighty whole, a little segment of the circle
+
+\begin{verse}
+`They are but broken lights of Thee, \\
+ And Thou, O Lord! art more than they.'
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent And in the measure, therefore, in which men adhere to
+Christ, and have taken Him for theirs; in that measure are they
+delivered from all undue dependence on, still more from all
+slavish submission to, any single individual teacher or aspect of
+truth. To have Christ for ours, and to be His, which are only the
+opposite sides of the same thing, mean, in brief, to take Jesus
+Christ for the source of all knowledge of moral and religious
+truth. His Word is the Christian's creed, His Person and the
+truths that lie in Him, are the fountains of all our knowledge of
+God and man. To be Christ's is to take Him as the master who has
+absolute authority over conduct and practice. His commandment is
+the Christian's duty; His pattern the Christian's all-sufficient
+example; His smile the Christian's reward. To be Christ's is to
+take Him for the home of our hearts, in whose gracious and sweet
+love we find all sufficiency and a rest for our seeking
+affections. And so, if ye are His, Paul, Apollos, Cephas, all men
+are yours; in the sense that you are delivered from all undue
+dependence upon them; and in the sense that they subserve your
+highest good.
+
+So the true democracy of Christianity, which abjures swearing by
+the words of any teacher, is simply the result of loyal adherence
+to the teaching of Jesus Christ. And that proud independence which
+some of you seek to cultivate, and on the strength of which you
+declare that no man is your master upon earth, is an unwholesome
+and dangerous independence, unless it be conjoined with the bowing
+down of the whole nature, in loyal submission, to the absolute
+authority of the only lips that ever spoke truth, truth only, and
+truth always. If Christ be our Master, if we take our creed from
+Him, if we accept His words and His revelation of the Father as
+our faith and our objective religion, then all the slavery to
+favourite names, all the taking of truth second-hand from the lips
+that we honour, all the partisanship for one against another which
+has been the shame and the ruin of the Christian Church, and is
+working untold mischiefs in it to-day, are ended at once. `One is
+your Master, even Christ.' `Call no man Rabbi! upon earth; but bow
+before Him, the Incarnate and the Personal Truth.'
+
+And in like manner they who are Christ's are delivered from all
+temptations to make men's maxims and practices and approbation the
+law of their conduct. Society presses upon each of us; what we
+call public opinion, which is generally the clatter of the
+half-dozen people that happen to stand nearest us, rules us; and
+it needs to be said very emphatically to all Christian men and
+women---Take your law of conduct from His lips, and from nobody
+else's.
+
+`They say. What say they? Let them say.' If we take Christ's
+commandment for our absolute law, and Christ's approbation for our
+highest aim and all-sufficient reward, we shall then be able to
+brush aside other maxims and other people's opinions of us, safely
+and humbly, and to say, `With me it is a very small matter to be
+judged of you, or of man's judgment. He that judgeth me is the
+Lord.'
+
+The envoy of some foreign power cares very little what the
+inhabitants of the land to which he is ambassador may think of him
+and his doings; it is his sovereign's good opinion that he seeks
+to secure. The soldier's reward is his commander's praise, the
+slave's joy is the master's smile, and for us it ought to be the
+law of our lives, and in the measure in which we really belong to
+Christ it will be the law of our lives, that `we labour that,
+whether present or absent, we may be pleasing to Him.'
+
+So, brethren, as teachers, as patterns, as objects of love which
+is only too apt to be exclusive and to master us, we can only take
+one another in subordination to our supreme submission to Christ,
+and if we are His, our duty, as our joy, is to count no man
+necessary to our wellbeing, but to hang only on the one Man, whom
+it is safe and blessed to believe utterly, to obey abjectly, and
+to love with all our strength, because He is more than man, even
+God manifest in the flesh.
+
+II. And now let us pass to the next idea here, secondly, Christ's
+servants are the lords of `the world.'
+
+That phrase is used here, no doubt, as meaning the external
+material universe. These creatures around us, they belong to us,
+if we belong to Jesus Christ. That man owns the world who despises
+it. There are plenty of rich men in Manchester who say they
+possess so many thousand pounds. Turn the sentence about and it
+would be a great deal truer---the thousands of pounds possess
+them. They are the slaves of their own possessions, and every man
+who counts any material thing as indispensable to his wellbeing,
+and regards it as the chiefest good, is the slave-servant of that
+thing. He owns the world who turns it to the highest use of
+growing his soul by it. All material things are given, and, I was
+going to say, were created, for the growth of men, or at all
+events their highest purpose is that men should, by them, grow.
+And therefore, as the scaffolding is swept away when the building
+is finished, so God will sweep away this material universe with
+all its wonders of beauty and of contrivance, when men have been
+grown by means of it. The material is less than the soul, and he
+is master of the world, and owns it, who has got thoughts out of
+it, truth out of it, impulses out of it, visions of God out of it,
+who has by it been led nearer to his divine Master. If I look out
+upon a fair landscape, and the man who draws the rents of it is
+standing by my side, and I suck more sweetness, and deeper
+impulses, and larger and loftier thoughts out of it than he does,
+it belongs to me far more than it does to him. The world is his
+who from it has learned to despise it, to know himself and to know
+God. He owns the world who uses it as the arena, or wrestling
+ground, on which, by labour, he may gain strength, and in which he
+may do service. Antagonism helps to develop muscle, and the best
+use of the outward frame of things is that we shall take it as the
+field upon which we can serve God.
+
+And now all these three things---the contempt of earth, the use of
+earth for growing souls, and the use of earth as the field of
+service---all these things belong most truly to the man who
+belongs to Christ. The world is His, and if we live near Him and
+cultivate fellowship with Him, and see His face gleaming through
+all the Material, and are led up nearer to Him by everything
+around us, then we own the world and wring the sweetness to the
+last drop out of it, though we may have but little of that outward
+relation to its goods which short-sighted men call possessing
+them. We may solve the paradox of those who, `having nothing, yet
+have all,' if we belong to Christ the Lord of all things, and so
+have co-possession with Him of all His riches.
+
+III. Further, my text tells us, in the third place, that Christian
+men, who belong to Jesus Christ, are the lords and masters of
+`life and death.'
+
+Both of these words are here used, as it seems to me, in their
+simple, physical sense, natural life and natural death. You may
+say, `Well, everybody is lord of life in that sense.' Yes, of
+course, in a fashion we all possess it, seeing that we are all
+alive. But that mysterious gift of personality, that awful gift of
+conscious existence, only belongs, in the deepest sense, to the
+men who belong to Jesus Christ. I do not call that man the owner
+of his own life who is not the lord of his own spirit. I do not
+see in what, except in the mere animal sense in which a fly, or a
+spider, or a toad may be called the master of its life, that man
+owns himself who has not given up himself to Jesus Christ. The
+only way to get a real hold of yourselves is to yield yourselves
+to Him who gives you back Himself, and yourself along with Him.
+The true ownership of life depends upon self-control, and
+self-control depends upon letting Jesus Christ govern us wholly.
+So the measure in which it is true of me that `I live; yet not I,
+but Christ liveth in me,' is the measure in which the lower life
+of sense really belongs to us, and ministers to our highest good.
+
+And then turn to the other member of this wonderful antithesis,
+`whether life or \textit{death}.' Surely if there is anything over
+which no man can become lord, except by sinfully taking his fate
+into his own hands, it is death. And yet even death, in which we
+seem to be abjectly passive, and by which so many of us are
+dragged away reluctantly from everything that we care to possess,
+may become a matter of consent and therefore a moral act. Animals
+expire; a Christian man may yield his soul to his Saviour, who is
+the Lord both of the dead and of the living. If thus we feel our
+dependence upon Him, and yield up our lives to Him, and can say,
+`Living or dying we are the Lord's,' then we may be quite sure
+that death, too, will be our servant, and that our wills will be
+concerned even in passing out of life.
+
+Still more, if you and I, dear brethren, belong to Jesus Christ,
+then death is our fellow-servant who comes to call us out of this
+ill-lighted workshop into the presence of the King. And at His
+magic cold touch, cares and toils and sorrows are stiffened into
+silence, like noisy streams bound in white frost; and we are
+lifted clean up out of all the hubbub and the toil into eternal
+calm. Death is ours because it fulfils our deepest desires, and
+comes as a messenger to paupers to tell them they have a great
+estate. Death is ours if we be Christ's.
+
+IV. And lastly, Christ's servants are the lords of time and
+eternity, `things present or things to come.'
+
+Our Apostle's division, in this catalogue of his, is rhetorical
+rather than logical; and we need not seek to separate the first of
+this final pair from others which we have already encountered in
+our study of the words, but still we may draw a distinction. The
+whole mass of `things present,' including not only that material
+universe which we call the world, but all the events and
+circumstances of our lives, over these we may exercise supreme
+control. If we are bowing in humble submission to Jesus Christ,
+they will all subserve our highest good. Every weather will be
+right; night and day equally desirable; the darkness will be good
+for eyes that have been tired of brightness and that need repose,
+the light will be good. The howling tempests of winter and its
+white snows, the sharp winds of spring and its bursting sunshine;
+the calm steady heat of June and the mellowing days of August, all
+serve to ripen the grain. And so all `things present,' the light
+and the dark, the hopes fulfilled and the hopes disappointed, the
+gains and the losses, the prayers answered and the prayers
+unanswered, they will all be recognised, if we have the wisdom
+that comes from submission to Jesus Christ's will, as being ours
+and ministering to our highest blessing.
+
+We shall be their lords too inasmuch as we shall be able to
+control them. We need not be `anvils but hammers.' We need not let
+outward circumstances dominate and tyrannise over us. We need not
+be like the mosses in the stream, that lie whichever way the
+current sets, nor like some poor little sailing boat that is at
+the mercy of the winds and the waves, but may carry an inward
+impulse like some great ocean-going steamer, the throb of whose
+power shall drive us straight forward on our course, whatever
+beats against us. That we may have this inward power and mastery
+over things present, and not be shaped and moulded and made by
+them, let us yield ourselves to Christ, and He will help us to
+rule them.
+
+And then, all `things to come,' the dim, vague future, shall be
+for each of us like some sunlit ocean stretching shoreless to the
+horizon; every little ripple flashing with its own bright
+sunshine, and all bearing us onwards to the great Throne that
+stands on the sea of glass mingled with fire.
+
+Then, my brother, ask yourselves what your future is if you have
+not Christ for your Friend.
+
+\begin{verse}
+`I backward cast mine eye \\
+\ \ On prospects drear; \\
+And forward though I cannot see, \\
+\ \ I guess and fear.'
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent So I beseech you, yield yourselves to Jesus Christ, He
+died to win us. He bears our sins that they may be all forgiven.
+If we give ourselves to Him who has given Himself to us, then we
+shall be lords of men, of the world, of life and death, of time
+and eternity.
+
+In the old days conquerors used to bestow upon their followers
+lands and broad dominions on condition of their doing suit and
+service, and bringing homage to them. Christ, the King of the
+universe, makes His subjects kings, and will give us to share in
+His dominion, so that to each of us may be fulfilled that
+boundless and almost unbelievable promise: `He that overcometh
+shall inherit all things.' `All are yours if ye are Christ's.'
+
+\chapter{The Three Tribunals}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS iv. 3, 4}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of
+you, or of man's judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self. 4. For
+I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified; but he
+that judgeth me is the Lord.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} iv. 3, 4.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The Church at Corinth was honeycombed by the characteristic Greek
+vice of party spirit. The three great teachers, Paul, Peter,
+Apollos, were pitted against each other, and each was unduly
+exalted by those who swore by him, and unduly depreciated by the
+other two factions. But the men whose names were the war-cries of
+these sections were themselves knit in closest friendship, and
+felt themselves to be servants in common of one Master, and
+fellow-workers in one task.
+
+So Paul, in the immediate context, associating Peter and Apollos
+with himself, bids the Corinthians think of `\textit{us}' as being
+servants of Christ, and not therefore responsible to men; and as
+stewards of the mysteries of God, that is, dispensers of truths
+long hidden but now revealed, and as therefore accountable for
+correct accounts and faithful dispensation only to the Lord of the
+household. Being responsible to Him, they heeded very little what
+others thought about them. Being responsible to Him, they could
+not accept vindication by their own consciences as being final.
+There was a judgment beyond these.
+
+So here we have three tribunals---that of man's estimates, that of
+our own consciences, that of Jesus Christ. An appeal lies from the
+first to the second, and from the second to the third. It is base
+to depend on men's judgments; it is well to attend to the
+decisions of conscience, but it is not well to take it for granted
+that, if conscience approve, we are absolved. The court of final
+appeal is Jesus Christ, and what He thinks about each of us. So
+let us look briefly at these three tribunals.
+
+I. First, the lowest---men's judgment.
+
+`With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you,'
+enlightened Christians that you are, or by the outside world. Now,
+Paul's letters give ample evidence that he was keenly alive to the
+hostile and malevolent criticisms and slanders of his untiring
+opponents. Many a flash of sarcasm out of the cloud like a
+lightning bolt, many a burst of wounded affection like rain from
+summer skies, tell us this. But I need not quote these. Such a
+character as his could not but be quick to feel the surrounding
+atmosphere, whether it was of love or of suspicion. So, he had to
+harden himself against what naturally had a great effect upon him,
+the estimate which he felt that people round him were making of
+him. There was nothing brusque, rough, contemptuous in his
+brushing aside these popular judgments. He gave them all due
+weight, and yet he felt, `From all that this lowest tribunal may
+decide, there are two appeals, one to my own conscience, and one
+to my Master in heaven.'
+
+Now, I suppose I need not say a word about the power which that
+terrible court which is always sitting, and which passes judgment
+upon every one of us, though we do not always hear the sentences
+read, has upon us all. There is a power which it is meant to have.
+It is not good for a man to stand constantly in the attitude of
+defying whatever anybody else chooses to say or to think about
+him. But the danger to which we are all exposed, far more than
+that other extreme, is of deferring too completely and slavishly
+to, and being far too subtly influenced in all that we do by, the
+thought of what A, B, or C, may have to say or to think about it.
+`The last infirmity of noble minds,' says Milton about the love of
+fame. It is an infirmity to love it, and long for it, and live by
+it. It is a weakening of humanity, even where men are spurred to
+great efforts by the thought of the reverberation of these in the
+ear of the world, and of the honour and glory that may come
+therefrom.
+
+But not only in these higher forms of seeking after reputation,
+but in lower forms, this trembling before, and seeking to
+conciliate, the tribunal of what we call `general opinion,' which
+means the voices of the half-dozen people that are beside us and
+know about us, besets us all, and weakens us all in a thousand
+ways. How many men would lose all the motive that they have for
+living reputable lives, if nobody knew anything about it? How many
+of you, when you go to London, and are strangers, frequent places
+that you would not be seen in in Manchester? How many of us are
+hindered, in courses which we know that we ought to pursue,
+because we are afraid of this or that man or woman, and of what
+they may look or speak? There is a regard to man's judgment, which
+is separated by the very thinnest partition from hypocrisy. There
+is a very shadowy distinction between the man who, consciously or
+unconsciously, does a thing with an eye to what people may say
+about it, and the man who pretends to be what he is not for the
+sake of the reputation that he may thereby win.
+
+Now, the direct tendency of Christian faith and principle is to
+dwindle into wholesome insignificance the multitudinous voice of
+men's judgments. For, if I understand at all what Christianity
+means, it means centrally and essentially this, that I am brought
+into loving personal relation with Jesus Christ, and draw from Him
+the power of my life, and from Him the law of my life, and from
+Him the stimulus of my life, and from Him the reward of my life.
+If there is a direct communication between me and Him, and if I am
+deriving from Him the life that He gives, which is `free from the
+law of sin and death,' I shall have little need or desire to heed
+the judgment that men, who see only the surface, may pass upon me,
+and upon my doings, and I shall refer myself to Him instead of to
+them. Those who can go straight to Christ, whose lives are steeped
+in Him, who feel that they draw all from Him, and that their
+actions and character are moulded by His touch and His Spirit, are
+responsible to no other tribunal. And the less they think about
+what men have to say of them the stronger, the nobler, the more
+Christ-like they will be.
+
+There is no need for any contempt or roughness to blend with such
+a putting aside of men's judgments. The velvet glove may be worn
+upon the iron hand. All meekness and lowliness may go with this
+wholesome independence, and must go with it unless that
+independence is false and distorted. `With me it is a very small
+thing to be judged of you, or of man's judgment,' need not be said
+in such a tone as to mean `I do not care a rush what you think
+about me'; but it must be said in such a tone as to mean `I care
+supremely for one approbation, and if I have that I can bear
+anything besides.'
+
+Let me appeal to you to cultivate more distinctly, as a plain
+Christian duty, this wholesome independence of men's judgment. I
+suppose there never was a day when it was more needed that men
+should be themselves, seeing with their own eyes what God may
+reveal to them and they are capable of receiving, and walking with
+their own feet on the path that fits them, whatsoever other people
+may say about it. For the multiplication of daily literature, the
+way in which we are all living in glass houses
+nowadays---everybody knowing everything about everybody else, and
+delighting in the gossip which takes the place of literature in so
+many quarters---and the tendency of society to a more democratic
+form give the many-headed monster and its many tongues far more
+power than is wholesome, in the shaping of the lives and character
+and conduct of most men. The evil of democracy is that it levels
+down all to one plane, and that it tends to turn out millions of
+people, as like each other as if they had been made in a machine.
+And so we need, I believe, even more than our fathers did, to lay
+to heart this lesson, that the direct result of a deep and strong
+Christian faith is the production of intensely individual
+character. And if there are plenty of angles in it, perhaps so
+much the better. We are apt to be rounded by being rubbed against
+each other, like the stones on the beach, till there is not a
+sharp corner or a point that can prick anywhere. So society
+becomes utterly monotonous, and is insipid and profitless because
+of that. You Christian people, be yourselves, after your own
+pattern. And whilst you accept all help from surrounding
+suggestions and hints, make it `a very small thing that you be
+judged of men.' And you, young men, in warehouses and shops, and
+you, students, and you, boys and girls, that are budding into
+life, never mind what other people say. `Let thine eyes look right
+onwards,' and let all the clatter on either side of you go on as
+it will. The voices are very loud, but if we go up high enough on
+the hill-top, to the secret place of the Most High, we shall look
+down and see, but not hear, the bustle and the buzz; and in the
+great silence Christ will whisper to us, `Well done! good and
+faithful servant.' That praise is worth getting, and one way to
+get it is to put aside the hindrance of anxious seeking to
+conciliate the good opinion of men.
+
+II. Note the higher court of conscience.
+
+Our Apostle is not to be taken here as contradicting what he says
+in other places. `I judge not mine own self,'---yet in one of
+these same letters to the Corinthians he says, `If we judged
+ourselves we should not be judged.' So that he does not mean here
+that he is entirely without any estimate of his own character or
+actions. That he did in some sense judge himself is evident from
+the next clause, because he goes on to say, `I know nothing
+against myself.' If he acquitted himself, he must previously have
+been judging himself. But his acquittal of himself is not to be
+understood as if it covered the whole ground of his life and
+character, but it is to be confined to the subject in hand---viz.
+his faithfulness as a steward of the mysteries of God. But though
+there is nothing in that region of his life which he can charge
+against himself as unfaithfulness, he goes on to say, `Yet am I
+not hereby justified?'
+
+Our absolution by conscience is not infallible. I suppose that
+conscience is more reliable when it condemns than when it acquits.
+It is never safe for a man to neglect it when it says, `You are
+wrong!' It is just as unsafe for a man to accept it, without
+further investigation, when it says, `You are right!' For the only
+thing that is infallible about what we call conscience is its
+sentence, `It is right to do right.' But when it proceeds to say
+`This, that, and the other thing is right; and therefore it is
+right for you to do it,' there may be errors in the judgment, as
+everybody's own experience tells them. The inward judge needs to
+be stimulated, to be enlightened, to be corrected often. I suppose
+that the growth of Christian character is very largely the
+discovery that things that we thought innocent are not, for us, so
+innocent as we thought them.
+
+You only need to go back to history, or to go down into your own
+histories, to see how, as light has increased, dark corners have
+been revealed that were invisible in the less brilliant
+illumination. How long it has taken the Christian Church to find
+out what Christ's Gospel teaches about slavery, about the
+relations of sex, about drunkenness, about war, about a hundred
+other things that you and I do not yet know, but which our
+successors will wonder that we failed to see! Inquisitor and
+martyr have equally said, `We are serving God.' Surely, too,
+nothing is more clearly witnessed by individual experience, than
+that we may do a wrong thing, and think that it is right. `They
+that kill you will think that they do God service.'
+
+So, Christian people, accept the inward monition when it is stern
+and prohibitive. Do not be too sure about it when it is placable
+and permissive. `Happy is he that condemneth not himself in the
+thing which he alloweth.' There may be secret faults, lying all
+unseen beneath the undergrowth in the forest, which yet do prick
+and sting. The upper floors of the house where we receive company,
+and where we, the tenants, generally live, may be luxurious, and
+sweet, and clean. What about the cellars, where ugly things crawl
+and swarm, and breed, and sting?
+
+Ah, dear brethren! when my conscience says to me, `You may do it,'
+it is always well to go to Jesus Christ, and say to Him `May I?'
+`Search me, O God, and ... see if there be any wicked way in me,'
+and show it to me, and help me to cast it out. `I know nothing
+against myself; yet am I not hereby justified.'
+
+III. Lastly, note the supreme court of final appeal.
+
+`He that judgeth me is the Lord.' Now it is obvious that `the
+Lord' here is Christ, both because of the preceding context and
+because of the next verse, which speaks of His coming. And it is
+equally obvious, though it is often unnoticed, that the judgment
+of which the Apostle is here speaking is a present and preliminary
+judgment. `He that \textit{judgeth} me'---not, `will judge,' but
+\textit{now}, at this very moment. That is to say, whilst people
+round us are passing their superficial estimates upon me, and
+whilst my conscience is excusing, or else accusing me---and in
+neither case with absolute infallibility---there is another
+judgment, running concurrently with them, and going on in silence.
+That calm eye is fixed upon me, and sifting me, and knowing me.
+\textit{That} judgment is not fallible, because before Him `the
+hidden things' that the darkness shelters, those creeping things
+in the cellars that I was speaking about, are all manifest; and to
+Him the `counsels of the heart,' that is, the motives from which
+the actions flow, are all transparent and legible. So His
+judgment, the continual estimate of me which Jesus Christ, in His
+supreme knowledge of me, has, at every moment of my
+life---\textit{that} is uttering the final word about me and my
+character.
+
+His estimate will dwindle the sentences of the other two tribunals
+into nothingness. What matter what his fellow-servants say about
+the steward's accounts, and distribution of provisions, and
+management of the household? He has to render his books, and to
+give account of his stewardship, only to his lord.
+
+The governor of a Crown Colony may attach some importance to
+colonial opinion, but he reports home; and it is what the people
+in Downing Street will say that he thinks about. We have to report
+home; and it is the King whom we serve, to whom we have to give an
+account. The gladiator, down in the arena, did not much mind
+whether the thumbs of the populace were up or down, though the one
+was the signal for his life and the other for his death. He looked
+to the place where, between the purple curtains and the flashing
+axes of the lictors, the emperor sate. Our Emperor once was down
+on the sand Himself, and although we are `compassed about with a
+cloud of witnesses,' we look to the Christ, the supreme Arbiter,
+and take acquittal or condemnation, life or death, from Him.
+
+That judgment, persistent all through each of our lives, is
+preliminary to the future tribunal and sentence. The Apostle
+employs in this context two distinct words, both of which are
+translated in our version `judge.' The one which is used in these
+three clauses, on which I have been commenting, means a
+preliminary examination, and the one which is used in the next
+verse means a final decisive trial and sentence. So, dear
+brethren, Christ is gathering materials for His final sentence;
+and you and I are writing the depositions which will be adduced in
+evidence. Oh! how little all that the world may have said about a
+man will matter then! Think of a man standing before that great
+white throne, and saying, `I held a very high place in the
+estimation of my neighbours. The newspapers and the reviews blew
+my trumpet assiduously. My name was carved upon the plinth of a
+marble statue, that my fellow-citizens set up in honour of my many
+virtues,'---and the name was illegible centuries before the statue
+was burned in the last fire!
+
+Brother! seek for the praise from Him, which is praise indeed. If He
+says, `Well done, good and faithful servant,' it matters little what
+censures men may pass on us. If He says, `I never knew you,' all
+their praises will not avail. `Wherefore we labour that, whether
+present or absent, we may be well-pleasing to Him.'
+
+\chapter{The Festal Life}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS v. 8}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven ... but with
+the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} v.
+8.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+There had been hideous immorality in the Corinthian Church. Paul
+had struck at it with heat and force, sternly commanding the
+exclusion of the sinner. He did so on the ground of the diabolical
+power of infection possessed by evil, and illustrated that by the
+very obvious metaphor of leaven, a morsel of which, as he says,
+`will leaven the whole lump,' or, as we say, `batch.' But the word
+`leaven' drew up from the depths of his memory a host of sacred
+associations connected with the Jewish Passover. He remembered the
+sedulous hunting in every Jewish house for every scrap of leavened
+matter; the slaying of the Paschal Lamb, and the following feast.
+Carried away by these associations, he forgets the sin in the
+Corinthian Church for a moment, and turns to set forth, in the
+words of the text, a very deep and penetrating view of what the
+Christian life is, how it is sustained, and what it demands.
+`Wherefore,' says he, `let us keep the feast ... with the
+unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.' That `wherefore' takes
+us back to the words before it, And what are these? `Christ our
+Passover is sacrificed for us'; therefore---because of that
+sacrifice, to us is granted the power, and on us is laid
+imperatively the obligation, to make life a festival and to purge
+ourselves. Now, in the notion of a feast, there are two things
+included---joy and plentiful sustenance. So there are three points
+here, which I have already indicated---what the Christian life is,
+a festival; on what it is sustained, the Paschal Sacrifice; what
+it demands, scrupulous purging out of the old leaven.
+
+I. The Christian life ought to be a continual festival.
+
+The Christian life a feast? It is more usually represented as a
+fight, a wrestle, a race; and such metaphors correspond, as it
+would appear, far more closely to the facts of our environment,
+and to the experiences of our hearts, than does such a metaphor as
+this. But the metaphor of the festival goes deeper than that of
+the fight or race, and it does not ignore the strenuous and
+militant side of the Christian life. No man ever lived a more
+strenuous life than Paul; no man had heavier tasks, and did them
+more cheerily; no man had a sterner fight and fought it more
+bravely. There is nothing soft, Epicurean, or oblivious of the
+patent sad facts of humanity in the declaration that after all,
+beneath all, above all, central to all, the Christian life is a
+glad festival, when it is the life that it ought to be.
+
+But you say, `Ah! it is all very well to call it so; but in the
+first place, continual joy is impossible in the presence of the
+difficulties, and often sadnesses, that meet us on our life's
+path; and, in the second place, it is folly to tell us to pump up
+emotions, or to ignore the occasions for much heaviness and sorrow
+of heart.' True; but, still, it is possible to cultivate such a
+temper as makes life habitually joyful. We can choose the aspect
+under which we by preference and habitually regard our lives. All
+emotion follows upon a preceding thought, or sensible experience,
+and we can pick the objects of our thoughts, and determine what
+aspect of our lives to look at most.
+
+The sky is often piled with stormy, heaped-up masses of blackness,
+but between them are lakes of calm blue. We can choose whether we
+look at the clouds or at the blue. \textit{These} are in the lower
+ranges; \textit{that} fills infinite spaces, upwards and out to
+the horizon. These are transient, eating themselves away even
+whilst we look, and black and thunderous as they may be, they are
+there but for a moment---that is perennial. If we are wise, we
+shall fix our gaze much rather on the blue than on the ugly
+cloud-rack that hides it, and thus shall minister to ourselves
+occasions for the noble kind of joy which is not noisy and
+boisterous, `like the crackling of thorns under a pot,' and does
+not foam itself away by its very ebullience, but is calm like the
+grounds of it; still, like the heaven to which it looks; eternal,
+like the God on whom it is fastened. If we would only steadfastly
+remember that the one source of worthy and enduring joy is God
+Himself, and listen to the command, `Rejoice in the Lord,' we
+should find it possible to `rejoice always.' For that thought of
+Him, His sufficiency, His nearness, His encompassing presence, His
+prospering eye, His aiding hand, His gentle consolation, His
+enabling help will take the sting out of even the bitterest of our
+sorrows, and will brace us to sustain the heaviest, otherwise
+crushing burdens, and greatly to `rejoice, though now for a season
+we are in heaviness through manifold temptations.' The Gulf Stream
+rushes into the northern hemisphere, melts the icebergs and warms
+the Polar seas, and so the joy of the Lord, if we set it before us
+as we can and should do, will minister to us a gladness which will
+make our lives a perpetual feast.
+
+But there is another thing that we can do; that is, we can clearly
+recognise the occasions for sorrow in our experience, and yet
+interpret them by the truths of the Christian faith. That is to
+say, we can think of them, not so much as they tend to make us sad
+or glad, but as they tend to make us more assured of our
+possession of, more ardent in our love towards, and more
+submissive in our attitude to, the all-ordering Love which is God.
+Brethren, if we thought of life, and all its incidents, even when
+these are darkest and most threatening, as being what it and they
+indeed are, His training of us into capacity for fuller
+blessedness, because fuller possession of Himself, we should be
+less startled at the commandment, `Rejoice in the Lord always,'
+and should feel that it was possible, though the figtree did not
+blossom, and there was no fruit in the vine, though the flocks
+were cut off from the pastures, and the herds from the stall, yet
+to rejoice in the God of our salvation. Rightly understood and
+pondered on, all the darkest passages of life are but like the
+cloud whose blackness determines the brightness of the rainbow on
+its front. Rightly understood and reflected on, these will teach
+us that the paradoxical commandment, `Count it all joy that ye
+fall into divers temptations,' is, after all, the voice of true
+wisdom speaking at the dictation of a clear-eyed faith.
+
+This text, since it is a commandment, implies that obedience to
+it, and therefore the realisation of this continual festal aspect
+of life, is very largely in our own power. Dispositions differ,
+some of us are constitutionally inclined to look at the blacker,
+and some at the brighter, side of our experiences. But our
+Christianity is worth little unless it can modify, and to some
+extent change, our natural tendencies. The joy of the Lord being
+our strength, the cultivation of joy in the Lord is largely our
+duty. Christian people do not sufficiently recognise that it is as
+incumbent on them to seek after this continual fountain of calm
+and heavenly joy flowing through their lives, as it is to
+cultivate some of the more recognised virtues and graces of
+Christian conduct and character.
+
+Secondly, we have here---
+
+II. The Christian life is a continual feeding on a sacrifice.
+
+`Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Wherefore let us keep
+the feast.' It is very remarkable that this is the only place in
+Paul's writings where he articulately pronounces that the Paschal
+Lamb is a type of Jesus Christ. There is only one other instance
+in the New Testament where that is stated with equal clearness and
+emphasis, and that is in John's account of the Crucifixion, where
+he recognises the fact that Christ died with limbs unbroken, as
+being a fulfilment, in the New Testament sense of that word, of
+what was enjoined in regard to the antitype, `a bone of him shall
+not be broken.'
+
+But whilst the definite statement which precedes my text that
+Christ is `our Passover,' and `sacrificed for us' as such, is
+unique in Paul's writings, the thought to which it gives clear and
+crystallised expression runs through the whole of the New
+Testament. It underlies the Lord's Supper. Did you ever think of
+how great was the self-assertion of Jesus Christ when He laid His
+hand on that sacredest of Jewish rites, which had been
+established, as the words of the institution of it say, to be `a
+perpetual memorial through all generations,' brushed it on one
+side, and in effect, said: `You do not need to remember the
+Passover any more. I am the true Paschal Lamb, whose blood
+sprinkled on the doorposts averts the sword of the destroying
+Angel, whose flesh, partaken of, gives immortal life. Remember Me,
+and this do in remembrance of Me.' The Lord's Supper witnesses
+that Jesus thought Himself to be what Paul tells the Corinthians
+that He is, even our Passover, sacrificed for us. But the point to
+be observed is this, that just as in that ancient ritual, the lamb
+slain became the food of the Israelites, so with us the Christ who
+has died is to be the sustenance of our souls, and of our
+Christian life. `Therefore let us keep the feast.'
+
+Feed upon Him; that is the essential central requirement for all
+Christian life, and what does feeding on Him mean? `How can this
+man give us his flesh to eat?' said the Jews, and the answer is
+plain now, though so obscure then. The flesh which He gave for the
+life of the world in His death, must by us be taken for the very
+nourishment of our souls, by the simple act of faith in Him. That
+is the feeding which brings not only sustenance but life. Christ's
+death for us is the basis, but it is only the basis, of Christ's
+living in us, and His death for me is of no use at all to me
+unless He that died for me lives in me. We feed on Him by faith,
+which not only trusts to the Sacrifice as atoning for sin, but
+feeds on it as communicating and sustaining eternal life---`Christ
+our Passover is sacrificed for us, wherefore let us keep the
+Feast.'
+
+Again, we keep the feast when our minds feed upon Christ by
+contemplation of what He is, what He has done, what He is doing,
+what He will do; when we take Him as `the Master-light of all our
+seeing,' and in Him, His words and works, His Passion,
+Resurrection, Ascension, Session as Sovereign at the right hand of
+God, find the perfect revelation of what God is, the perfect
+discovery of what man is, the perfect disclosure of what sin is,
+the perfect prophecy of what man may become, the Light of light,
+the answer to every question that our spirits can put about the
+loftiest verities of God and man, the universe and the future. We
+feed on Christ when, with lowly submission, we habitually subject
+thoughts, purposes, desires, to His authority, and when we let His
+will flow into, and make plastic and supple, our wills. We nourish
+our wills by submitting them to Jesus, and we feed on Him when we
+not only say `Lord! Lord!' but when we do the things that He says.
+We feed on Christ, when we let His great, sacred, all-wise,
+all-giving, all satisfying love flow into our restless hearts and
+make them still, enter into our vagrant affections and fix them on
+Himself. Thus when mind and conscience and will and heart all turn
+to Jesus, and in Him find their sustenance, we shall be filled
+with the feast of fat things which He has prepared for all people.
+With that bread we shall be satisfied, and with it only, for the
+husks of the swine are no food for the Father's son, and we `spend
+our money for that which is not bread, and our labour for that
+which satisfieth not,' if we look anywhere else than to the
+Paschal Lamb slain for us for the food of our souls.
+
+III. The Christian life is a continual purging out of the old
+leaven.
+
+I need not remind you how vivid and profoundly significant that
+emblem of leaven, as applied to all manner of evil, is. But let me
+remind you how, just as in the Jewish Ritual, the cleansing from
+all that was leavened was the essential pre-requisite to the
+participation in the feast, feeding on Jesus Christ, as I have
+tried to describe it, is absolutely impossible unless our leaven
+is cleansed away. Children spoil their appetites for wholesome
+food by eating sweetmeats. Men destroy their capacity for feeding
+on Christ by hungry desires, and gluttonous satisfying of those
+desires with the delusive sweets of this passing world. But, my
+brother, your experience, if you are a Christian man at all, will
+tell you that in the direct measure in which you have been drawn
+away into paltering with evil, your appetite for Christ and your
+capacity for gazing upon Him, contemplating Him, feeding on Him,
+has died out. There comes a kind of constriction in a man's throat
+when he is hungering after lesser good, especially when there is a
+tinge of evil in the supposed good that he is hungering after,
+which incapacitates Him from eating the bread of God, which is
+Jesus Christ.
+
+But let us remember that absolute cleansing from all sin is not
+essential, in order to have real participation in Jesus Christ.
+The Jew had to take every scrap of leaven out of his house before
+he began the Passover. If that were the condition for us, alas!
+for us all; but the effort after purity, though it has not
+entirely attained its aim, is enough. Sin abhorred does not
+prevent a man from participating in the Bread that came down from
+heaven.
+
+Then observe, too, that for this power to cleanse ourselves, we
+must have had some participation in Christ, by which there is
+given to us that new life that conquers evil. In the words
+immediately preceding my text, the Apostle bases his injunction to
+purge out the old leaven on the fact that `ye are unleavened.'
+Ideally, in so far as the power possessed by them was concerned,
+these Corinthians were unleavened, even whilst they were bid to
+purge out the leaven. That is to say, be what you are; realise
+your ideal, utilise the power you possess, and since by your faith
+there has been given to you a new life that can conquer all
+corruption and sin, see that you use the life that is given. Purge
+out the old leaven because ye are unleavened.
+
+One last word---this stringent exhortation, which makes Christian
+effort after absolute purity a Christian duty, and the condition
+of participation in the Paschal Lamb, is based upon that thought
+to which I have already referred, of the diabolical power of
+infection which Evil possesses. Either you must cast it out, or it
+will choke the better thing in you. It spreads and grows, and
+propagates itself, and works underground through and through the
+whole mass. A water-weed got into some of our canals years ago,
+and it has all but choked some of them. The slime on a pond
+spreads its green mantle over the whole surface with rapidity. If
+we do not eject Evil it will eject the good from us. Use the
+implanted power to cast out this creeping, advancing evil.
+Sometimes a wine-grower has gone into his cellars, and found in a
+cask no wine, but a monstrous fungus into which all the wine had,
+in the darkness, passed unnoticed. I fear some Christian people,
+though they do not know it, have something like that going on in
+them.
+
+It is possible for us all to keep this perpetual festival. To live
+in, on, for, Jesus Christ will give us victory over enemies,
+burdens, sorrows, sins. We may, if we will, dwell in a calm zone
+where no tempests rage, hear a perpetual strain of sweet music
+persisting through thunder peals of sorrow and suffering, and find
+a table spread for us in the presence of our enemies, at which we
+shall renew our strength for conflict, and whence we shall rise to
+fight the good fight a little longer, till we sit with Him at His
+table in His Kingdom, and `eat, and live for ever.'
+
+\chapter{Forms \textit{versus} Character}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS vii. 19; GALATIANS v. 6, vi. 16}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the
+keeping of the commandments of God.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} vii. 19. \\
+`For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth anything, nor
+uncircumcision, but faith which worketh by love.'---\textsc{Gal.}
+v. 6. \\
+`For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a
+new creature.'---\textsc{Gal.} vi. 16 (R.~V.).
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The great controversy which embittered so much of Paul's life, and
+marred so much of his activity, turned upon the question whether a
+heathen man could come into the Church simply by the door of
+faith, or whether he must also go through the gate of
+circumcision. We all know how Paul answered the question. Time,
+which settles all controversies, has settled that one so
+thoroughly that it is impossible to revive any kind of interest in
+it; and it may seem to be a pure waste of time to talk about it.
+But the principles that fought then are eternal, though the forms
+in which they manifest themselves vary with every varying age.
+
+The Ritualist---using that word in its broadest sense---on the one
+hand, and the Puritan on the other, represent permanent tendencies
+of human nature; and we find to-day the old foes with new faces.
+These three passages, which I have read, are Paul's deliverance on
+the question of the comparative value of external rites and
+spiritual character. They are remarkable both for the identity in
+the former part of each and for the variety in the latter. In all
+the three cases he affirms, almost in the same language, that
+`circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing,' that the
+Ritualist's rite and the Puritan's protest are equally
+insignificant in comparison with higher things. And then he varies
+the statement of what the higher things are, in a very remarkable
+and instructive fashion. The `keeping of the commandments of God,'
+says one of the texts, is the all-important matter. Then, as it
+were, he pierces deeper, and in another of the texts (I take the
+liberty of varying their order) pronounces that `a new creature'
+is the all-important thing. And then he pierces still deeper to
+the bottom of all, in the third text, and says the all-important
+thing is `faith which worketh by love.'
+
+I think I shall best bring out the force of these words by dealing
+first with that emphatic threefold proclamation of the nullity of
+all externalism; and then with the singular variations in the
+triple statement of what is essential, viz. spiritual conduct and
+character.
+
+I. First, the emphatic proclamation of the nullity of outward
+rites.
+
+`Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing,' say two
+texts. `Circumcision availeth nothing, and uncircumcision availeth
+nothing,' says the other. It neither is anything nor does
+anything. Did Paul say that because circumcision was a Jewish
+rite? No. As I believe, he said it because it was \textit{a rite};
+and because he had learned that the one thing needful was
+spiritual character, and that no external ceremonial of any sort
+could produce that. I think we are perfectly warranted in taking
+this principle of my text, and in extending it beyond the limits
+of the Jewish rite about which Paul was speaking. For if you
+remember, he speaks about baptism, in the first chapter of the
+First Epistle to the Corinthians, in a precisely similar tone and
+for precisely the same reason, when he says, in effect, `I
+baptized Crispus and Gaius and the household of Stephanas, and I
+think these are all. I am not quite sure. I do not keep any kind
+of record of such things; God did not send me to baptize, He sent
+me to preach the Gospel.'
+
+The thing that produced the spiritual result was not the rite, but
+the truth, and therefore he felt that his function was to preach
+the truth and leave the rite to be administered by others.
+Therefore we can extend the principle here to all externalisms of
+worship, in all forms, in all churches, and say that in comparison
+with the essentials of an inward Christianity they are nothing and
+they do nothing.
+
+They have their value. As long as we are here on earth, living in
+the flesh, we must have outward forms and symbolical rites. It is
+in Heaven that the seer `saw no temple.' Our sense-bound nature
+requires, and thankfully avails itself of, the help of external
+rites and ceremonials to lift us up towards the Object of our
+devotion. A man prays all the better if he bow his head, shut his
+eyes, and bend his knees. Forms do help us to the realisation of
+the realities, and the truths which they express and embody. Music
+may waft our souls to the heavens, and pictures may stir deep
+thoughts. That is the simple principle on which the value of all
+external aids to devotion depends. They may be helps towards the
+appreciation of divine truth, and to the suffusing of the heart
+with devout emotions which may lead to building up a holy
+character.
+
+There is a worth, therefore---an auxiliary and subordinate
+worth---in these things, and in that respect they are \textit{not}
+nothing, nor do they `avail nothing.' But then all external rites
+tend to usurp more than belongs to them, and in our weakness we
+are apt to cleave to them, and instead of using them as means to
+lift us higher, to stay in them, and as a great many of us do, to
+mistake the mere gratification of taste and the excitement of the
+sensibilities for worship. A bit of stained glass may be glowing
+with angel-forms and pictured saints, but it always keeps some of
+the light out, and it always hinders us from seeing through it.
+And all external worship and form have so strong a tendency to
+usurp more than belongs to them, and to drag us down to their own
+level, even whilst we think that we are praying, that I believe
+the wisest man will try to pare down the externals of his worship
+to the lowest possible point. If there be as much body as will
+keep a soul in, as much form as will embody the spirit, that is
+all that we want. What is more is dangerous.
+
+All form in worship is like fire, it is a good servant but it is a
+bad master, and it needs to be kept very rigidly in subordination,
+or else the spirituality of Christian worship vanishes before men
+know; and they are left with their dead forms which are only
+evils---crutches that make people limp by the very act of using
+them.
+
+Now, my dear friends, when that has happened, when men begin to
+say, as the people in Paul's time were saying about circumcision,
+and as people are saying in this day about Christian rites, that
+they are necessary, then it is needful to take up Paul's ground
+and to say, `No! they are nothing!' They are useful in a certain
+place, but if you make them obligatory, if you make them
+essential, if you say that grace is miraculously conveyed through
+them, then it is needful that we should raise a strong note of
+protestation, and declare their absolute nullity for the highest
+purpose, that of making that spiritual character which alone is
+essential.
+
+And I believe that this strange recrudescence---to use a modern
+word---of ceremonialism and aesthetic worship which we see all
+round about us, not only in the ranks of the Episcopal Church, but
+amongst Nonconformists, who are sighing for a less bare service,
+and here and there are turning their chapels into concert-rooms,
+and instead of preaching the Gospel are having `Services of Song'
+and the like---that all this makes it as needful to-day as ever it
+was to say to men: `Forms are not worship. Rites may crush the
+spirit. Men may yield to the sensuous impressions which they
+produce, and be lapped in an atmosphere of aesthetic emotion,
+without any real devotion.'
+
+Such externals are only worth anything if they make us grasp more
+firmly with our understandings and feel more profoundly with our
+hearts, the great truths of the Gospel. If they do that, they
+help; if they are not doing that, they hinder, and are to be
+fought against. And so we have again to proclaim to-day, as Paul
+did, `Circumcision is nothing,' `but the keeping of the
+commandments of God.'
+
+Then notice with what remarkable fairness and boldness and breadth
+the Apostle here adds that other clause: `and uncircumcision is
+nothing.' It is a very hard thing for a man whose life has been
+spent in fighting against an error, not to exaggerate the value of
+his protest. It is a very hard thing for a man who has been
+delivered from the dependence upon forms, not to fancy that his
+formlessness is what the other people think that their forms are.
+The Puritan who does not believe that a man can be a good man
+because he is a Ritualist or a Roman Catholic, is committing the
+very same error as the Ritualist or the Roman Catholic who does
+not believe that the Puritan can be a Christian unless he has been
+`christened.' The two people are exactly the same, only the one
+has hold of the stick at one end, and the other at the other.
+There may be as much idolatry in superstitious reliance upon the
+bare worship as in the advocacy of the ornate; and many a
+Nonconformist who fancies that he has `never bowed the knee to
+Baal' is as true an idol-worshipper in his superstitious
+abhorrence of the ritualism that he sees in other communities, as
+are the men who trust in it the most.
+
+It is a large attainment in Christian character to be able to say
+with Paul, `Circumcision is nothing, and my own favourite point of
+uncircumcision is nothing either. Neither the one side nor the
+other touches the essentials.'
+
+II. Now let us look at the threefold variety of the designation of
+these essentials here.
+
+In our first text from the Epistle to the Corinthians we read,
+`Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the
+keeping of the commandments of God.' If we finished the sentence
+it would be, `but the keeping of the commandments of God is
+everything.'
+
+And by that `keeping the commandments,' of course, the Apostle
+does not mean merely external obedience. He means something far
+deeper than that, which I put into this plain word, that the one
+essential of a Christian life is the conformity of the will with
+God's---not the external obedience merely, but the entire
+surrender and the submission of my will to the will of my Father
+in Heaven. That is the all-important thing; that is what God
+wants; that is the end of all rites and ceremonies; that is the
+end of all revelation and of all utterances of the divine heart.
+The Bible, Christ's mission, His passion and death, the gift of
+His Divine Spirit, and every part of the divine dealings in
+providence, all converge upon this one aim and goal. For this
+purpose the Father worketh hitherto, and Christ works, that man's
+will may yield and bow itself wholly and happily and lovingly to
+the great infinite will of the Father in heaven.
+
+Brethren! that is the perfection of a man's nature, when his will
+fits on to God's like one of Euclid's triangles superimposed upon
+another, and line for line coincides. When his will allows a free
+passage to the will of God, without resistance or deflection, as
+light travels through transparent glass; when his will responds to
+the touch of God's finger upon the keys, like the telegraphic
+needle to the operator's hand, then man has attained all that God
+and religion can do for him, all that his nature is capable of;
+and far beneath his feet may be the ladders of ceremonies and
+forms and outward acts, by which he climbed to that serene and
+blessed height, `Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is
+nothing, but the keeping of God's commandments is everything.'
+
+That submission of will is the sum and the test of your
+Christianity. Your Christianity does not consist only in a mere
+something which you call faith in Jesus Christ. It does not
+consist in emotions, however deep and blessed and genuine they may
+be. It does not consist in the acceptance of a creed. All these
+are means to an end. They are meant to drive the wheel of life, to
+build up character, to make your deepest wish to be, `Father! not
+my will, but Thine, be done.' In the measure in which that is your
+heart's desire, and not one hair's-breadth further, have you a
+right to call yourself a Christian.
+
+But, then, I can fancy a man saying: `It is all very well to talk
+about bowing the will in this fashion; how can I do that?' Well,
+let us take our second text---the third in the order of their
+occurrence---`For neither circumcision is anything, nor
+uncircumcision, but a new creature.' That is to say, if we are
+ever to keep the will of God we must be made over again. Ay! we
+must! Our own consciences tell us that; the history of all the
+efforts that ever we have made---and I suppose all of us have made
+some now and then, more or less earnest and more or less
+persistent---tells us that there needs to be a stronger hand than
+ours to come into the fight if it is ever to be won by us. There
+is nothing more heartless and more impotent than to preach, `Bow
+your wills to God, and then you will be happy; bow your wills to
+God, and then you will be good.' If that is all the preacher has
+to say, his powerless words will but provoke the answer, `We
+cannot. Tell the leopard to change his spots, or the Ethiopian his
+skin, as soon as tell a man to reduce this revolted kingdom within
+him to obedience, and to bow his will to the will of God. We
+cannot do it.' But, brethren, in that word, `a new creature,' lies
+a promise from God; for a creature implies a creator. `It is He
+that hath made us, and not we ourselves.' The very heart of what
+Christ has to offer us is the gift of His own life to dwell in our
+hearts, and by its mighty energy to make us free from the law of
+sin and death which binds our wills. We may have our spirits
+moulded into His likeness, and new tastes, and new desires, and
+new capacities infused into us, so as that we shall not be left
+with our own poor powers to try and force ourselves into obedience
+to God's will, but that submission and holiness and love that
+keeps the commandments of God, will spring up in our renewed
+spirits as their natural product and growth. Oh! you men and women
+who have been honestly trying, half your lifetime, to make
+yourselves what you know God wants you to be, and who are obliged
+to confess that you have failed, hearken to the message: `If any
+man be in Christ, he is a new creature, old things are passed
+away.' The one thing needful is keeping the commandments of God,
+and the only way by which we can keep the commandments of God is
+that we should be formed again into the likeness of Him of whom
+alone it is true that `He did always the things that pleased' God.
+
+And so we come to the last of these great texts: `In Christ Jesus,
+neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but
+faith which worketh by love.' That is to say, if we are to be made
+over again, we must have faith in Christ Jesus. We have got to the
+root now, so far as we are concerned. We must keep the
+commandments of God; if we are to keep the commandments we must be
+made over again, and if our hearts ask how can we receive that new
+creating power into our lives, the answer is, by `faith which
+worketh by love.'
+
+Paul did not believe that external rites could make men partakers
+of a new nature, but he believed that if a man would trust in
+Jesus Christ, the life of that Christ would flow into his opened
+heart, and a new spirit and nature would be born in him. And,
+therefore, his triple requirements come all down to this one, so
+far as we are concerned, as the beginning and the condition of the
+other two. `Neither circumcision does anything, nor
+uncircumcision, but faith which worketh by love,' does everything.
+He that trusts Christ opens his heart to Christ, who comes with
+His new-creating Spirit, and makes us willing in the day of His
+power to keep His commandments.
+
+But faith leads us to obedience in yet another fashion, than this
+opening of the door of the heart for the entrance of the
+new-creating Spirit. It leads to it in the manner which is
+expressed by the words of our text, `worketh by love.' Faith shows
+itself living, because it leads us to love, and through love it
+produces its effects upon conduct.
+
+Two things are implied in this designation of faith. If you trust
+Christ you will love Him. That is plain enough. And you will not
+love Him unless you trust Him. Though it lies wide of my present
+purpose, let us take this lesson in passing. You cannot work
+yourself up into a spasm or paroxysm of religious emotion and love
+by resolution or by effort. All that you can do is to go and look
+at the Master and get near Him, and that will warm you up. You can
+love if you trust. Your trust will make you love; unless you trust
+you will never love Him.
+
+The second thing implied is, that if you love you will obey. That
+is plain enough. The keeping of the commandments will be easy
+where there is love in the heart. The will will bow where there is
+love in the heart. Love is the only fire that is hot enough to
+melt the iron obstinacy of a creature's will. The will cannot be
+driven. Strike it with violence and it stiffens; touch it gently
+and it yields. If you try to put an iron collar upon the will,
+like the demoniac in the Gospels, the touch of the apparent
+restraint drives it into fury, and it breaks the bands asunder.
+Fasten it with the silken leash of love, and a `little child' can
+lead it. So faith works by love, because whom we trust we shall
+love, and whom we love we shall obey.
+
+Therefore we have got to the root now, and nothing is needful but
+an operative faith, out of which will come all the blessed
+possession of a transforming Spirit, and all sublimities and
+noblenesses of an obedient and submissive will.
+
+My brother! Paul and James shake hands here. There is a `faith' so
+called, which does not work. It is dead! Let me beseech you, none
+of you to rely upon what you choose to call your faith in Jesus
+Christ, but examine it. Does it do anything? Does it help you to
+be like Him? Does it open your hearts for His Spirit to come in?
+Does it fill them with love to that Master, a love which proves
+itself by obedience? Plain questions, questions that any man can
+answer; questions that go to the root of the whole matter. If your
+faith does that, it is genuine; if it does not, it is not.
+
+And do not trust either to forms, or to your freedom from forms.
+They will not save your souls, they will not make you more
+Christ-like. They will not help you to pardon, purity, holiness,
+blessedness. In these respects neither if we have them are we the
+better, nor if we have them not are we the worse. If you are
+trusting to Christ, and by that faith are having your hearts
+moulded and made over again into all holy obedience, then you have
+all that you need. Unless you have, though you partook of all
+Christian rites, though you believed all Christian truth, though
+you fought against superstitious reliance on forms, you have not
+the one thing needful, for `in Christ Jesus neither circumcision
+availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but faith which worketh by
+love.'
+
+\chapter{Slaves and Free}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS vii. 22}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`He that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord's
+free man: likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ's
+servant.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} vii. 22.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+This remarkable saying occurs in a remarkable connection, and is
+used for a remarkable purpose. The Apostle has been laying down
+the principle, that the effect of true Christianity is greatly to
+diminish the importance of outward circumstance. And on that
+principle he bases an advice, dead in the teeth of all the maxims
+recognised by worldly prudence. He says, in effect, `Mind very
+little about getting on and getting up. Do God's will wherever you
+are, and let the rest take care of itself.' Now, the world says,
+`Struggle, wriggle, fight, do anything to better yourself.' Paul
+says, `You will better yourself by getting nearer God, and if you
+secure that---art thou a slave? care not for it; if thou mayest be
+free, use it rather; art thou bound to a wife? seek not to be
+loosed; art thou loosed? seek not to be bound; art thou
+circumcised? seek not to be uncircumcised; art thou a Gentile?
+seek not to become in outward form a Jew.' Never mind about
+externals: the main thing is our relation to Jesus Christ, because
+in that there is what will be compensation for all the
+disadvantages of any disadvantageous circumstances, and in that
+there is what will take the gilt off the gingerbread of any
+superficial and fleeting good, and will bring a deep-seated and
+permanent blessing.
+
+Now, I am not going to deal in this sermon with that general
+principle, nor even to be drawn aside to speak of the tone in
+which the Apostle here treats the great abomination of slavery,
+and the singular advice that he gives to its victims; though the
+consideration of the tone of Christianity to that master-evil of
+the old world might yield a great many thoughts very relevant to
+pressing questions of to-day. But my one object is to fix upon the
+combination which he here brings out in regard to the essence of
+the Christian life; how that in itself it contains both members of
+the antithesis, servitude and freedom; so that the Christian man
+who is free externally is Christ's slave, and the Christian man
+who is outwardly in bondage is emancipated by his union with Jesus
+Christ.
+
+There are two thoughts here, the application in diverse directions
+of the same central idea---viz. the slavery of Christ's free men,
+and the freedom of Christ's slaves. And I deal briefly with these
+two now.
+
+I. First, then, note how, according to the one-half of the
+antithesis, Christ's freed men are slaves.
+
+Now, the way in which the New Testament deals with that awful
+wickedness of a man held in bondage by a man is extremely
+remarkable. It might seem as if such a hideous piece of immorality
+were altogether incapable of yielding any lessons of good. But the
+Apostles have no hesitation whatever in taking slavery as a clear
+picture of the relation in which all Christian people stand to
+Jesus Christ their Lord. He is the owner and we are the slaves.
+For you must remember that the word most inadequately rendered
+here, `servant' does not mean a hired man who has, of his own
+volition, given himself for a time to do specific work and get
+wages for it; but it means `a bond-slave,' a chattel owned by
+another. All the ugly associations which gather round the word are
+transported bodily into the Christian region, and there, instead
+of being hideous, take on a shape of beauty, and become
+expressions of the deepest and most blessed truths, in reference
+to Christian men's dependence upon, and submission to, and place
+in the household and the heart of, Jesus Christ, their Owner.
+
+And what is the centre idea that lies in this metaphor, if you
+like to call it so? It is this: absolute authority, which has for
+its correlative---for the thing in us that answers to
+it---unconditional submission. Jesus Christ has the perfect right
+to command each of us, and we are bound to bow ourselves,
+unreluctant, unmurmuring, unhesitating, with complete submission
+at His feet. His authority, and our submission, go far, far deeper
+than the most despotic sway of the most tyrannous master, or than
+the most abject submission of the most downtrodden slave. For no
+man can coerce another man's will, and no man can require more, or
+can ever get more, than that outward obedience which may be
+rendered with the most sullen and fixed rebellion of a hating
+heart and an obstinate will. But Jesus Christ demands that if we
+call ourselves Christians we shall bring, not our members only as
+instruments to Him, in outward surrender and service, but that we
+shall yield ourselves, with our capacities of willing and
+desiring, utterly, absolutely, constantly to Him.
+
+The founder of the Jesuits laid it down as a rule for his Order
+that each member of it was to be at the master's disposal like a
+corpse, or a staff in the hand of a blind man. That was horrible.
+But the absolute putting of myself at the disposal of another's
+will, which is expressed so tyrannously in Loyola's demand, is the
+simple duty of every Christian, and as long as we have
+recalcitrating wills, which recoil at anything which Christ
+commands or appoints, and perk up their own inclinations in the
+face of His solemn commandment, or that shrink from doing and
+suffering whatsoever He imposes and enjoins, we have still to
+learn what it means to be Christ's disciples.
+
+Dear brethren, absolute submission is not all that makes a
+disciple, but, depend upon it, there is no discipleship worth
+calling by the name without it. So I come to each of you with His
+message to you:---Down on your faces before Him! Bow your
+obstinate will, surrender yourselves and accept Him as absolute,
+dominant Lord over your whole being! Are you Christians after that
+pattern? Being freemen, are you Christ's slaves?
+
+It does not matter what sort of work the owner sets his household
+of slaves to do. One man is picked out to be his pipe-bearer, or
+his shoe-cleaner; and, if the master is a sovereign, another one
+is sent off, perhaps, to be governor of a province, or one of his
+council. They are all slaves; and the service that each does is
+equally important.
+
+\begin{verse}
+`All service ranks the same with God: \\
+ There is no last nor first.'
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent What does it matter what you and I are set to do?
+Nothing. And, so, why need we struggle and wear our hearts out to
+get into conspicuous places, or to do work that shall bring some
+revenue of praise said glory to ourselves? `Play well thy part;
+there all the honour lies,' the world can say. Serve Christ in
+anything, and all His servants are alike in His sight.
+
+The slave-owner had absolute power of life and death over his
+dependants. He could split up families; he could sell away dear
+ones; he could part husband and wife, parent and child. The slave
+was his, and he could do what he liked with his own, according to
+the cruel logic of ancient law. And Jesus Christ, the Lord of the
+household, the Lord of providence, can say to this one, `Go!' and
+he goes into the mists and the shadows of death. And He can say to
+those who are most closely united, `Loose your hands! I have need
+of one of you yonder. I have need of the other one here.' And if
+we are wise, if we are His servants in any real deep sense, we
+shall not kick against the appointments of His supreme,
+autocratic, and yet most loving Providence, but be content to
+leave the arbitrament of life and death, of love united or of love
+parted, in His hands, and say, `Whether we live we are the Lord's,
+or whether we die we are the Lord's; living or dying we are His.'
+
+The slave-owner owned all that the slave owned. He gave him a
+little cottage, with some humble sticks of furniture in it; and a
+bit of ground on which to grow his vegetables for his family. But
+he to whom the owner of the vegetables and the stools belonged
+owned them too. And if we are Christ's servants, our banker's book
+is Christ's, and our purse is Christ's, and our investments are
+Christ's; and our mills, and our warehouses, and our shops and our
+businesses are His. We are not His slaves, if we arrogate to
+ourselves the right of doing what we like with His possessions.
+
+And, then, still further, there comes into our Apostle's picture
+here yet another point of resemblance between slaves and the
+disciples of Jesus. For the hideous abominations of the
+slave-market are transferred to the Christian relation, and
+defecated and cleansed of all their abominations and cruelty
+thereby. For what immediately follows my text is, `Ye are bought
+with a price.' Jesus Christ has won us for Himself. There is only
+one price that can buy a heart, and that is a heart. There is only
+one way of getting a man to be mine, and that is by giving myself
+to be his. So we come to the very vital, palpitating centre of all
+Christianity when we say, `He gave Himself for us, that He might
+acquire to Himself a people for His possession.' Thus His purchase
+of His slave, when we remember that it is the buying of a man in
+his inmost personality, changes all that might seem harsh in the
+requirement of absolute submission into the most gracious and
+blessed privilege. For when I am won by another, because that
+other has given him or her whole self to me, then the language of
+love is submission, and the conformity of the two wills is the
+delight of each loving will. Whoever has truly been wooed into
+relationship with Jesus, by reflection upon the love with which
+Jesus grapples him to His heart, finds that there is nothing so
+blessed as to yield one's self utterly and for ever to His
+service.
+
+The one bright point in the hideous institution of slavery was,
+that it bound the master to provide for the slave, and though that
+was degrading to the inferior, it made his life a careless,
+child-like, merry life, even amidst the many cruelties and
+abominations of the system. But what was a good, dashed with a
+great deal of evil, in that relation of man to man, comes to be a
+pure blessing and good in our relation to Him. If I am Christ's
+slave, it is His business to take care of His own property, and I
+do not need to trouble myself much about it. If I am His slave, He
+will be quite sure to find me in food and necessaries enough to
+get His tale of work out of me; and I may cast all my care upon
+Him, for He careth for me. So, brethren, absolute submission and
+the devolution of all anxiety on the Master are what is laid upon
+us, if we are Christ's slaves.
+
+II. Then there is the other side, about which I must say,
+secondly, a word or two; and that is, the freedom of Christ's
+slaves.
+
+As the text puts it, `He that is called, being a servant, is the
+Lord's freedman.' A freedman was one who was emancipated, and who
+therefore stood in a relation of gratitude to his emancipator and
+patron. So in the very word `freedman' there is contained the idea
+of submission to Him who has struck off the fetters.
+
+But, apart from that, let me just remind you, in a sentence or
+two, that whilst there are many other ways by which men have
+sought, and have partially attained, deliverance from the many
+fetters and bondages that attach to our earthly life, the one
+perfect way by which a man can be truly, in the deepest sense of
+the word and in his inmost being, a free man is by faith in Jesus
+Christ.
+
+I do not for a moment forget how wisdom and truth, and noble aims
+and high purposes, and culture of various kinds have, in lower
+degrees and partially, emancipated men from self and flesh and sin
+and the world, and all the other fetters that bind us. But sure I
+am that the process is never so completely and so assuredly
+effected as by the simple way of absolute submission to Jesus
+Christ, taking Him for the supreme and unconditional Arbiter and
+Sovereign of a life.
+
+If we do that, brethren, if we really yield ourselves to Him, in
+heart and will, in life and conduct, submitting our understanding
+to His infallible Word, and our wills to His authority, regulating
+our conduct by His perfect pattern, and in all things seeking to
+serve Him and to realise His presence, then be sure of this, that
+we shall be set free from the one real bondage, and that is the
+bondage of our own wicked selves. There is no such tyranny as mob
+tyranny; and there is no such slavery as to be ruled by the mob of
+our own passions and lusts and inclinations and other meannesses
+that yelp and clamour within us, and seek to get hold of us and to
+sway. There is only one way by which the brute domination of the
+lower part of our nature can be surely and thoroughly put down,
+and that is by turning to Jesus Christ and saying to Him, `Lord!
+do Thou rule this anarchic kingdom within me, for I cannot govern
+it myself. Do Thou guide and direct and subdue.' You can only
+govern yourself and be free from the compulsion of your own evil
+nature when you surrender the control to the Master, and say ever,
+`Speak, Lord! for Thy slave hears. Here am I, send me.'
+
+And that is the only way by which a man can be delivered from the
+bondage of dependence upon outward things. I said at the beginning
+of these remarks that my text occurred in the course of a
+discussion in which the Apostle was illustrating the tendency of
+true Christian faith to set man free from, and to make him largely
+independent of, the varieties in external circumstances. Christian
+faith does so, because it brings into a life a sufficient
+compensation for all losses, limitations, and sorrows, and a good
+which is the reality of which all earthly goods are but shadows.
+So the slave may be free in Christ, and the poor man may be rich
+in Him, and the sad man may be joyful, and the joyful man may be
+delivered from excess of gladness, and the rich man be kept from
+the temptations and sins of wealth, and the free man be taught to
+surrender his liberty to the Lord who makes him free. Thus, if we
+have the all-sufficient compensation which there is in Jesus
+Christ, the satisfaction for all our needs and desires, we do not
+need to trouble ourselves so much as we sometimes do about these
+changing things round about us. Let them come, let them go; let
+the darkness veil the light, and the light illuminate the
+darkness; let summer and winter alternate; let tribulation and
+prosperity succeed each other; we have a source of blessedness
+unaffected by these. Ice may skin the surface of the lake, but
+deep beneath, the water is at the same temperature in winter and
+in summer. Storms may sweep the face of the deep, but in the abyss
+there is calm which is not stagnation. So he that cleaves to
+Christ is delivered from the slavery that binds men to the details
+and accidents of outward life.
+
+And if we are the servants of Christ, we shall be set free, in the
+measure in which we are His, from the slavery which daily becomes
+more oppressive as the means of communication become more
+complete, the slavery to popular opinion and to men round us. Dare
+to be singular; take your beliefs at first hand from the Master.
+Never mind what fellow-slaves say. It is His smile or frown that
+is of importance. `Ye are bought with a price; be not servants of
+men.'
+
+And so, brethren, `choose you this day whom ye will serve.' You
+are not made to be independent. You must serve some thing or
+person. Recognise the narrow limitations within which your choice
+lies, and the issues which depend upon it. It is not whether you
+will serve Christ or whether you will be free. It is whether you
+will serve Christ or your own worst self, the world, men, and I
+was going to add, the flesh and the devil. Make your choice. He
+has bought you. You belong to Him by His death. Yield yourselves
+to Him, it is the only way of breaking your chains. He that doeth
+sin is the servant of sin. `If the Son make you free, ye shall be
+free indeed,' and not only free; for the King's slaves are princes
+and nobles, and `all things are yours, and ye are Christ's.' They
+who say to Him `O Lord! truly I am Thy servant,' receive from Him
+the rank of kings and priests to God, and shall reign with Him for
+ever.
+
+\chapter{The Christian Life}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS vii. 24}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Brethren, let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with
+God.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} vii. 24.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+You find that three times within the compass of a very few verses
+this injunction is repeated. `As God hath distributed to every
+man,' says the Apostle in the seventeenth verse, `as the Lord hath
+called every one, so let him walk. And so ordain I in all the
+churches.' Then again in the twentieth verse, `Let every man abide
+in the same calling wherein he is called.' And then finally in our
+text.
+
+The reason for this emphatic reiteration is not difficult to
+ascertain. There were strong temptations to restlessness besetting
+the early Christians. The great change from heathenism to
+Christianity would seem to loosen the joints of all life, and
+having been swept from their anchorage in religion, all external
+things would appear to be adrift. It was most natural that a man
+should seek to alter even the circumstances of his outward life,
+when such a revolution had separated him from his ancient self.
+Hence would tend to come the rupture of family ties, the
+separation of husband and wife, the Jewish convert seeking to
+become like a Gentile, the Gentile seeking to become like a Jew;
+the slave trying to be free, the freeman, in some paroxysm of
+disgust at his former condition, trying to become a slave. These
+three cases are all referred to in the context---marriage,
+circumcision, slavery. And for all three the Apostle has the same
+advice to give---`Stop where you are.' In whatever condition you
+were when God's invitation drew you to Himself---for that, and not
+being set to a `vocation' in life, is the meaning of the word
+`called' here---remain in it.
+
+And then, on the other hand, there was every reason why the
+Apostle and his co-workers should set themselves, by all means in
+their power, to oppose this restlessness. For, if Christianity in
+those early days had once degenerated into the mere instrument of
+social revolution, its development would have been thrown back for
+centuries, and the whole worth and power of it, for those who
+first apprehended it, would have been lost. So you know Paul never
+said a word to encourage any precipitate attempts to change
+externals. He let slavery---he let war alone; he let the tyranny
+of the Roman Empire alone---not because he was a coward, not
+because he thought that these things were not worth meddling with,
+but because he, like all wise men, believed in making the tree
+good and then its fruit good. He believed in the diffusion of the
+principles which he proclaimed, and the mighty Name which he
+served, as able to girdle the poison-tree, and to take the bark
+off it, and the rest, the slow dying, might be left to the work of
+time. And the same general idea underlies the words of my text.
+`Do not try to change,' he says, `do not trouble about external
+conditions; keep to your Christian profession; let those alone,
+they will right themselves. Art thou a slave? Seek not to be
+freed. Art thou circumcised? Seek not to be uncircumcised. Get
+hold of the central, vivifying, transmuting influence, and all the
+rest is a question of time.'
+
+But, besides this more especial application of the words of my text
+to the primitive times, it carries with it, dear brethren, a large
+general principle that applies to all times---a principle, I may
+say, dead in the teeth of the maxims upon which life is being
+ordered by the most of us. \textit{Our} maxim is, `Get on!' Paul's
+is, `Never mind about getting \textit{on}, get \textit{up}!' Our
+notion is---`Try to make the circumstances what I would like to have
+them.' Paul's is---`Leave circumstances to take care of themselves,
+or rather leave God to take care of the circumstances. You get close
+to Him, and hold His hand, and everything else will right itself.'
+Only he is not preaching stolid acquiescence. His previous
+injunctions were---`Let every man abide in the same calling wherein
+he was called.' He sees that that may be misconceived and abused,
+and so, in his third reiteration of the precept, he puts in a word
+which throws a flood of light upon the whole thing---`Let every man
+wherein he is called therein abide.' Yes, but that is not
+all---`therein abide \textit{with God}!' Ay, that is it! not an
+impossible stoicism; not hypocritical, fanatical contempt of the
+external. But whilst that gets its due force and weight, whilst a
+man yields himself in a measure to the natural tastes and
+inclinations which God has given him, and with the intention that he
+should find there subordinate guidance and impulse for his life,
+still let him abide where he is called with God, and seek to
+increase his fellowship with Him, as the main thing that he has to
+do.
+
+I. Thus we are led from the words before us first to the thought
+that our chief effort in life ought to be union with God.
+
+`Abide with God,' which, being put into other words, means, I
+think, mainly two things---constant communion, the occupation of
+all our nature with Him, and, consequently, the recognition of His
+will in all circumstances.
+
+As to the former, we have the mind and heart and will of God
+revealed to us for the light, the love, the obedience of our will
+and heart and mind; and our Apostle's precept is, first, that we
+should try, moment by moment, in all the bustle and stir of our
+daily life, to have our whole being consciously directed to and
+engaged with, fertilised and calmed by contact with, the perfect
+and infinite nature of our Father in heaven.
+
+As we go to our work again to-morrow morning, what difference
+would obedience to this precept make upon my life and yours?
+Before all else, and in the midst of all else, we should think of
+that Divine Mind that in the heavens is waiting to illumine our
+darkness; we should feel the glow of that uncreated and perfect
+Love, which, in the midst of change and treachery, of coldness and
+of `greetings where no kindness is,' in the midst of masterful
+authority and unloving command, is ready to fill our hearts with
+tenderness and tranquillity: we should bow before that Will which
+is absolute and supreme indeed, but neither arbitrary nor harsh,
+which is `the eternal purpose that He hath purposed in Himself'
+indeed, but is also `the good pleasure of His goodness and the
+counsel of His grace.'
+
+And with such a God near to us ever in our faithful thoughts, in
+our thankful love, in our lowly obedience, with such a mind
+revealing itself to us, and such a heart opening its hidden
+storehouses for us as we approach, like some star that, as one
+gets nearer to it, expands its disc and glows into rich colour,
+which at a distance was but pallid silver, and such a will
+sovereign above all, energising, even through opposition, and
+making obedience a delight, what room, brethren, would there be in
+our lives for agitations, and distractions, and regrets, and
+cares, and fears---what room for earthly hopes or for sad
+remembrances? They die in the fruition of a present God
+all-sufficient for mind, and heart, and will---even as the sun
+when it is risen with a burning heat may scorch and wither the
+weeds that grow about the base of the fruitful tree, whose deeper
+roots are but warmed by the rays that ripen the rich clusters
+which it bears. `Let every man, wherein he is called, therein
+abide \textit{with God}.'
+
+And then, as a consequence of such an occupation of the whole
+being with God, there will follow that second element which is
+included in the precept, namely, the recognition of God's will as
+operating in and determining all circumstances. When our whole
+soul is occupied with Him, we shall see Him everywhere. And this
+ought to be our honest effort---to connect everything which
+befalls ourselves and the world with Him. We should see that
+Omnipotent Will, the silent energy which flows through all being,
+asserting itself through all secondary causes, marching on towards
+its destined and certain goal, amidst all the whirl and
+perturbation of events, bending even the antagonism of rebels and
+the unconsciousness of godless men, as well as the play of
+material instruments, to its own purposes, and swinging and
+swaying the whole set and motion of things according to its own
+impulse and by the touch of its own fingers.
+
+Such a faith does not require us to overlook the visible occasions
+for the things which befall us, nor to deny the stable laws
+according to which that mighty will operates in men's lives.
+Secondary causes? Yes. Men's opposition and crime? Yes. Our own
+follies and sins? No doubt. Blessings and sorrows falling
+indiscriminately on a whole community or a whole world? Certainly.
+And yet the visible agents are not the sources, but only the
+vehicles of the power, the belting and shafting which transmit a
+mighty impulse which they had nothing to do in creating. And the
+antagonism subserves the purposes of the rule which it opposes, as
+the blow of the surf may consolidate the sea-wall that it breaks
+against. And our own follies and sins may indeed sorrowfully shadow
+our lives, and bring on us pains of body and disasters in fortune,
+and stings in spirit for which we alone are responsible, and which
+we have no right to regard as inscrutable judgments---yet even these
+bitter plants of which our own hands have sowed the seed, spring by
+His merciful will, and \textit{are} to be regarded as His loving,
+fatherly chastisements---sent before to warn us by a premonitory
+experience that `the wages of sin is death.' As a rule, God does not
+interpose to pick a man out of the mud into which he has been
+plunged by his own faults and follies, until he has learned the
+lessons which he can find in plenty down in the slough, if he will
+only look for them! And the fact that some great calamity or some
+great joy affects a wide circle of people, does not make its having
+a special lesson and meaning for each of them at all doubtful.
+\textit{There} is one of the great depths of all-moving wisdom and
+providence, that in the very self-same act it is in one aspect
+universal, and in another special and individual. The ordinary
+notion of a special providence goes perilously near the belief that
+God's will is less concerned in some parts of a man's life than in
+others. It is very much like desecrating and secularising a whole
+land by the very act of focussing the sanctity in some single
+consecrated shrine. But the true belief is that the whole sweep of a
+life is under the will of God, and that when, for instance, war
+ravages a nation, though the sufferers be involved in a common ruin
+occasioned by murderous ambition and measureless pride, yet for each
+of the sufferers the common disaster has a special message. Let us
+believe in a divine will which regards each individual caught up in
+the skirts of the horrible storm, even as it regards each individual
+on whom the equal rays of His universal sunshine fall. Let us
+believe that every single soul has a place in the heart, and is
+taken into account in the purposes of Him who moves the tempest, and
+makes His sun to shine upon the unthankful and on the good. Let us,
+in accordance with the counsel of the Apostle here, first of all try
+to anchor and rest our own souls fast and firm in God all the day
+long, that, grasping His hand, we may look out upon all the confused
+dance of fleeting circumstances and say, `Thy will is done on
+earth'---if not yet `as it is done in heaven,' still done in the
+issues and events of all---and done with my cheerful obedience and
+thankful acceptance of its commands and allotments in my own life.
+
+II. The second idea which comes out of these words is this---Such
+union with God will lead to contented continuance in our place,
+whatever it be.
+
+Our text is as if Paul had said, `You have been ``called'' in such
+and such worldly circumstances. The fact proves that these
+circumstances do not obstruct the highest and richest blessings.
+The light of God can shine on your souls through them. Since then
+you have such sacred memorials associated with them, and know by
+experience that fellowship with God is possible in them, do you
+remain where you are, and keep hold of the God who has visited you
+in them.'
+
+If once, in accordance with the thoughts already suggested, our
+minds have, by God's help, been brought into something like real,
+living fellowship with Him, and we have attained the wisdom that
+pierces through the external to the Almighty will that underlies
+all its mazy whirl, then why should we care about shifting our
+place? Why should we trouble ourselves about altering these
+varying events, since each in its turn is a manifestation of His
+mind and will; each in its turn is a means of discipline for us;
+and through all their variety a single purpose works, which tends
+to a single end---`that we should be partakers of His holiness'?
+
+And that is the one point of view from which we can bear to look
+upon the world and not be utterly bewildered and over-mastered by
+it. Calmness and central peace are ours; a true appreciation of
+all outward good and a charm against the bitterest sting of
+outward evils are ours; a patient continuance in the place where
+He has set us is ours---when by fellowship with Him we have
+learned to look upon our work as primarily doing His will, and
+upon all our possessions and conditions primarily as means for
+making us like Himself. Most men seem to think that they have gone
+to the very bottom of the thing when they have classified the
+gifts of fortune as good or evil, according as they produce
+pleasure or pain. But that is a poor, superficial classification.
+It is like taking and arranging books by their bindings and
+flowers by their colours. Instead of saying, `We divide life into
+two halves, and we put there all the joyful, and here all the sad,
+for that is the ruling distinction'---let us rather say, `The
+whole is one, because it all comes from one purpose, and it all
+tends towards one end. The only question worth asking in regard to
+the externals of our life is---How far does each thing help me to
+be a good man? how far does it open my understanding to apprehend
+Him? how far does it make my spirit pliable and plastic under His
+touch? how far does it make me capable of larger reception of
+greater gifts from Himself? what is its effect in preparing me for
+that world beyond?' Is there any other greater, more satisfying,
+more majestic thought of life than this---the scaffolding by which
+souls are built up into the temple of God? And to care whether a
+thing is painful or pleasant is as absurd as to care whether the
+bricklayer's trowel is knocking the sharp corner off a brick, or
+plastering mortar on the one below it before he lays it carefully
+on its course. Is the \textit{building} getting on? That is the
+one question that is worth thinking about.
+
+You and I write our lives as if on one of those manifold writers
+which you use. A thin filmy sheet \textit{here}, a bit of black
+paper below it; but the writing goes through upon the next page,
+and when the blackness that divides two worlds is swept away
+\textit{there}, the history of each life written by ourselves
+remains legible in eternity. And the question is---What sort of
+autobiography are we writing for the revelation of that day, and
+how far do our circumstances help us to transcribe fair in our
+lives the will of our God and the image of our Redeemer?
+
+If, then, we have once got hold of that principle that all which
+is---summer and winter, storm and sunshine, possession and loss,
+memory and hope, work and rest, and all the other antitheses of
+life---is equally the product of His will, equally the
+manifestation of His mind, equally His means for our discipline,
+then we have the amulet and talisman which will preserve us from
+the fever of desire and the shivering fits of anxiety as to things
+which perish. And, as they tell of a Christian father who, riding
+by one of the great lakes of Switzerland all day long, on his
+journey to the Church Council that was absorbing his thoughts,
+said towards evening to the deacon who was pacing beside him,
+`Where is the lake?' so you and I, journeying along by the margin
+of this great flood of things when wild storms sweep across it, or
+when the sunbeams glint upon its blue waters, `and birds of peace
+sit brooding on the charmed wave,' will be careless of the
+changeful sea, if the eye looks beyond the visible and beholds the
+unseen, the unchanging real presences that make glory in the
+darkest lives, and `sunshine in the shady place.' `Let every man,
+wherein he is called, therein abide with God.'
+
+III. Still further, another thought may be suggested from these
+words, or rather from the connection in which they occur, and that
+is---Such contented continuance in our place is the dictate of the
+truest wisdom.
+
+There are two or three collateral topics, partly suggested by the
+various connections in which this commandment occurs in the
+chapter, from which I draw the few remarks I have to make now.
+
+And the first point I would suggest is that very old commonplace
+one, so often forgotten, that after all, though you may change
+about as much as you like, there is a pretty substantial equipoise
+and identity in the amount of pain and pleasure in all external
+conditions. The total length of day and night all the year round
+is the same at the North Pole and at the Equator---half and half.
+Only, in the one place, it is half and half for four-and-twenty
+hours at a time, and in the other, the night lasts through gloomy
+months of winter, and the day is bright for unbroken weeks of
+summer. But, when you come to add them up at the year's end, the
+man who shivers in the ice, and the man who pants beneath the
+beams from the zenith, have had the same length of sunshine and of
+darkness. It does not matter much at what degrees between the
+Equator and the Pole you and I live; when the thing comes to be
+made up we shall be all pretty much upon an equality. You do not
+get the happiness of the rich man over the poor one by multiplying
+twenty shillings a week by as many figures as will suffice to make
+it up to \pounds10,000 a year. What is the use of such eager
+desires to change our condition, when every condition has
+disadvantages attending its advantages as certainly as a shadow;
+and when all have pretty nearly the same quantity of the raw
+material of pain and pleasure, and when the amount of either
+actually experienced by us depends not on where we are, but on
+\textit{what} we are?
+
+Then, still further, there is another consideration to be kept in
+mind upon which I do not enlarge, as what I have already said
+involves it---namely, that whilst the portion of external pain and
+pleasure summed up comes pretty much to the same in everybody's
+life, any condition may yield the fruit of devout fellowship with
+God.
+
+Another very remarkable idea suggested by a part of the context
+is---What is the need for my troubling myself about outward
+changes when \textit{in Christ} I can get all the peculiarities
+which make any given position desirable to me? For instance, hear
+how Paul talks to slaves eager to be set free: `For he that is
+called in the Lord, \textit{being} a servant, is the Lord's
+freeman: likewise also he that is called, \textit{being} free, is
+Christ's servant.' If you generalise that principle it comes to
+this, that in union with Jesus Christ we possess, by our
+fellowship with Him, the peculiar excellences and blessings that
+are derivable from external relations of every sort. To take
+concrete examples---if a man is a slave, he may be free in Christ.
+If free, he may have the joy of utter submission to an absolute
+master in Christ. If you and I are lonely, we may feel all the
+delights of society by union with Him. If surrounded and
+distracted by companionship, and seeking for seclusion, we may get
+all the peace of perfect privacy in fellowship with Him. If we are
+rich, and sometimes think that we were in a position of less
+temptation if we were poorer, we may find all the blessings for
+which we sometimes covet poverty in communion with Him. If we are
+poor, and fancy that, if we had a little more just to lift us
+above the grinding, carking care of to-day and the anxiety of
+to-morrow, we should be happier, we may find all tranquillity in
+Him. And so you may run through all the variety of human
+conditions, and say to yourself---What is the use of looking for
+blessings flowing from these from without? Enough for us if we
+grasp that Lord who is all in all, and will give us in peace the
+joy of conflict, in conflict the calm of peace, in health the
+refinement of sickness, in sickness the vigour and glow of health,
+in memory the brightness of undying hope, in hope the calming of
+holy memory, in wealth the lowliness of poverty, in poverty the
+ease of wealth; in life and in death being all and more than all
+that dazzles us by the false gleam of created brightness!
+
+And so, finally---a remark which has no connection with the text
+itself, but which I cannot avoid inserting here---I want you to
+think, and think seriously, of the antagonism and diametrical
+opposition between these principles of my text and the maxims
+current in the world, and nowhere more so than in this city. Our
+text is a revolutionary one. It is dead against the watchwords
+that you fathers give your children---`push,' `energy,'
+`advancement,' `get on, whatever you do.' You have made a
+philosophy of it, and you say that this restless discontent with a
+man's present position and eager desire to get a little farther
+ahead in the scramble, underlies much modern civilisation and
+progress, and leads to the diffusion of wealth and to employment
+for the working classes, and to mechanical inventions, and
+domestic comforts, and I don't know what besides. You have made a
+religion of it; and it is thought to be blasphemy for a man to
+stand up and say---`It is idolatry!' My dear brethren, I declare I
+solemnly believe that, if I were to go on to the Manchester
+Exchange next Tuesday, and stand up and say---`There is no God,' I
+should not be thought half such a fool as if I were to go and
+say---`Poverty is not an evil \textit{per se}, and men do not come
+into this world to get \textit{on} but to get \textit{up}---nearer
+and liker to God.' If you, by God's grace, lay hold of this
+principle of my text, and honestly resolve to work it out,
+trusting in that dear Lord who `though He was rich yet for our
+sakes became poor,' in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred you will
+have to make up your minds to let the big prizes of your trade go
+into other people's hands, and be contented to say---`I live by
+peaceful, high, pure, Christ-like thoughts.' `He that needs
+least,' said an old heathen, `is nearest the gods'; but I would
+rather modify the statement into, `He that needs most, and knows
+it, is nearest the gods.' For surely Christ is more than mammon;
+and a spirit nourished by calm desires and holy thoughts into
+growing virtues and increasing Christlikeness is better than
+circumstances ordered to our will, in the whirl of which we have
+lost our God. `In everything by prayer and supplication, with
+thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God, and the
+peace of God and the God of peace shall keep your hearts and minds
+in Christ Jesus.'
+
+\chapter{`Love Buildeth Up'}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS viii. 1--13}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Now, as touching things offered unto idols, we know that we all
+have knowledge. Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth. 2.\
+And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing
+yet as he ought to know. 3.\ But if any man love God, the same is
+known of him. 4.\ As concerning therefore the eating of those
+things that are offered in sacrifice unto idols, we know that an
+idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none other God but
+one. 5.\ For though there be that are called gods, whether in
+heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,) 6.\
+But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all
+things, and we in Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all
+things, and we by Him. 7.\ Howbeit there is not in every man that
+knowledge: for some, with conscience of the idol unto this hour,
+eat it as a thing offered unto an idol; and their conscience being
+weak is defiled. 8.\ But meat commendeth us not to God: for
+neither, if we eat, are we the better; neither, if we eat not, are
+we the worse. 9.\ But take heed, lest by any means this liberty of
+yours become a stumblingblock to them that are weak. 10.\ For if
+any man see thee which hast knowledge sit at meat in the idol's
+temple, shall not the conscience of him which is weak be
+emboldened to eat those things which are offered to idols; 11.\
+And through thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom
+Christ died? 12.\ But when ye sin so against the brethren, and
+wound their weak conscience, ye sin against Christ. 13.\
+Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh
+while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.'---1
+\textsc{Cor.} viii. 1--13.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+It is difficult for us to realise the close connection which
+existed between idol-worship and daily life. Something of the same
+sort is found in all mission fields. It was almost impossible for
+Christians to take any part in society and not seem to sanction
+idolatry. Would that Christianity were as completely interwoven
+with our lives as heathen religions are into those of their
+devotees! Paul seems to have had referred to him a pressing case
+of conscience, which divided the Corinthian Church, as to whether
+a Christian could join in the usual feasts or sacrifices. His
+answer is in this passage.
+
+The longest way round is sometimes the shortest way home. The
+Apostle begins far away from the subject in hand by running a
+contrast between knowledge and love, and setting the latter first.
+But his contrast is very relevant to his purpose. Small questions
+should be solved on great principles.
+
+The first principle laid down by Paul is the superiority of love
+over knowledge, the bearing of which on the question in hand will
+appear presently. We note that there is first a distinct admission
+of the Corinthians' intelligence, though there is probably a tinge
+of irony in the language `We know that we all have knowledge.'
+`You Corinthians are fully aware that you are very superior
+people. Whatever else you know, you know that, and I fully
+recognise it.'
+
+The admission is followed by a sudden, sharp comment, to which the
+Co\-rinth\-ians' knowledge that they knew laid them open. Swift as
+the thrust of a spear comes flashing `Knowledge puffeth up.'
+Puffed-up things are swollen by wind only, and the more they are
+inflated the hollower and emptier they are; and such a sharp point
+as Paul's saying shrivels them. The statement is not meant as the
+assertion of a necessary or uniform result of knowledge, but it
+does put plainly a very usual result of it, if it is unaccompanied
+by love. It is a strange, sad result of superior intelligence or
+acquirements, that it so often leads to conceit, to a false
+estimate of the worth and power of knowing, to a ridiculous
+over-valuing of certain acquirements, and to an insolent contempt
+and cruel disregard of those who have them not. Paul's dictum has
+been only too well confirmed by experience.
+
+`Love builds up,' or `edifies.' Probably the main direction in
+which that building up is conceived of as taking effect, is in
+aiding the progress of our neighbours, especially in the religious
+life. But the tendency of love to rear a fair fabric of personal
+character is not to be overlooked. In regard to effect on
+character, the palm must be given to love, which produces solid
+excellence far beyond what mere knowledge can effect. Further,
+that pluming one's self on knowledge is a sure proof of ignorance.
+The more real our acquirements, the more they disclose our
+deficiencies. All self-conceit hinders us from growing
+intellectually or morally, and intellectual conceit is the worst
+kind of it.
+
+Very significantly, love to God, and not the simple emotion of
+love without reference to its object, is opposed to knowledge; for
+love so directed is the foundation of all excellence, and of all
+real love to men. Love to God is not the antithesis of true
+knowledge, but it is the only victorious antagonist of the conceit
+of knowing. Very significantly, too, does Paul vary his conclusion
+in verse 3 by saying that the man who loves God `is known of Him,'
+instead of, as we might have expected, `knows Him.' The latter is
+true, but the statement in the verse puts more strongly the
+thought of the man's being an object of God's care. In regard,
+then, to their effects on character, in producing consideration
+and helpfulness to others, and in securing God's protection, love
+stands first, and knowledge second.
+
+What has all this to do with the question in hand? This, that if
+looked at from the standpoint of knowledge, it may be solved in
+one way, but if from that of love, it will be answered in another.
+So, in verses 4--6, Paul treats the matter on the ground of
+knowledge. The fundamental truth of Christianity, that there is
+one God, who is revealed and works through Jesus Christ, was
+accepted by all the Corinthians. Paul states it here broadly,
+denying that there were any objective realities answering to the
+popular conceptions or poetic fancies or fair artistic
+presentments of the many gods and lords of the Greek pantheon, and
+asserting that all Christians recognise one God, the Father, from
+whom the universe of worlds and living things has origin, and to
+whom we as Christians specially belong, and one Lord, the channel
+through whom all divine operations of creation, providence, and
+grace flow, and by whose redeeming work we Christians are endowed
+with our best life. If a believer was fully convinced of these
+truths, he could partake of sacrificial feasts without danger to
+himself, and without either sanctioning idolatry or being tempted
+to return to it.
+
+No doubt it was on this ground that an idol was nothing that the
+laxer party defended their action in eating meat offered to idols;
+and Paul fully recognises that they had a strong case, and that,
+if there were no other considerations to come in, the answer to
+the question of conscience submitted to him would be wholly in
+favour of the less scrupulous section. But there is something
+better than knowledge; namely, love. And its decision must be
+taken before the whole material for a judgment is in evidence.
+
+Therefore, in the remainder of the chapter, Paul dwells on loving
+regard for brethren. In verse 7, he reminds the `knowing'
+Corinthians that new convictions do not obliterate the power of
+old associations. The awful fascination of early belief still
+exercises influence. The chains are not wholly broken off. Every
+mission field shows examples of this. Every man knows that habits
+are not so suddenly overcome, that there is no hankering after
+them or liability to relapse. It would be a dangerous thing for a
+weak believer to risk sharing in an idol feast; for he would be
+very likely to slide down to his old level of belief, and Zeus or
+Pallas to seem to him real powers once more.
+
+The considerations in verse 7 would naturally be followed by the
+further thoughts in verse 9, etc. But, before dealing with these,
+Paul interposes another thought in verse 8, to the effect that
+partaking of or abstinence from any kind of food will not, in
+itself, either help or hinder the religious life. The bearing of
+that principle on his argument seems to be to reduce the
+importance of the whole question, and to suggest that, since
+eating of idol sacrifices could not be called a duty or a means of
+spiritual progress, the way was open to take account of others'
+weakness as determining our action in regard to it. A modern
+application may illustrate the point. Suppose that a Christian
+does not see total abstinence from intoxicants to be obligatory on
+him. Well, he cannot say that drinking is so, or that it is a
+religious duty, and so the way is clear for urging regard to
+others' weakness as an element in the case.
+
+That being premised, Paul comes to his final point; namely, that
+Christian men are bound to restrict their liberty so that they
+shall not tempt weaker brethren on to a path on which they cannot
+walk without stumbling. He has just shown the danger to such of
+partaking of the sacrificial feasts. He now completes his position
+by showing, in verse 10, that the stronger man's example may lead
+the weaker to do what he cannot do innocently. What is harmless to
+us may be fatal to others, and, if we have led them to it, their
+blood is on our heads.
+
+The terrible discordance of such conduct with our Lord's example,
+which should be our law, is forcibly set forth in verse 11, which
+has three strongly emphasised thoughts---the man's fate---he
+perishes; his relation to his slayer---a brother; what Christ did
+for the man whom a Christian has sent to destruction---died for
+him. These solemn thoughts are deepened in verse 12, which reminds
+us of the intimate union between the weakest and Christ, by which
+He so identifies Himself with them that any blow struck on them
+touches Him.
+
+There is no greater sin than to tempt weak or ignorant Christians
+to thoughts or acts which their ignorance or weakness cannot
+entertain or do without damage to their religion. There is much
+need for laying that truth to heart in these days. Both in the
+field of speculation and of conduct, Christians, who think that
+they know so much better than ignorant believers, need to be
+reminded of it.
+
+So Paul, in verse 13, at last answers the question. His sudden
+turning to his own conduct is beautiful. He will not so much
+command others, as proclaim his own determination. He does so with
+characteristic vehemence and hyperbole. No doubt the liberal party
+in Corinth were ready to complain against the proposal to restrict
+their freedom because of others' weakness; and they would be
+disarmed, or at least silenced, and might be stimulated to like
+noble resolution, by Paul's example.
+
+The principle plainly laid down here is as distinctly applicable to
+the modern question of abstinence from intoxicants. No one can doubt
+that `moderation' in their use by some tempts others to use which
+soon becomes fatally immoderate. The Church has been robbed of
+promising members thereby, over and over again. How can a Christian
+man cling to a `moderate' use of these things, and run the risk of
+destroying by his example a brother for whom Christ died?
+
+\chapter{The Sin of Silence}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS ix. 16, 17}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`For though I preach the Gospel, I have nothing to glory of: for
+necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not
+the Gospel! 17.\ For if I do this thing willingly, I have a
+reward.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} ix. 16, 17.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The original reference of these words is to the Apostle's
+principle and practice of not receiving for his support money from
+the churches. Gifts he did accept; pay he did not. The exposition
+of his reason is interesting, ingenuous, and chivalrous. He
+strongly asserts his right, even while he as strongly declares
+that he will waive it. The reason for his waiving it is that he
+desires to have somewhat in his service beyond the strict line of
+his duty. His preaching itself, with all its toils and miseries,
+was but part of his day's work, which he was bidden to do, and for
+doing which he deserved no thanks nor praise. But he would like to
+have a little bit of glad service over and above what he is
+ordered to do, that, as he ingenuously says, he may have `somewhat
+to boast of.'
+
+In this exposition of motives we have two great principles
+actuating the Apostle---one, his profound sense of obligation, and
+the other his desire, if it might be, to do more than he was bound
+to do, because he loved his work so much. And though he is
+speaking here as an apostle, and his example is not to be
+unconditionally transferred to us, yet I think that the motives
+which actuated his conduct are capable of unconditional
+application to ourselves.
+
+There are three things here. There is the obligation of speech,
+there is the penalty of silence, and there is the glad obedience
+which transcends obligation.
+
+I. First, mark the obligation of speech.
+
+No doubt the Apostle had, in a special sense, a `necessity laid
+upon' him, which was first laid upon him on that road to Damascus,
+and repeated many a time in his life. But though he differs from
+us in the direct supernatural commission which was given to him,
+in the width of the sphere in which he had to work, and in the
+splendour of the gifts which were entrusted to his stewardship, he
+does not differ from us in the reality of the obligation which was
+laid upon him. Every Christian man is as truly bound as was Paul
+to preach the Gospel. The commission does not depend upon
+apostolic dignity. Jesus Christ, when He said, `Go ye into all the
+world, and preach the Gospel to every creature,' was not speaking
+to the eleven, but to all generations of His Church. And whilst
+there are many other motives on which we may rest the Christian
+duty of propagating the Christian faith, I think that we shall be
+all the better if we bottom it upon this, the distinct and
+definite commandment of Jesus Christ, the grip of which encloses
+all who for themselves have found that the Lord is gracious.
+
+For that commandment is permanent. It is exactly contemporaneous
+with the duration of the promise which is appended to it, and
+whosoever suns himself in the light of the latter is bound by the
+precept of the former. `Lo! I am with you alway, even to the end
+of the world,' defines the duration of the promise, and it defines
+also the duration of the duty. Nay, even the promise is made
+conditional upon the discharge of the duty enjoined. For it is to
+the Church `going into all the world, and preaching the Gospel to
+every creature,' that the promise of an abiding presence is made.
+
+Let us remember, too, that, just because this commission is given
+to the whole Church, it is binding on every individual member of
+the Church. There is a very common fallacy, not confined to this
+subject, but extending over the whole field of Christian duty, by
+which things that are obligatory on the community are shuffled off
+the shoulders of the individual. But we have to remember that the
+whole Church is nothing more than the sum total of all its
+members, and that nothing is incumbent upon it which is not in
+their measure incumbent upon each of them. Whatsoever Christ says
+to all, He says to each, and the community has no duties which you
+and I have not.
+
+Of course, there are diversities of forms of obedience to this
+commandment; of course, the restrictions of locality and the other
+obligations of life, come in to modify it; and it is not every
+man's duty to wander over the whole world doing this work. But the
+direct work of communicating to others who know it not the
+sweetness and the power of Jesus Christ belongs to every Christian
+man. You cannot buy yourselves out of the ranks, as they used to
+be able to do out of the militia, by paying for a substitute. Both
+forms of service are obligatory upon each of us. We all, if we
+know anything of Christ and His love and His power, are bound, by
+the fact that we do know it, to tell it to those whom we can
+reach. You have all got congregations if you would look for them.
+There is not a Christian man or woman in this world who has not
+somebody that he or she can speak to more efficiently than anybody
+else can. You have your friends, your relations, the people with
+whom you are brought into daily contact, if you have no wider
+congregations. You cannot all stand up and preach in the sense in
+which I do so. But this is not the meaning of the word in the New
+Testament. It does not imply a pulpit, nor a set discourse, nor a
+gathered multitude; it simply implies a herald's task of
+proclaiming. Everybody who has found Jesus Christ can say, `I have
+found the Messiah,' and everybody who knows Him can say, `Come and
+hear, and I will tell what the Lord hath done for my soul.' Since
+you can do it you are bound to do it; and if you are one of `the
+dumb dogs, lying down and loving to slumber,' of whom there are
+such crowds paralysing the energies and weakening the witness of
+every Church upon earth, then you are criminally and suicidally
+oblivious of an obligation which is a joy and a privilege as much
+as a duty.
+
+Oh, brethren! I do want to lay on the consciences of all you
+Christian people this, that nothing can absolve you from the
+obligation of personal, direct speech to some one of Christ and
+His salvation. Unless you can say, `I have not refrained my lips,
+O Lord! Thou knowest,' there frowns over against you an
+unfulfilled duty, the neglect of which is laming your spiritual
+activity, and drying up the sources of your spiritual strength.
+
+But, then, besides this direct effort, there are the other
+indirect methods in which this commandment can be discharged, by
+sympathy and help of all sorts, about which I need say no more
+here.
+
+Jesus Christ's ideal of His Church was an active propaganda, an
+army in which there were no non-combatants, even although some of
+the combatants might be detailed to remain in the camp and look
+after the stuff, and others of them might be in the forefront of
+the battle. But is that ideal ever fulfilled in any of our
+churches? How many amongst us there are who do absolutely nothing
+in the shape of Christian work! Some of us seem to think that the
+voluntary principle on which our Nonconformist churches are
+largely organised means, `I do not need to do anything unless I
+like. Inclination is the guide of duty, and if I do not care to
+take any active part in the work of our church, nobody has
+anything to say.' No man can force me, but if Jesus Christ says to
+me, `Go!' and I say, `I had rather not,' Jesus Christ and I have
+to settle accounts between us. The less \textit{men} control, the
+more stringent ought to be the control of Christ. And if the
+principle of Christian obedience is a willing heart, then the duty
+of a Christian is to see that the heart is willing.
+
+A stringent obligation, not to be shuffled off by any of the
+excuses that we make, is laid upon us all. It makes very short
+work of a number of excuses. There is a great deal in the tone of
+this generation which tends to chill the missionary spirit. We
+know more about the heathen world, and familiarity diminishes
+horror. We have taken up, many of us, milder and more merciful
+ideas about the condition of those who die without knowing the
+name of Jesus Christ. We have taken to the study of comparative
+religion as a science, forgetting sometimes that the thing that we
+are studying as a science is spreading a dark cloud of ignorance
+and apathy over millions of men. And all these reasons somewhat
+sap the strength and cool the fervour of a good many Christian
+people nowadays. Jesus Christ's commandment remains just as it
+was.
+
+Then some of us say, `I prefer working at home!' Well, if you are
+doing all that you can there, and really are enthusiastically
+devoted to one phase of Christian service, the great principle of
+division of labour comes in to warrant your not entering upon
+other fields which others cultivate. But unless you are thus
+casting all your energies into the work which you say that you
+prefer, there is no reason in it why you should do nothing in the
+other direction. Jesus Christ still says, `Go ye into all the
+world.'
+
+Then some of you say, `Well, I do not much believe in your
+missionary societies. There is a great deal of waste of money about
+them. A number of things there are that one does not approve of. I
+have heard stories about missionaries being very idle, very
+luxurious, and taking too much pay, and doing too little work.'
+Well, be it so! Very probably it is partly true; though I do not
+know that the people whose testimony is so willingly accepted, to
+the detriment of our brethren in foreign lands, are precisely the
+kind of people that should talk much about self-sacrifice and
+luxurious living, or whose estimate of Christian work is to be
+relied upon. I fancy many of them, if they walked about the streets
+of an English town, would have a somewhat similar report to give, as
+they have when they walk about the streets of an Indian one. But be
+that as it may, does that indictment draw a wet sponge across the
+commandment of Jesus Christ? or can you chisel out of the stones of
+Sinai one of the words written there, by reason of the imperfections
+of those who are seeking to obey them? Surely not! Christ still
+says, `Go ye into all the world!'
+
+I sometimes venture to think that the day will come when the
+condition of being received into, and retained in, the communion
+of a Christian church will be obedience to that commandment. Why,
+even bees have the sense at a given time of the year to turn the
+drones out of the hives, and sting them to death. I do not
+recommend the last part of the process, but I am not sure but that
+it would be a benefit to us all, both to those ejected and to
+those retained, that we should get rid of that added weight that
+clogs every organised community in this and other lands---the dead
+weight of idlers who say that they are Christ's disciples. Whether
+it is a condition of church membership or not, sure I am that it
+is a condition of fellowship with Jesus Christ, and a condition,
+therefore, of health in the Christian life, that it should be a
+life of active obedience to this plain, imperative, permanent, and
+universal command.
+
+II. Secondly, a word as to the penalty of silence.
+
+`Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel.' I suppose Paul is thinking
+mainly of a future issue, but not exclusively of that. At all
+events, let me point you, in a word or two, to the plain penalties
+of silence here, and to the awful penalties of silence hereafter.
+
+`Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel.' If you are a dumb and idle
+professor of Christ's truth, depend upon it that your dumb
+idleness will rob you of much communion with Jesus Christ. There
+are many Christians who would be ever so much happier, more
+joyous, and more assured Christians if they would go and talk
+about Christ to other people. Because they have locked up God's
+word in their hearts it melts away unknown, and they lose more
+than they suspect of the sweetness and buoyancy and assured
+confidence that might mark them, for no other reason than because
+they seek to keep their morsel to themselves. Like that mist that
+lies white and dull over the ground on a winter's morning, which
+will be blown away with the least puff of fresh air, there lie
+doleful dampnesses, in their sooty folds, over many a Christian
+heart, shutting out the sun from the earth, and a little whiff of
+wholesome activity in Christ's cause would clear them all away,
+and the sun would shine down upon men again. If you want to be a
+happy Christian, work for Jesus Christ. I do not lay that down as
+a specific by itself. There are other things to be taken in
+conjunction with it, but yet it remains true that the woe of a
+languid Christianity attaches to the men who, being professing
+Christians, are silent when they should speak, and idle when they
+should work.
+
+There is, further, the woe of the loss of sympathies, and the gain
+of all the discomforts and miseries of a self-absorbed life. And
+there is, further, the woe of the loss of one of the best ways of
+confirming one's own faith in the truth---viz. that of seeking to
+impart it to others. If you want to learn a thing, teach it. If
+you want to grasp the principles of any science, try to explain it
+to somebody who does not understand it. If you want to know where,
+in these days of jangling and controversy, the true, vital centre
+of the Gospel is, and what is the essential part of the revelation
+of God, go and tell sinful men about Jesus Christ who died for
+them; and you will find out that it is the Cross, and Him who died
+thereon, as dying for the world, that is the power which can move
+men's hearts. And so you will cleave with a closer grasp, in days
+of difficulty and unsettlement, to that which is able to bring
+light into darkness and to harmonise the discord of a troubled and
+sinful soul. And, further, there is the woe of having none that
+can look to you and say, `I owe myself to thee.' Oh, brethren!
+there is no greater joy accessible to a man than that of feeling
+that through his poor words Christ has entered into a brother's
+heart. And you are throwing away all this because you shut your
+mouths and neglect the plain commandment of your Lord.
+
+Ay! but that is not all. There is a future to be taken into
+account, and I think that Christian people do far too little
+realise the solemn truth that it is not all the same \textit{then}
+whether a man has kept his Master's commandments or neglected
+them. I believe that whilst a very imperfect faith saves a man,
+there is such a thing as being `saved, yet so as through fire,'
+and that there is such a thing as having `an abundant entrance
+ministered unto us into the everlasting kingdom.' He whose life
+has been very slightly influenced by Christian principle, and who
+has neglected plain, imperative duties, will not stand on the same
+level of blessedness as the man who has more completely yielded
+himself in life to the constraining power of Christ's love, and
+has sought to keep all His commandments.
+
+Heaven is not a dead level. Every man there will receive as much
+blessedness as he is capable of, but capacities will vary, and the
+principal factor in determining the capacity, which capacity
+determines the blessedness, will be the thoroughness of obedience
+to all the ordinances of Christ in the course of the life upon
+earth. So, though we know, and therefore dare say, little about
+that future, I do beseech you to take this to heart, that he who
+there can stand before God, and say, `Behold! I and the children
+whom God hath given me' will wear a crown brighter than the
+starless ones of those who saved themselves, and have brought none
+with them.
+
+`Some on boards, and some on broken pieces of the ship, they all
+came safe to land.' But the place where they stand depends on
+their Christian life, and of that Christian life one main element
+is obedience to the commandment which makes them the apostles and
+missionaries of their Lord.
+
+III. Lastly, note the glad obedience which transcends the limits
+of obligation.
+
+`If I do this thing willingly I have a reward.' Paul desired to
+bring a little more than was required, in token of his love to his
+Master, and of his thankful acceptance of the obligation. The
+artist who loves his work will put more work into his picture than
+is absolutely needed, and will linger over it, lavishing diligence
+and care upon it, because he is in love with his task. The servant
+who seeks to do as little as he can scrape through with without
+rebuke is actuated by no high motives. The trader who barely puts
+as much into the scale as will balance the weight in the other is
+grudging in his dealings; but he who, with liberal hand, gives
+`shaken down, pressed together, and running over' measure, gives
+because he delights in the giving.
+
+And so it is in the Christian life. There are many of us whose
+question seems to be, `How little can I get off with? how much can
+I retain?'---many of us whose effort is to find out how much of
+the world is consistent with the profession of Christianity, and
+to find the minimum of effort, of love, of service, of gifts which
+may free us from obligation.
+
+And what does that mean? It means that we are slaves. It means
+that if we durst we would give nothing, and do nothing. And what
+does that mean? It means that we do not care for the Lord, and
+have no joy in our work. And what does that mean? It means that
+our work deserves no praise, and will get no reward. If we love
+Christ we shall be anxious, if it were possible, to do more than
+He commands us, in token of our loyalty to the King, and of our
+delight in the service. Of course, in the highest view, nothing
+can be more than necessary. Of course He has the right to all our
+work; but yet there are heights of Christian consecration and
+self-sacrifice which a man will not be blamed if he has not
+climbed, and will be praised if he has. What we want, if I might
+venture to say so, is extravagance of service. Judas may say, `To
+what purpose is this waste?' but Jesus will say, He `hath wrought
+a good work on Me,' and the fragrance of the ointment will smell
+sweet through the centuries.
+
+So, dear brethren, the upshot of the whole thing is, Do not let us
+do our Christian work reluctantly, else it is only slave's work,
+and there is no blessing in it, and no reward will come to us from
+it. Do not let us ask, `How little may I do?' but `How much can I
+do?' Thus, asking, we shall not offer as burnt offering to the
+Lord that which doth cost us nothing. On His part He has given the
+commandment as a sign of His love. The stewardship is a token that
+He trusts us, the duty is an honour, the burden is a grace. On our
+parts let us seek for the joy of service which is not contented
+with the bare amount of the tribute that is demanded, but gives
+something over, if it were possible, because of our love to Him.
+They who thus give to Jesus Christ their all of love and effort
+and service will receive it all back a hundredfold, for the Master
+is not going to be in debt to any of His servants, and He says to
+them all, `I will repay it, howbeit I say not unto thee how thou
+owest unto Me even thine own self besides.'
+
+\chapter{A Servant of Men}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS ix. 19--23}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`For though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant
+unto all, that I might gain the more. 20.\ And unto the Jews I
+became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are
+under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are
+under the law; 21.\ To them that are without law, as without law,
+(being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that
+I might gain them that are without law. 22.\ To the weak became I
+as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all
+men, that I might by all means save some. 23.\ And this I do for
+the gospel's sake, that I might be partaker thereof with you.'---1
+\textsc{Cor.} ix. 19--23.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+Paul speaks much of himself, but he is not an egotist. When he
+says, `I do so and so,' it is a gracious way of enjoining the same
+conduct on his readers. He will lay no burden on them which he
+does not himself carry. The leader who can say `Come' is not
+likely to want followers. So, in this section, the Apostle is
+really enjoining on the Corinthians the conduct which he declares
+is his own.
+
+The great principle incumbent on all Christians, with a view to
+the salvation of others, is to go as far as one can without
+untruthfulness in the direction of finding points of resemblance
+and contact with those to whom we would commend the Gospel. There
+is a base counterfeit of this apostolic example, which slurs over
+distinctive beliefs, and weakly tries to please everybody by
+differing from nobody. That trimming to catch all winds never
+gains any. Mr.\ Facing-both-ways is not a powerful evangelist. The
+motive of becoming all things to all men must be plainly
+disinterested, and the assimilation must have love for the souls
+concerned and eagerness to bring the truth to them, and them to
+the truth, legibly stamped upon it, or it will be regarded, and
+rightly so, as mere cowardice or dishonesty. And there must be no
+stretching the assimilation to the length of either concealing
+truth or fraternising in evil. Love to my neighbour can never lead
+to my joining him in wrongdoing.
+
+But, while the limits of this assumption of the colour of our
+surroundings are plainly marked, there is ample space within these
+for the exercise of this eminently Christian grace. We must get
+near people if we would help them. Especially must we identify
+ourselves with them in sympathy, and seek to multiply points of
+assimilation, if we would draw them to Jesus Christ. He Himself
+had to become man that He might gain men, and His servants have to
+do likewise, in their degree. The old story of the Christian
+teacher who voluntarily became a slave, that he might tell of
+Christ to slaves, has in spirit to be repeated by us all.
+
+We can do no good by standing aloof on a height and flinging down
+the Gospel to the people below. They must feel that we enter into
+their circumstances, prejudices, ways of thinking, and the like,
+if our words are to have power. That is true about all Christian
+teachers, whether of old or young. You must be a boy among boys,
+and try to show that you enter into the boy's nature, or you may
+lecture till doomsday and do no good.
+
+Paul instances three cases in which he had acted, and still
+continued to do so, on this principle. He was a Jew, but after his
+conversion he had to `become a Jew' by a distinct act; that is, he
+had receded so far from his old self, that he, if he had had only
+himself to think of, would have given up all Jewish observances.
+But he felt it his duty to conciliate prejudice as far as he
+could, and so, though he would have fought to the death rather
+than given countenance to the belief that circumcision was
+necessary, he had no scruple about circumcising Timothy; and,
+though he believed that for Christians the whole ancient ritual
+was abolished, he was quite willing, if it would smooth away the
+prejudices of the `many thousands of Jews who believed,' to show,
+by his participation in the temple worship, that he `walked
+orderly, keeping the law.' If he was told `You must,' his answer
+could only be `I will not'; but if it was a question of
+conciliating, he was ready to go all lengths for that.
+
+The category which he names next is not composed of different
+persons from the first, but of the same persons regarded from a
+somewhat different point of view. `Them that are under the law'
+describes Jews, not by their race, but by their religion; and Paul
+was willing to take his place among them, as we have just
+observed. But he will not do that so as to be misunderstood,
+wherefore he protests that in doing so he is voluntarily abridging
+his freedom for a specific purpose. He is not `under the law'; for
+the very pith of his view of the Christian's position is that he
+has nothing to do with that Mosaic law in any of its parts,
+because Christ has made him free.
+
+The second class to whom in his wide sympathies he is able to
+assimilate himself, is the opposite of the former---the Gentiles
+who are `without law.' He did not preach on Mars' Hill as he did
+in the synagogues. The many-sided Gospel had aspects fitted for
+the Gentiles who had never heard of Moses, and the many-sided
+Apostle had links of likeness to the Greek and the barbarian. But
+here, too, his assimilation of himself to those whom he seeks to
+win is voluntary; wherefore he protests that he is not without
+law, though he recognises no longer the obligations of Moses' law,
+for he is `under [or, rather, ``in''] law to Christ.'
+
+`The weak' are those too scrupulous-conscienced Christians of whom
+he has been speaking in chapter viii. and whose narrow views he
+exhorted stronger brethren to respect, and to refrain from doing
+what they could do without harming their own consciences, lest by
+doing it they should induce a brother to do the same, whose
+conscience would prick him for it. That is a lesson needed to-day
+as much as, or more than, in Paul's time, for the widely different
+degrees of culture and diversities of condition, training, and
+associations among Christians now necessarily result in very
+diverse views of Christian conduct in many matters. The grand
+principle laid down here should guide us all, both in regard to
+fellow-Christians and others. Make yourself as like them as you
+honestly can; restrict yourself of allowable acts, in deference to
+even narrow prejudices; but let the motive of your assimilating
+yourself to others be clearly their highest good, that you may
+`gain' them, not for yourself but for your Master.
+
+Verse 23 lays down Paul's ruling principle, which both impelled
+him to become all things to all men, with a view to their
+salvation, as he has been saying, and urged him to effort and
+self-discipline, with a view to his own, as he goes on to say.
+`For the Gospel's sake' seems to point backward; `that I may be a
+joint partaker thereof points forward. We have not only to preach
+the Gospel to others, but to live on it and be saved by it
+ourselves.
+
+\chapter{How the Victor Runs}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS ix. 24}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`So run, that ye may obtain.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} ix. 24.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+`\textit{So} run.' Does that mean `Run so that ye obtain?' Most
+people, I suppose, superficially reading the words, attach that
+significance to them, but the `so' here carries a much greater
+weight of meaning than that. It is a word of comparison. The
+Apostle would have the Corinthians recall the picture which he has
+been putting before them---a picture of a scene that was very
+familiar to them; for, as most of us know, one of the most
+important of the Grecian games was celebrated at intervals in the
+immediate neighbourhood of Corinth. Many of the Corinthian
+converts had, no doubt, seen, or even taken part in them. The
+previous portion of the verse in which our text occurs appeals to
+the Corinthians' familiar knowledge of the arena and the
+competitors, `Know ye not that they which run in a race run all,
+but one receiveth the prize?' He would have them picture the eager
+racers, with every muscle strained, and the one victor starting to
+the front; and then he says, `Look at that panting conqueror. That
+is how you should run. \textit{So} run---`meaning thereby not,
+`Run so that you may obtain the prize,' but `Run so' as the victor
+does, `in order that you may obtain.' So, then, this victor is to
+be a lesson to us, and we are to take a leaf out of his book. Let
+us see what he teaches us.
+
+I. The first thing is, the utmost tension and energy and strenuous
+effort.
+
+It is very remarkable that Paul should pick out these Grecian
+games as containing for Christian people any lesson, for they were
+honeycombed, through and through, with idolatry and all sorts of
+immorality, so that no Jew ventured to go near them, and it was
+part of the discipline of the early Christian Church that
+professing Christians should have nothing to do with them in any
+shape.
+
+And yet here, as in many other parts of his letters, Paul takes
+these foul things as patterns for Christians. `There is a soul of
+goodness in things evil, if we would observantly distil it out.'
+It is very much as if English preachers were to refer their people
+to a racecourse, and say, `Even there you may pick out lessons,
+and learn something of the way in which Christian people ought to
+live.'
+
+On the same principle the New Testament deals with that diabolical
+business of fighting. It is taken as an emblem for the Christian
+soldier, because, with all its devilishness, there is in it this,
+at least, that men give themselves up absolutely to the will of
+their commander, and are ready to fling away their lives if he
+lifts his finger. That at least is grand and noble, and to be
+imitated on a higher plane.
+
+In like manner Paul takes these poor racers as teaching us a
+lesson. Though the thing be all full of sin, we can get one
+valuable thought out of it, and it is this---If people would work
+half as hard to gain the highest object that a man can set before
+him, as hundreds of people are ready to do in order to gain
+trivial and paltry objects, there would be fewer stunted and
+half-dead Christians amongst us. `That is the way to run,' says
+Paul, `if you want to obtain.'
+
+Look at the contrast that he hints at, between the prize that
+stirs these racers' energies into such tremendous operation and
+the prize which Christians profess to be pursuing. `They do it to
+obtain a corruptible crown'---a twist of pine branch out of the
+neighbouring grove, worth half-a-farthing, and a little passing
+glory not worth much more. They do it to obtain a corruptible
+crown; we do \textit{not} do it, though we professedly have an
+incorruptible one as our aim and object. If we contrast the
+relative values of the objects that men pursue so eagerly, and the
+objects of the Christian course, surely we ought to be smitten
+down with penitent consciousness of our own unworthiness, if not
+of our own hypocrisy.
+
+It is not even there that the lesson stops, because we Christian
+people may be patterns and rebukes to ourselves. For, on the one
+side of our nature we show what we can do when we are really in
+earnest about getting something; and on the other side we show
+with how little work we can be contented, when, at bottom, we do
+not much care whether we get the prize or not. If you and I really
+believed that that crown of glory which Paul speaks about might be
+ours, and would be all sufficing for us if it were ours, as truly
+as we believe that money is a good thing, there would not be such
+a difference between the way in which we clutch at the one and the
+apathy which scarcely cares to put out a hand for the other. The
+things that are seen and temporal do get the larger portion of the
+energies and thoughts of the average Christian man, and the things
+that are unseen and eternal get only what is left. Sometimes
+ninety per cent. of the water of a stream is taken away to drive a
+milldam or do work, and only ten per cent. can be spared to
+trickle down the half-dry channel and do nothing but reflect the
+bright sun and help the little flowers and the grass to grow. So,
+the larger portion of most lives goes to drive the mill-wheels,
+and there is very little left, in the case of many of us, in order
+to help us towards God, and bring us closer into communion with
+our Lord. `Run' for the crown as eagerly as you `run' for your
+incomes, or for anything that you really, in your deepest desires,
+want. Take yourselves for your own patterns and your own rebukes.
+Your own lives may show you how you \textit{can} love, hope, work,
+and deny yourselves when you have sufficient inducement, and their
+flame should put to shame their frost, for the warmth is directed
+towards trifles and the coldness towards the crown. If you would
+run for the incorruptible prize of effort in the fashion in which
+others and yourselves run for the corruptible, your whole lives
+would be changed. Why! if Christian people in general really took
+half---half? ay! a tenth part of---the honest, persistent pains to
+improve their Christian character, and become more like Jesus
+Christ, which a violinist will take to master his instrument,
+there would be a new life for most of our Christian communities.
+Hours and hours of patient practice are not too much for the one;
+how many moments do we give to the other? `So run, that ye
+obtain.'
+
+II. The victorious runner sets Christians an example of rigid
+self-control.
+
+Every man that is striving for the mastery is `temperate in all
+things.' The discipline for runners and athletes was rigid. They
+had ten months of spare diet---no wine---hard gymnastic exercises
+every day, until not an ounce of superfluous flesh was upon their
+muscles, before they were allowed to run in the arena. And, says
+Paul, that is the example for us. They practise this rigid
+discipline and abstinence by way of preparation for the race, and
+after it was run they might dispense with the training. You and I
+have to practise rigid abstinence as part of the race, as a
+continuous necessity. \textit{They} did not abstain only from bad
+things, they did not only avoid criminal acts of sensuous
+indulgence; but they abstained from many perfectly legitimate
+things. So for us it is not enough to say, `I draw the line there,
+at this or that vice, and I will have nothing to do with these.'
+You will never make a growing Christian if abstinence from
+palpable sins only is your standard. You must `lay aside' every
+sin, of course, but also `every \textit{weight}' Many things are
+`weights' that are not `sins'; and if we are to run fast we must
+run light, and if we are to do any good in this world we have to
+live by rigid control and abstain from much that is perfectly
+legitimate, because, if we do not, we shall fail in accomplishing
+the highest purposes for which we are here. Not only in regard to
+the gross sensual indulgences which these men had to avoid, but in
+regard to a great deal of the outgoings of our interests and our
+hearts, we have to apply the knife very closely and cut to the
+quick, if we would have leisure and sympathy and affection left
+for loftier objects. It is a very easy thing to be a Christian in
+one aspect, inasmuch as a Christian at bottom is a man that is
+trusting to Jesus Christ, and that is not hard to do. It is a very
+hard thing to be a Christian in another aspect, because a real
+Christian is a man who, by reason of his trusting Jesus Christ,
+has set his heel upon the neck of the animal that is in him, and
+keeps the flesh well down, and not only the flesh, but the desires
+of the mind as well as of the flesh, and subordinates them all to
+the one aim of pleasing Him. `No man that warreth entangleth
+himself with the affairs of this life' if his object is to please
+Him that has called him to be a soldier. Unless we cut off a great
+many of the thorns, so to speak, by which things catch hold of us
+as we pass them, we shall not make much advance in the Christian
+life. Rigid self-control and abstinence from else legitimate
+things that draw us away from Him are needful, if we are so to run
+as the poor heathen racer teaches us.
+
+III. The last grace that is suggested here, the last leaf to take
+out of these racers' book, is definiteness and concentration of
+aim.
+
+`I, therefore,' says the Apostle, `so run not as uncertainly.' If
+the runner is now heading that way and now this, making all manner
+of loops upon his path, of course he will be left hopelessly in the
+rear. It is the old fable of the Grecian mythology transplanted into
+Christian soil. The runner who turned aside to pick up the golden
+apple was disappointed of his hopes of the radiant fair. The ship,
+at the helm of which is a steersman who has either a feeble hand or
+does not understand his business, and which therefore keeps yawing
+from side to side, with the bows pointing now this way and now that,
+is not holding a course that will make the harbour first in the
+race. The people that to-day are marching with their faces towards
+Zion, and to-morrow making a loop-line to the world, will be a long
+time before they reach their terminus. I believe there are few
+things more lacking in the average Christian life of to-day than
+resolute, conscious concentration upon an aim which is clearly and
+always before us. Do you know what you are aiming at? That is the
+first question. Have you a distinct theory of life's purpose that
+you can put into half a dozen words, or have you not? In the one
+case, there is some chance of attaining your object; in the other
+one, none. Alas! we find many Christian people who do not set before
+themselves, with emphasis and constancy, as their aim the doing of
+God's will, and so sometimes they do it, when it happens to be easy,
+and sometimes, when temptations are strong, they do not. It needs a
+strong hand on the tiller to keep it steady when the wind is blowing
+in puffs and gusts, and sometimes the sail bellies full and
+sometimes it is almost empty. The various strengths of the
+temptations that blow us out of our course are such that we shall
+never keep a straight line of direction, which is the shortest line,
+and the only one on which we shall `obtain,' unless we know very
+distinctly where we want to go, and have a good strong will that has
+learned to say `No!' when the temptations come. `Whom resist
+steadfast in the faith.' `I therefore so run, not as uncertainly,'
+taking one course one day and another the next.
+
+Now, that definite aim is one that can be equally pursued in all
+varieties of life. `This one thing I do' said one who did about as
+many things as most people, but the different kinds of things that
+Paul did were all, at bottom, one thing. And we, in all the
+varieties of our circumstances, may keep this one clear aim before
+us, and whether it be in this way or in that, we may be equally
+and at all times seeking the better country, and bending all
+circumstances and all duty to make us more like our Master and
+bring us closer to Him.
+
+The Psalmist did not offer an impossible prayer when he said: `One
+thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after, that I
+may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to
+behold the beauty of the Lord and to enquire in His temple.' Was
+David in `the house of the Lord' when he was with his sheep in the
+wilderness, and when he was in Saul's palace, and when he was
+living with wild beasts in dens and caves of the earth, and when
+he was a fugitive, hunted like a partridge upon the mountains? Was
+he always in the Lord's house? Yes! At any rate he could be. All
+that we do may be doing His will, and over a life, crowded with
+varying circumstances and yet simplified and made blessed by
+unvarying obedience, we may write, `This one thing I do.'
+
+But we shall not keep this one aim clear before our eyes, unless
+we habituate ourselves to the contemplation of the end. The
+runner, according to Paul's vivid picture in another of his
+letters, forgets the things that are behind, and stretches out
+towards the things that are before. And just as a man runs with
+his body inclining forward, and his eager hand nearer the prize
+than his body, and his eyesight and his heart travelling ahead of
+them both to grasp it, so if we want to live with the one worthy
+aim for ours, and to put all our effort and faith into what
+deserves it all---the Christian race---we must bring clear before
+us continually, or at least with the utmost frequency, the prize
+of our high calling, the crown of righteousness. Then we shall run
+so that we may, at the last, be able to finish our course with
+joy, and dying to hope with all humility that there is laid up for
+us a crown of righteousness.
+
+\chapter{`Concerning the Crown'}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS ix. 25}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`They do it to obtain a corruptible crown, but we are
+in\-cor\-rupt\-ible.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} ix. 25.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+One of the most famous of the Greek athletic festivals was held
+close by Corinth. Its prize was a pine-wreath from the
+neighbouring sacred grove. The painful abstinence and training of
+ten months, and the fierce struggle of ten minutes, had for their
+result a twist of green leaves, that withered in a week, and a
+little fading fame that was worth scarcely more, and lasted
+scarcely longer. The struggle and the discipline were noble; the
+end was contemptible. And so it is with all lives whose aims are
+lower than the highest. They are greater in the powers they put
+forth than in the objects they compass, and the question, `What is
+it for?' is like a douche of cold water from the cart that lays
+the clouds of dust in the ways.
+
+So, says Paul, praising the effort and contemning the prize, `They
+do it to obtain a corruptible crown.' And yet there was a soul of
+goodness in this evil thing. Though these festivals were
+indissolubly intertwined with idolatry, and besmirched with much
+sensuous evil, yet he deals with them as he does with war and with
+slavery; points to the disguised nobility that lay beneath the
+hideousness, and holds up even these low things as a pattern for
+Christian men.
+
+But I do not mean here to speak so much about the general bearing
+of this text as rather to deal with its designation of the aim and
+reward of Christian energy, that `incorruptible crown' of which my
+text speaks. And in doing so I desire to take into account
+likewise other places in Scripture in which the same metaphor
+occurs.
+
+I. The crown.
+
+Let me recall the other places where the same metaphor is
+employed. We find the Apostle, in the immediate prospect of death,
+rising into a calm rapture in which imprisonment and martyrdom
+lose their terrors, as he thinks of the `crown of righteousness'
+which the Lord will give to him. The Epistle of James, again,
+assures the man who endures temptation that `the Lord will give
+him the crown of life which He has promised to all them that love
+Him.' The Lord Himself from heaven repeats that promise to the
+persecuted Church at Smyrna: `Be thou faithful unto death, and I
+will give thee a crown of life.' The elders cast their crowns
+before the feet of Him that sitteth upon the throne. The Apostle
+Peter, in his letter, stimulates the elders upon earth to faithful
+discharge of their duty, by the hope that thereby they shall
+`receive a crown of righteousness that fadeth not away.' So all
+these instances taken together with this of my text enable us to
+gather two or three lessons.
+
+It is extremely unlikely that all these instances of the
+occurrence of the emblem carry with them reference, such as that
+in my text, to the prize at the athletic festivals. For Peter and
+James, intense Jews as they were, had probably never seen, and
+possibly never heard of, the struggles at the Isthmus and at
+Olympus and elsewhere. The Book of the Revelation draws its
+metaphors almost exclusively from the circle of Jewish practices
+and things. So that we have to look in other directions than the
+arena or the racecourse to explain these other uses of the image.
+It is also extremely unlikely that in these other passages the
+reference is to a crown as the emblem of sovereignty, for that
+idea is expressed, as a rule, by another word in Scripture, which
+we have Anglicised as `diadem.' The `crown' in all these passages
+is a garland twisted out of some growth of the field. In ancient
+usage roses were twined for revellers; pine-shoots or olive
+branches for the victors in the games; while the laurel was `the
+meed of mighty conquerors'; and plaited oak leaves were laid upon
+the brows of citizens who had deserved well of their country, and
+myrtle sprays crowned the fair locks of the bride.
+
+And thus in these directions, and not towards the wrestling ground
+or the throne of the monarch, must we look for the ideas suggested
+by the emblem.
+
+Now, if we gather together all these various uses of the word,
+there emerge two broad ideas, that the `crown' which is the
+Christian's aim symbolises a state of triumphant repose and of
+festal enjoyment. There are other aspects of that great and dim
+future which correspond to other necessities of our nature, and I
+suppose some harm has been done and some misconceptions have been
+induced, and some unreality imported into the idea of the
+Christian future, by the too exclusive prominence given to these
+two ideas---victorious rest after the struggle, and abundant
+satisfaction of all desires. That future is other and more than a
+festival; it is other and more than repose. There are larger
+fields there for the operation of powers that have been trained
+and evolved here. The faithfulness of the steward is exchanged,
+according to Christ's great words, for the authority of the ruler
+over many cities. But still, do we not all know enough of the
+worry and turbulence and strained effort of the conflict here
+below, to feel that to some of our deepest and not ignoble needs
+and desires that image appeals? The helmet that pressed upon the
+brow even whilst it protected the brain, and wore away the hair
+even whilst it was a defence, is lifted off, and on unruffled
+locks the garland is intertwined that speaks victory and befits a
+festival. One of the old prophets puts the same metaphor in words
+imperfectly represented by the English translation, when he
+promises `a crown' or a garland `for ashes'---instead of the
+symbol of mourning, strewed grey and gritty upon the dishevelled
+hair of the weepers, flowers twined into a wreath---`the oil of
+joy for mourning,' and the festival `garment of praise' to dress
+the once heavy spirit. So the satisfaction of all desires, the
+accompaniments of a feast, in abundance, rejoicing and
+companionship, and conclusive conquest over all foes, are promised
+us in this great symbol.
+
+But let us look at the passages separately, and we shall find that
+they present the one thought with differences, and that if we
+combine these, as in a stereoscope, the picture gains solidity.
+
+The crown is described in three ways. It is the crown of `life,'
+of `glory' and of `righteousness.' And I venture to think that
+these three epithets describe the material, so to speak, of which
+the wreath is composed. The everlasting flower of life, the
+radiant blossoms of glory, the white flower of righteousness;
+these are its components.
+
+I need not enlarge upon them, nor will your time allow that I
+should. Here we have the promise of life, that fuller life which
+men want, `the life of which our veins are scant,' even in the
+fullest tide and heyday of earthly existence. The promise sets
+that future over against the present, as if then first should men
+know what it means to live: so buoyant, elastic, unwearied shall
+be their energies, so manifold the new outlets for activity, and
+the new inlets for the surrounding glory and beauty; so
+incorruptible and glorious shall be their new being. Here we live
+a living death; there we shall live indeed; and that will be the
+crown, not only in regard to physical, but in regard to spiritual,
+powers and consciousness.
+
+But remember that all this full tide of life is Christ's gift.
+There is no such thing as natural immortality; there is no such
+thing as independent life. All Being, from the lowest creature up
+to the loftiest created spirit, exists by one law, the continual
+impartation to it of life from the fountain of life, according to
+its capacities. And unless Jesus Christ, all through the eternal
+ages of the future, imparted to the happy souls that sit garlanded
+at His board the life by which they live, the wreaths would wither
+on their brows, and the brows would melt away, and dissolve from
+beneath the wreaths. `I will give him a crown of life.'
+
+It is a crown of `glory,' and that means a lustrousness of
+character imparted by radiation and reflection from the central
+light of the glory of God. `Then shall the righteous blaze out
+like the sun in the Kingdom of My Father.' Our eyes are dim, but
+we can at least divine the far-off flashing of that great light,
+and may ponder upon what hidden depths and miracles of transformed
+perfectness and unimagined lustre wait for us, dark and limited as
+we are here, in the assurance that we all shall be changed into
+the `likeness of the body of His glory.'
+
+It is a crown of `righteousness.' Though that phrase may mean the
+wreath that rewards righteousness, it seems more in accordance
+with the other similar expressions to which I have referred to
+regard it, too, as the material of which the crown is composed. It
+is not enough that there should be festal gladness, not enough
+that there should be calm repose, not enough that there should be
+flashing glory, not enough that there should be fulness of life.
+To accord with the intense moral earnestness of the Christian
+system there must be, emphatically, in the Christian hope,
+cessation of all sin and investiture with all purity. The word
+means the same thing as the ancient promise, `Thy people shall be
+all righteous.' It means the same thing as the latest promise of
+the ascended Christ, `They shall walk with Me in white.' And it
+sets, I was going to say, the very climax and culmination on the
+other hopes, declaring that absolute, stainless, infallible
+righteousness which one day shall belong to our weak and sinful
+spirits.
+
+These, then, are the elements, and on them all is stamped the
+signature of perpetuity. The victor's wreath is tossed on the
+ashen heap, the reveller's flowers droop as he sits in the heat of
+the banqueting-hall; the bride's myrtle blossom fades though she
+lay it away in a safe place. The crown of life is incorruptible.
+It is twined of amaranth, ever blossoming into new beauty and
+never fading.
+
+II. Now look, secondly, at the discipline by which the crown is
+won.
+
+Observe, first of all, that in more than one of the passages to
+which we have already referred great emphasis is laid upon Christ
+as \textit{giving} the crown. That is to say, that blessed future
+is not won by effort, but is bestowed as a free gift. It is given
+from the hands which have procured it, and, as I may say, twined
+it for us. Unless His brows had been pierced with the crown of
+thorns, ours would never have worn the garland of victory. Jesus
+provides the sole means, by His work, by which any man can enter
+into that inheritance; and Jesus, as the righteous Judge who
+bestows the rewards, which are likewise the results, of our life
+here, gives the crown. It remains for ever the gift of His love.
+`The wages of sin is death,' but we rise above the region of
+retribution and desert when we pass to the next clause---`the gift
+of God is eternal life,' and that `through Jesus Christ.'
+
+Whilst, then, this must be laid as the basis of all, there must
+also, with equal earnestness and clearness, be set forth the other
+thought that Christ's gift has conditions, which conditions these
+passages plainly set forth. In the one, which I have read as a
+text, we have these conditions declared as being
+twofold---protracted discipline and continuous effort. The same
+metaphor employed by the same Apostle, in his last dying
+utterance, associates his consciousness that he had fought the
+good fight and run his race, like the pugilists and runners of the
+arena, with the hope that he shall receive the crown of
+righteousness. James declares that it is given to the man who
+\textit{endures} temptation, not only in the sense of bearing, but
+of so bearing as not thereby to be injured in Christian character
+and growth in Christian life. Peter asserts that it is the reward
+of self-denying discharge of duty. And the Lord from heaven lays
+down the condition of faithfulness unto death as the necessary
+pre-requisite of His gift of the crown of life. In two of the
+passages there is included, though not precisely on the level of
+these other requirements, the love of Him and the love of `His
+appearing,' as the necessary qualifications for the gift of the
+crown.
+
+So, to begin with, unless a man has such a love to Jesus Christ as
+that he is happy in His presence, and longs to have Him near, as
+parted loving souls do; and, especially, is looking forward to
+that great judicial coming, and feeling that there is no tremor in
+his heart at the prospect of meeting the Judge, but an outgoing of
+desire and love at the hope of seeing his Saviour and his Friend,
+what right has he to expect the crown? None. And he will never get
+it. There is a test for us which may well make some of us ask
+ourselves, Are we Christians, then, at all?
+
+And then, beyond that, there are all these other conditions which
+I have pointed out, which may be gathered into one---strenuous
+discharge of daily duty and continual effort after following in
+Christ's footsteps.
+
+This needs to be as fully and emphatically preached as the other
+doctrine that eternal life is the gift of God. All manner of
+mischiefs may come, and have come, from either of these twin
+thoughts, wrenched apart. But let us weave them as closely
+together as the stems of the flowers that make the garlands are
+twined, and feel that there is a perfect consistency of both in
+theory, and that there must be a continual union of both, in our
+belief and in our practice. Eternal life is the gift of God, on
+condition of our diligence and earnestness. It is not all the same
+whether you are a lazy Christian or not. It does make an eternal
+difference in our condition whether here we `run with patience the
+race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus.' We have to
+receive the crown as a gift; we have to wrestle and run, as
+contending for a prize.
+
+III. And now, lastly, note the power of the reward as motive for
+life.
+
+Paul says roundly in our text that the desire to obtain the
+incorruptible crown is a legitimate spring of Christian action.
+Now, I do not need to waste your time and my own in defending
+Christian morality from the fantastic objection that it is low and
+selfish, because it encourages itself to efforts by the prospect
+of the crown. If there are any men who are Christians---if such a
+contradiction can be even stated in words---only because of what
+they hope to gain thereby in another world, they will not get what
+they hope for; and they would not like it if they did. I do not
+believe that there are any such; and sure I am, if there are, that
+it is not Christianity that has made them so. But a thought that
+we must not take as a supreme motive, we may rightly accept as a
+subsidiary encouragement. We are not Christians unless the
+dominant motive of our lives be the love of the Lord Jesus Christ;
+and unless we feel a necessity, because of loving Him, to aim to
+be like Him. But, that being so, who shall hinder me from
+quickening my flagging energies, and stimulating my torpid faith,
+and encouraging my cowardice, by the thought that yonder there
+remain rest, victory, the fulness of life, the flashing of glory,
+and the purity of perfect righteousness? If such hopes are low and
+selfish as motives, would God that more of us were obedient to
+such low and selfish motives!
+
+Now it seems to me, that this spring of action is not as strong in
+the Christians of this day as it used to be, and as it should be.
+You do not hear much about heaven in ordinary preaching. I do not
+think it occupies a very large place in the average Christian
+man's mind. We have all got such a notion nowadays of the great
+good that the Gospel does in society and in the present, and some
+of us have been so frightened by the nonsense that has been talked
+about the `other-worldliness' of Christianity---as if that was a
+disgrace to it---that it seems to me that the future of glory and
+blessedness has very largely faded away, as a motive for Christian
+men's energies, like the fresco off a neglected convent wall.
+
+And I want to say, dear brethren, that I believe, for my part,
+that we suffer terribly by the comparative neglect into which this
+side of Christian truth has fallen. Do you not think that it would
+make a difference to you if you really believed, and carried
+always with you in your thoughts, the thrilling consciousness that
+every act of the present was registered, and would tell on the far
+side yonder?
+
+We do not know much of that future, and these days are intolerant
+of mere unverifiable hypotheses. But accuracy of knowledge and
+definiteness of impression do not always go together, nor is there
+the fulness of the one wanted for the clearness and force of the
+other. Though the thread which we throw across the abyss is very
+slender, it is strong enough, like the string of a boy's kite, to
+bear the messengers of hope and desire that we may send up by it,
+and strong enough to bear the gifts of grace that will surely come
+down along it.
+
+We cannot understand to-day unless we look at it with eternity for
+a background. The landscape lacks its explanation, until the mists
+lift and we see the white summits of the Himalayas lying behind
+and glorifying the low sandy plain. Would your life not be
+different; would not the things in it that look great be
+wholesomely dwindled and yet be magnified; would not sorrow be
+calmed, and life become `a solemn scorn of ills,' and energies be
+stimulated, and all be different, if you really `did it to obtain
+an incorruptible crown?'
+
+Brethren, let us try to keep more clearly before us, as solemn and
+blessed encouragement in our lives, these great thoughts. The
+garland hangs on the goal, but `a man is not crowned unless he
+strive according to the laws' of the arena. The laws are two---No
+man can enter for the conflict but by faith in Christ; no man can
+win in the struggle but by faithful effort. So the first law is,
+`Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ,' and the second is, `Hold fast
+that thou hast; let no man take thy crown.'
+
+\chapter{The Limits of Liberty}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS x. 23--33}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all
+things are lawful for me, but all things edify not. 24.\ Let no man
+seek his own, but every man another's wealth. 25.\ Whatsoever is
+sold in the shambles, that eat, asking no question for conscience
+sake. 26.\ For the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof.
+27.\ If any of them that believe not bid you to a feast, and ye be
+disposed to go, whatsoever is set before you eat, asking no question
+for conscience sake. 28.\ But if any man say unto you, This is
+offered in sacrifice unto idols, eat not for his sake that shewed
+it, and for conscience sake: for the earth is the Lord's and the
+fulness thereof: 29.\ Conscience, I say, not thine own, but of the
+other: for why is my liberty judged of another man's conscience?
+30.\ For if I by grace be a partaker, why am I evil spoken of for
+that for which I give thanks? 31.\ Whether therefore ye eat, or
+drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God. 32.\ Give
+none offence, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the
+church of God: 33.\ Even as I please all men in all things, not
+seeking mine own profit, but the profit of many, that they may be
+saved.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} x. 23--33.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+This passage strikingly illustrates Paul's constant habit of
+solving questions as to conduct by the largest principles. He did
+not keep his `theology' and his ethics in separate water-tight
+compartments, having no communication with each other. The
+greatest truths were used to regulate the smallest duties. Like
+the star that guided the Magi, they burned high in the heavens,
+but yet directed to the house in Bethlehem.
+
+The question here in hand was one that pressed on the Corinthian
+Christians, and is very far away from our experience. Idolatry had
+so inextricably intertwined itself with daily life that it was
+hard to keep up any intercourse with non-Christians without
+falling into constructive idolatry; and one very constantly
+obtruding difficulty was that much of the animal food served on
+private tables had been slaughtered as sacrifices or with certain
+sacrificial rites. What was a Christian to do in such a case? To
+eat or not to eat? Both views had their vehement supporters in the
+Corinthian church, and the importance of the question is manifest
+from the large space devoted to it in this letter.
+
+In chapter viii. we have a weighty paragraph, in which one phase
+of the difficulty is dealt with---the question whether a Christian
+ought to attend a feast in an idol temple, where, of course, the
+viands had been offered as sacrifices. But in chapter x. Paul
+deals with the case in which the meat had been bought in the
+flesh-market, and so was not necessarily sacrificial. Paul's
+manner of handling the point is very instructive. He envelops, as
+it were, the practical solution in a wrapping of large principles;
+verses 23, 24 precede the specific answer, and are general
+principles; verses 25--30 contain the practical answer; verses
+31--33 and verse 1 of the next chapter are again general
+principles, wide and imperative enough to mould all conduct, as
+well as to settle the matter immediately in hand, which, important
+as it was at Corinth, has become entirely uninteresting to us.
+
+We need not spend time in elucidating the specific directions
+given as to the particular question in hand further than to note
+the immense gift of saving common-sense which Paul had, and how
+sanely and moderately he dealt with his problem. His advice
+was---`Don't ask where the joint set before you came from. If you
+do not know that it was offered, your eating of it does not commit
+you to idol worship.' No doubt there were Corinthian Christians
+with inflamed consciences who did ask such questions, and rather
+prided themselves on their strictness and rigidity; but Paul would
+have them let sleeping dogs lie. If, however, the meat is known to
+have been offered to an idol, then Paul is as rigid and strict as
+they are. That combination of willingness to go as far as
+possible, and inflexible determination not to go one step farther,
+of yieldingness wherever principle does not come in, and of iron
+fixedness wherever it does, is rare indeed, but should be aimed at
+by all Christians. The morality of the Gospel would make more way
+in the world if its advocates always copied the `sweet
+reasonableness' of Paul, which, as he tells us in this passage, he
+learned from Jesus.
+
+As to the wrapping of general principles, they may all be reduced
+to one---the duty of limiting Christian liberty by consideration
+for others. In the two verses preceding the practical precepts,
+that duty is stated with reference entirely to the obligations
+flowing from our relationship to others. We are all bound together
+by a mystical chain of solidarity. Since every man is my
+neighbour, I am bound to think of him and not only of myself in
+deciding what I may do or refrain from doing. I must abstain from
+lawful things if, by doing them, I should be likely to harm my
+neighbour's building up of a strong character. I can, or I believe
+that I can, pursue some course of conduct, engage in some
+enterprise, follow some line of life, without damage to myself,
+either in regard to worldly position, or in regard to my religious
+life. Be it so, but I have to take some one else into account.
+Will my example call out imitation in others, to whom it may be
+harmful or fatal to do as I can do with real or supposed impunity?
+If so, I am guilty of something very like murder if I do not
+abstain.
+
+`What harm is there in betting a shilling? I can well afford to
+lose it, and I can keep myself from the feverish wish to risk
+more.' Yes, and you are thereby helping to hold up that gambling
+habit which is ruining thousands.
+
+`I can take alcohol in moderation, and it does me no harm, and I
+can go to a prayer-meeting after my dinner and temperate glass,
+and I am within my Christian liberty in doing so.' Yes, and you
+take part thereby in the greatest curse that besets our country,
+and are, by countenancing the drink habit, guilty of the blood of
+souls. How any Christian man can read these two verses and not
+abstain from all intoxicants is a mystery. They cut clean through
+all the pleas for moderate drinking, and bring into play another
+set of principles which limit liberty by regard to others' good.
+Surely, if there was ever a subject to which these words apply, it
+is the use of alcohol, the proved cause of almost all the crime
+and poverty on both sides of the Atlantic. To the Christians who
+plead their `liberty' we can only say, `Happy is he that
+condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth.'
+
+The same general considerations reappear in the verses following
+the specific precept, but with a difference. The neighbour's
+profit is still put forth as the limiting consideration, but it is
+elevated to a higher sacredness of obligation by being set in
+connection with the `glory of God' and the example of Christ. `Do
+all to the glory of God.' To put the thought here into modern
+English---Could you ask a blessing over a glass of spirits when
+you think that, though it should do you no harm, your taking it
+may, as it were, tip some weak brother over the precipice? Can you
+drink to God's glory when you know that drink is slaying thousands
+body and soul, and that hopeless drunkards are made by wholesale
+out of moderate drinkers? `Give no occasion of stumbling'; do not
+by your example tempt others into risky courses. And remember that
+`neighbour' (verse 24) resolves itself into `Jews' and `Greeks'
+and the `Church of God'---that is, substantially to your own race
+and other races---to men with whom you have affinities, and to men
+with whom you have none.
+
+A Christian man is bound to shape his life so that no man shall be
+able to say of him that he was the occasion of that one's fall. He
+is so bound because every man is his neighbour. He is so bound
+because he is bound to live to the glory of God, which can never
+be advanced by laying stumbling-blocks in the way for feeble feet.
+He is so bound because, unless Christ had limited Himself within
+the bound of manhood, and had sought not His own profit or
+pleasure, we should have had neither life nor hope. For all these
+reasons, the duty of thinking of others, and of abstaining, for
+their sakes, from what one might do, is laid on all Christians.
+How do they discharge that duty who will not forswear alcohol for
+their neighbour's sake?
+
+\chapter{`In Remembrance of Me'}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS xi. 24}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`This do in remembrance of Me.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} xi. 24.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The account of the institution of the Lord's Supper, contained in
+this context, is very much the oldest extant narrative of that
+event. It dates long before any of the Gospels, and goes up,
+probably, to somewhere about five and twenty years after the
+Crucifixion. It presupposes a previous narrative which had been
+orally delivered to the Corinthians, and, as the Apostle alleges,
+was derived by him from Christ Himself. It is intended to correct
+corruptions in the administration of the rite which must have
+taken some time to develop themselves. And so we are carried back
+to a period very close indeed to the first institution of the
+rite, by the words before us.
+
+No reasonable doubt can exist, then, that within a very few years
+of our Lord's death, the whole body of Christian people believed
+that Jesus Christ Himself appointed the Lord's Supper. I do not
+stay to dwell upon the value of a rite contemporaneous with the
+fact which it commemorates, and continuously lasting throughout
+the ages, as a witness of the historical veracity of the alleged
+fact; but I want to fix upon this thought, that Jesus Christ, who
+cared very little for rites, who came to establish a religion
+singularly independent of any outward form, did establish two
+rites, one of them to be done once in a Christian lifetime, one of
+them to be repeated with indefinite frequency, and, as it appears,
+at first repeated daily by the early believers. The reason why
+these two, and only these two, external ordinances were appointed
+by Jesus Christ was, that, taken together, they cover the whole
+ground of revealed fact, and they also cover the whole ground of
+Christian experience. There is no room for any other rites,
+because these two, the rite of initiation, which is baptism, and
+the rite of commemoration, which is the Lord's Supper, say
+everything about Christianity as a revelation, and about
+Christianity as a living experience.
+
+Not only so, but in the simple primitive form of the Lord's Supper
+there is contained a reference to the past, the present and the
+future. It covers all time as well as all revelation and all
+Christian experience. For the past, as the text shows us, it is a
+memorial of one Person, and one fact in that Person's life. For
+the present, it is the symbol of the Christian life, as that great
+sixth chapter in John's gospel sets forth; and for the future, it
+is a prophecy, as our Lord Himself said on that night in the upper
+chamber, `Till I drink it new with you in My Father's kingdom,'
+and as the Apostle in this context says, `Till He come.' It is to
+these three aspects of this ordinance, as the embodiment of all
+essential Christian truth, and as the embodiment of all deep
+Christian experience, covering the past, the present, and the
+future, that I wish to turn now. I do not deal so much with the
+mere words of my text as with this threefold significance of the
+rite which it appoints.
+
+I. So then, first, we have to think of it as a memorial of the
+past.
+
+`Do this,' is the true meaning of the words, not `in remembrance
+of Me,' but something far more sweet and pathetic---`do this for
+the \textit{remembering} of Me.' The former expression is equal to
+`Do this because you remember.' The real meaning of the words is,
+`Do this in case you forget'; do this in order that you may recall
+to memory what the slippery memory is so apt to lose---the
+impression of even the sweetest sweetness, of the most loving
+love, and the most self-abnegating sacrifice, which He offered for
+us.
+
+There is something to me infinitely pathetic and beautiful in
+looking at the words not only as the commandment of the Lord, but
+as the appeal of the Friend, who wished, as we all do, not to be
+utterly forgotten by those whom He cared for and loved; and who,
+not only because their remembrance was their salvation, but
+because their forgetfulness pained His human heart, brings to
+their hearts the plaintive appeal: `Do not forget Me when I am
+gone away from you; and even if you have no better way of
+remembering Me, take these poor symbols, to which I am not too
+proud to entrust the care of My memory, and do this, lest you
+forget Me.'
+
+But, dear brethren, there are deeper thoughts than this, on which
+I must dwell briefly. `In remembrance of Me'---Jesus Christ, then,
+takes up an altogether unique and solitary position here, and into
+the sacredest hours of devotion and the loftiest moments of
+communion with God, intrudes His personality, and says, `When you
+are most religious, remember Me; and let the highest act of your
+devout life be a thought turned to Myself.'
+
+Now, I want you to ask, is that thought diverted from God? And if
+it is not, how comes it not to be? I want you honestly to ask
+yourselves this question---what did \textit{He} think about
+Himself who, at that moment, when all illusions were vanishing,
+and life was almost at its last ebb, took the most solemn rite of
+His nation and laid it solemnly aside and said: `A greater than
+Moses is here; a greater deliverance is being wrought': `Remember
+Me.' Is that insisting on His own personality, and making the
+remembrance of it the very apex and shining summit of all
+religious aspiration---is that the work of one about whom all that
+we have to say is, He was the noblest of men? If so, then I want
+to know how Jesus Christ, in that upper chamber, founding the sole
+continuous rite of the religion which He established, and making
+its heart and centre the remembrance of His own personality, can
+be cleared from the charge of diverting to Himself what belongs to
+God only, and how you and I, if we obey His commands, escape the
+crime of idolatry and man-worship? `Do this in remembrance,'---not
+of God---`in remembrance of Me,' `and let memory, with all its
+tendrils, clasp and cleave to My person.' What an extraordinary
+demand! It is obscuring God, unless the `Me' \textit{is} God
+manifest in the flesh.
+
+Then, still further, let me remind you that in the appointment of
+this solitary rite as His memorial to all generations, Jesus
+Christ Himself designates one part of His whole manifestation as
+the part into which all its pathos, significance, and power are
+concentrated. We who believe that the death of Christ is the life
+of the world, are told that one formidable objection to our belief
+is that Jesus Christ Himself said so little during His life about
+His death. I believe His reticence upon that question is much
+exaggerated, but apart altogether from that, I believe also that
+there was a necessity in the order of the evolution of divine
+truth, for the reticence, such as it is, because, whatsoever might
+be possible to Moses and Elias, on the Mount of Transfiguration,
+`His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem,' could not
+be much spoken about in the plain till it had been accomplished.
+But, apart from both of these considerations, reflect, that
+whether He said much about His death or not, He said something
+very much to the purpose about it when He said `Do this in
+remembrance of Me.'
+
+It is not His personality only that we are to remember. The whole
+of the language of the institution of the ritual, as well as the
+form of the rite, and its connection with the ancient passover,
+and its connection with the new covenant into connection with
+which Christ Himself brings it, all point to the significance in
+His eyes of His death as the Sacrifice for the world's sin.
+Wherefore `the body' and `the blood' separately remembered, except
+to indicate death by violence? Wherefore the language `the body
+\textit{broken} for you'; `the blood \textit{shed} for many for
+the remission of sins?' Wherefore the association with the
+Passover sacrifice? Wherefore the declaration that `this is the
+blood of the Covenant,' unless all tended to the one thought---His
+death is the foundation of all loving relationships possible to us
+with God; and the condition of the remission of sins---the
+Sacrifice for the whole world?'
+
+This is the point that He desires us to remember; this is that
+which He would have live for ever in our grateful hearts.
+
+I say nothing about the absolute exclusion of any other purpose of
+this memorial rite. If it was the mysterious thing that the
+superstition of later ages has made of it, how, in the name of
+common-sense, does it come that not one syllable, looking in that
+direction, dropped from His lips when He established it? Surely
+He, in that upper chamber, knew best what He meant, and what He
+was doing when He established the rite; and I, for my part, am
+contented to be told that I believe in a poor, bald Zwinglianism,
+when I say with my Master, that the purpose of the Lord's Supper
+is simply the commemoration, and therein the proclamation, of His
+death. There is no magic, no mystery, no `sacrament' about it. It
+blesses us when it makes us remember Him. It does the same thing
+for us which any other means of bringing Him to mind does. It does
+that through a different vehicle. A sermon does it by words, the
+Communion does it by symbols. That is the difference to be found
+between them. And away goes the whole fabric of superstitious
+Christianity, and all its mischiefs and evils, when once you
+accept the simple `Remember.' Christ told us what He meant by the
+rite when He said `Do this in remembrance of Me.'
+
+II. And now one word or two more about the other particulars which
+I have suggested. The past, however sweet and precious, is not
+enough for any soul to live upon. And so this memorial rite, just
+because it is memorial, is a symbol for the present.
+
+That is taught us in the great chapter---the sixth of John's
+Gospel---which was spoken long before the institution of the
+Lord's Supper, but expresses in words the same ideas which it
+expresses by material forms. The Christ who died is the Christ who
+lives, and must be lived upon by the Christian. If our relation to
+Jesus Christ were only that `Once in the end of the ages He
+appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself'; and if we
+had to look back through lengthening vistas of distance and
+thickening folds of oblivion, simply to a historical past, in
+which He was once offered, the retrospect would not have the
+sweetness in it which it now has. But when we come to this thought
+that the Christ who was for us is also the Christ in us, and that
+He is not the Christ for us unless He is the Christ in us; and His
+death will never wash away our sins unless we feed upon Him, here
+and now, by faith and meditation, then the retrospect becomes
+blessedness. The Christian life is not merely the remembrance of a
+historical Christ in the past, but it is the present participation
+in a living Christ, with us now.
+
+He is near each of us that we may make Him the very food of our
+spirits. We are to live upon Him. He is to be incorporated within
+us by our own act. This is no mysticism, it is a piece of simple
+reality. There is no Christian life without it. The true life of
+the believer is just the feeding of our souls upon Him,---our
+minds accepting, meditating upon, digesting the truths which are
+incarnated in Jesus; our hearts feeding upon the love which is so
+tender, warm, stooping, and close; our wills feeding upon and
+nourished by the utterance of His will in commandments which to
+know is joy and to keep is liberty; our hopes feeding upon Him who
+is our Hope, and in whom they find no chaff and husks of
+peradventures, but the pure wheat of `Verily! verily I say unto
+you'; the whole nature thus finding its nourishment in Jesus
+Christ. You are Christians in the measure in which the very
+strength of your spirits, and sustenance of all your faculties,
+are found in loving communion with the living Lord.
+
+Remember, too, that all this communion, intimate, sweet, sacred,
+is possible only, or at all events is in its highest forms and
+most blessed reality, possible only, to those who approach Him
+through the gate of His death. The feeding upon the living Christ
+which will be the strength of our hearts and our portion for ever,
+must be a feeding upon the whole Christ. We must not only nourish
+our spirits on the fact that He was incarnated for our salvation,
+but also on the truth that He was crucified for our acceptance
+with God. `He that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me,' has for
+its deepest explanation, `He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My
+blood hath eternal life.'
+
+My friends, what about the hunger of your souls? Where is it
+satisfied? With the swine's husks, or with the `Bread of God which
+came down from Heaven?'
+
+III. Now, lastly, that rite which is a memorial and a symbol is
+also a prophecy.
+
+In the original words of the institution our Lord Himself makes
+reference to the future; `till I drink it new with you in My
+Father's kingdom.' And in the context here, the Apostle provides
+for the perpetual continuance, and emphasises the prophetic
+aspect, of the rite, by that word, `till He come.' His death
+necessarily implies His coming again. The Cross and the Throne are
+linked together by an indissoluble bond. Being what it is, the
+death cannot be the end. Being what He is, if He has once been
+offered to bear the sins of many, so He must come the second time
+without sin unto salvation. The rite, just because it is a rite,
+is the prophecy of a time when the need for it, arising from weak
+flesh and an intrusive world, shall cease. `They shall say no
+more, The ark of the covenant of the Lord; at that time they shall
+call Jerusalem the throne of the Lord.' There shall be no temple
+in that great city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are
+the Temple thereof. So all external worship is a prophecy of the
+coming of the perfect time, when that which is perfect being come,
+the external helps and ladders to climb to the loftiest shall be
+done away.
+
+But more than that, the memorial and symbol is a prophecy. That
+upper chamber, with its troubled thoughts, its unbidden tears,
+starting to the eyes of the half-understanding listeners, who only
+felt that He was going away and the sweet companionship was
+dissolved, may seem to be but a blurred and a poor image of the
+better communion of heaven. But though on that sad night the
+Master bore a burdened heart, and the servants had but partial
+apprehension and a more partial love; though He went forth to
+agonise and to die, and they went forth to deny and to betray, and
+to leave Him alone, still it was a prophecy of Christ's table in
+His kingdom. Heaven is to be a feast. That representation promises
+society to the solitary, rest to the toilers, the oil of joy for
+mourning, and the full satisfaction of all desires. That heavenly
+feast surpasses indeed the antitype in the upper chamber, in that
+there the Master Himself partook not, and yonder we shall sup with
+Him and He with us, but is prophetic in that, as there He took a
+towel and girded Himself and washed the disciples' feet, so yonder
+He will come forth Himself and serve them. The future is unlike
+the prophetic past in that `we shall go no more out'; there shall
+be no sequences of sorrow, and struggle, and distance and
+ignorance; but like it in that we shall feast on Christ, for
+through eternity the glorified Jesus will be the Bread of our
+spirits, and the fact of His past sacrifice the foundation of our
+hopes.
+
+So, dear brethren, though our external celebration of this rite be
+dashed, as it always is, with much ignorance and with feeble
+faith; and though we gather round this table as the first
+generation of Israelites did round the passover, of which it is
+the successor, with staff in hand and loins girded, and have to
+eat it often with bitter herbs mingled, and though there be at our
+sides empty places, yet even in our clouded and partial
+apprehension, and in the imperfections of this outward type, we
+may see a gracious shadow of what is waiting for us when we shall
+go no more out, and all empty places shall be filled, and the
+bitter herbs shall be changed for the asphodel of Heaven and the
+sweet flowerage round the throne of God, and we shall feast upon
+the Christ, and in the loftiest experience of the utmost glories
+of the Heavens, shall remember the bitter Cross and agony as that
+which has bought it all. `This do in remembrance of Me.' May it be
+a symbol of our inmost life, and the prophecy of the Heaven to
+which we each shall come!
+
+\chapter{The Universal Gift}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS xii. 7}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`The manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit
+withal.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} xii. 7.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The great fact which to-day\footnote{Whitsunday.} commemorates is
+too often regarded as if it were a transient gift, limited to
+those on whom it was first bestowed. We sometimes hear it said
+that the great need of the Christian world is a second Pentecost,
+a fresh outpouring of the Spirit of God and the like. Such a way
+of thinking and speaking misconceives the nature and significance
+of the first Pentecost, which had a transient element in it, but
+in essence was permanent. The rushing mighty wind and the cloven
+tongues of fire, and the strange speech in many languages, were
+all equally transient. The rushing wind swept on, and the house
+was no more filled with it. The tongues flickered into
+invisibility and disappeared from the heads. The hubbub of many
+languages was quickly silent. But that which these things but
+symbolised is permanent; and we are not to think of Pentecost as
+if it were a sudden gush from a great reservoir, and the sluice
+was let down again after it, but as if it were the entrance into a
+dry bed, of a rushing stream, whose first outgush was attended
+with noise, but which thereafter flows continuous and unbroken. If
+churches or individuals are scant of that gift, it is not because
+it has not been bestowed, but because it has not been accepted.
+
+My text tells us two things: it unconditionally and broadly
+asserts that every Christian possesses this great gift---the
+manifestation is given to every man; and then it asserts that the
+gift of each is meant to be utilised for the good of all. `The
+manifestation is given to every man to profit withal.'
+
+I. Let me, then, say a word or two, to begin with, about the
+universality of this gift.
+
+Now, that is implied in our Lord's own language, as commented upon
+by the Evangelist. For Jesus Christ declared that this was the
+standing law of His kingdom, to be universally applied to all its
+members, that `He that believeth on Him, out of him shall flow
+rivers of living water'; and the Evangelist's comment goes on to
+say, `This spake He of the Spirit which they that believe on Him
+should receive.' \textit{There} is the condition and the
+qualification. Wherever there is faith, there the Spirit of God is
+bestowed, and bestowed in the measure in which faith is exercised.
+So, then, in full accordance with such fundamental principles in
+reference to the gift of the Spirit of God, comes the language of
+my text, and of many another text to which I cannot do more than
+refer. But let me just quote one or two of them, in order that I
+may make more emphatic what I believe a great many Christian
+people do not realise as they ought---viz. that the gift of God's
+Holy Spirit is not a thing to be desired, as if it were not
+possessed or confined to select individuals, or manifested by
+exceptional and lofty attainments, but is the universal heritage
+of the whole Christian Church. `Know ye not that ye are the temple
+of the Holy Ghost?' `We have all been made to drink into one
+Spirit,' says Paul again, in the immediate context. `If any man
+have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His,' says he,
+unconditionally. And in many other places the same principle is
+laid down, a principle which I believe the Christian Church to-day
+needs to have recalled to its consciousness, that it may be
+quickened to realise it in its experience far more than is the
+case at present.
+
+Let me remind you, too, that that universality of the gifts of the
+Divine Spirit is implied in the very conception of what Christ's
+work, in its deepest and most precious aspects to us, is. For we
+are not to limit, as a great many so-called earnest evangelical
+teachers and believers do---we are not to limit His work to that
+which is effected when a man first becomes a Christian---viz.
+pardon and acceptance with God. God forbid that I should ever seem
+to underrate that great initial gift on which everything else must
+be built. But I am not underrating it when I say, `Let us prophesy
+according to the proportion of faith,' and the `proportion of
+faith' has been violated, and the perspective and completeness of
+Christian truth, and of Christ's gifts, have been, alas! to a very
+large extent distorted because Christian people, trained in what
+we call the evangelical school, have laid far too little emphasis
+on the fact that the essential gift of Christ to His people is not
+pardon, nor acceptance, nor justification, but \textit{life}; and
+that forgiveness, and altered relationship to God, and assurance
+of acceptance with Him, are all preliminaries. They are, if I may
+recur to a figure that I have already employed, the preparing of
+the channel, and the taking away of the obstacles that block its
+mouth, in order to the inrush of the flood of the river of the
+water of life.
+
+This life that Christ gives is the result of the gift of the
+Spirit. So `If any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of
+His.' The life is the gift considered from our side, and the
+Spirit is the gift considered from the divine side. `Every man
+that hath the Son hath life'; because the law of the Spirit of
+life in Christ has made him free from the law of sin and death. So
+you see if that is true---and I for my part am sure that it
+is---then all that vulgar way of looking at the influences of the
+Holy Spirit upon men, as if they were confined to certain
+exceptional people, or certain abnormal and extraordinary and
+elevated acts, is swept away. It is not the spasmodic, the
+exceptional, the rare, not the lofty or transcendentally
+Christlike acts or characters that are alone the manifestation of
+the Spirit.
+
+Nor is this gift a thing that a man can discover as distinct from
+his own consciousness. The point where the river of the water of
+life comes into the channel of our spirits lies away far up, near
+the sources, and long before the stream comes into sight in our
+own consciousness, the blended waters have been inseparably
+mingled, and flow on peacefully together. `The Spirit beareth
+witness \textit{with} our spirits'; and you are not to expect that
+you can hear two voices speaking, but it is one voice and one
+only.
+
+Now, that universality of this divine gift underlies the very
+constitution of the Christian Church. `Where the Spirit of the
+Lord is there is liberty,' said Paul. It is because each Christian
+man has access to the one Source of illumination and of truth and
+righteousness and holiness, that no Christian man is to become
+subject to the dominion of a brother. And it is because on the
+servants and on the handmaidens has been poured out, in these
+days, God's Spirit and they prophesy, that all domination of
+classes or individuals, and all stiffening of the free life of
+God's Church by man-made creeds, are contrary to the very basis of
+its existence, and an attack on the dignity of each individual
+member of the Church. `Ye have an unction from the Holy One' is
+said to all Christian people---and `ye need not that any man teach
+you,' still less that any man, or body of men, or document framed
+by men, should be set up as normal and authoritative over Christ's
+free people.
+
+Still further, and only one word---Let me remind you of what I
+have already said, and what is only too sadly true, that this
+grand universality of the Spirit's gift to all Christian people
+does not fill, in the mind of the ordinary Christian man, the
+place that it ought, and it does not fill it, therefore, in his
+experience. I say no more upon that point.
+
+II. And now let me say a word, secondly, about the many-sidedness
+of this universal gift.
+
+One of the reasons why Christian people as a whole do not realise
+the universality as they ought is, as I have already suggested in
+a somewhat different connection, because they limit their notions
+far too much of what the gift of God's Spirit is to do to men. We
+must take a wider view of what that Spirit is meant to effect than
+we ordinarily take, before we understand how real and how visible
+its universal manifestations are. Take a leaf out of the Old
+Testament. The man who made the brass-work for the Tabernacle was
+`full of the Spirit of God.' The poets who sung the Psalms, in
+more than one place, declare of themselves that they, too, were
+but the harps upon which the divine finger played. Samson was
+capable of his rude feats of physical strength, because `the
+Spirit of God was upon him.' Art, song, counsel, statesmanlike
+adaptation of means to ends, and discernment of proper courses for
+a nation, such as were exemplified in Joseph and in Daniel, are,
+in the Old Testament, ascribed to the Spirit of God, and even the
+rude physical strength of the simple-natured and sensuous athlete
+is traced up to the same source.
+
+But again, we see another sphere of the Spirit's working in the
+manifestations of it in the experience of the primitive Church.
+These are, as we all know, accompanied with miracles, speaking
+with tongues and working wonders. The signs of that Spirit in
+those days were visible and audible. As I said, when the river
+first came into its bed, it came like the tide in Morecambe Bay,
+breast-high, with a roar and a rush. But it was quiet after that.
+In the context we have a whole series of manifestations of this
+Divine Spirit, some of them miraculous and some being natural
+faculties heightened, but all concerned with the Church as a
+society, and being for the benefit of the community.
+
+But there is another class. If you turn to the Epistle to the
+Galatians, you will find a wonderful list there of what the
+Apostle calls `the fruit of the Spirit,' beginning with `love,
+joy, peace.' These are all moral and religious, bearing upon
+personal experience and the completeness of the individual
+character.
+
+Now, let us include all these aspects in our conception of the
+fruit of the Spirit's working on men---the secular, if we may use
+that word, as exhibited in the Old Testament; the miraculous, as
+seen in the first days of the Church; the ecclesiastical, if we
+may so designate the endowments mentioned in the context, and the
+purely personal, moral, and religious emotions and acts. The plain
+fact is that everything in a Christian's life, except his sin, is
+the manifestation of that Divine Spirit, from whom all good
+thoughts, counsels, and works do proceed. He is the `Spirit of
+adoption,' and whenever in my heart there rises warm and blessed
+the aspiration `Abba! Father!' it is not my voice only, but the
+voice of that Divine Spirit. He is the Spirit of intercession; and
+whenever in my soul there move yearning desires after infinite
+good, child-like longings to be knit more closely to Him, that,
+too, is the voice of God's Spirit; and our prayers are then
+`sweet, indeed, when He the Spirit gives by which we pray.' In
+like manner, all the variety of Christian emotions and experiences
+is to be traced to the conjoint operation of that Divine Spirit as
+the source, and my own spirit as influenced by, and the organ of,
+the Spirit of God. If I may take a very rough illustration, there
+is a story in the Old Testament about a king, to whom were given a
+bow and arrow, with the command to shoot. The prophet's hand was
+laid on the king's weak hand, and the weak hand was strengthened
+by the touch of the other; and with one common pull they drew back
+the string and the arrow sped. The king drew the bow, but it was
+the prophet's hand grasping his wrist that gave him strength to do
+it. And that is how the Spirit of God will work with us if we
+will.
+
+III. Finally, consider the purpose of all the diverse
+manifestations of the one universal gift.
+
+`To profit withal'---for his own good who possesses it, and for
+the good of all the rest of his brethren.
+
+Now, that involves two plain things. There have been people in the
+Christian Church who have said, `We have all the Spirit, and
+therefore we do not need one another.' There may be isolation, and
+self-sufficiency, and a host of other evils coming in, if we only
+grasp the thought, `The manifestation of the Spirit is given to
+every man,' but they are all corrected if we go on and say, `to
+profit withal.' For every one of us has something, and no one of
+us has everything; so, on the one hand, we want each other, and,
+on the other hand, we are responsible for the use of what we have.
+
+You get the life, not in order that you may plume yourself on its
+possession, nor in order that you may ostentatiously display it,
+still less in order that you may shut it up and do nothing with
+it; but you get the life in order that it may spread through you
+to others.
+
+\begin{verse}
+`The least flower with a brimming cup may stand, \\
+ And share its dew-drop with another near.'
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent We each have the life that God's grace may fructify
+through us to all. Power is duty; endowment is obligation;
+capacity prescribes work. `The manifestation of the Spirit is
+given to every man to profit withal.'
+
+You can regulate the flow. You have the sluice; you can shut it or
+open it. I have said that the condition, and the only condition,
+of possessing the fulness of God's Spirit is faith in Jesus
+Christ. Therefore, the more you trust the more you have, and the
+less your faith the less the gift. You can get much or little,
+according to the greatness or the smallness, the fixity or the
+transiency, of your desires. If you hold the empty cup with a
+tremulous hand, the precious liquid will not be poured into
+it---for some of it will be spilt---in the same fulness as it
+would be if you held it steadily. It is the old story---the
+miraculous flow of the oil stopped when the widow had no more pots
+and vessels to bring. The reason why some of us have so little of
+that Divine Spirit is because we have not held out our vessels to
+be filled. You can diminish the flow by ignoring it, and that is
+what a host of so-called Christian people do nowadays. You can
+diminish it by neglecting to use the little that you have for the
+purpose for which it was given you. Does anybody profit by your
+spiritual life? Do you profit much by it yourselves? Has it ever
+been of the least good to anybody else in the world? `The
+manifestation of the Spirit is given to' you, if you are a
+Christian man or woman, more or less. And if you shut it up, and
+do never an atom of good with it, either to yourselves or to
+anybody else, of course it will slip away; and, sometime or other,
+to your astonishment, you will find that the vessels are empty,
+and that the Spirit of the Lord has departed from you. `Grieve not
+the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of
+redemption.'
+
+\chapter{What Lasts}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS xiii. 8, 13}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be
+tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall
+vanish away. 13.\ And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these
+three. ...'---1 \textsc{Cor.} xiii. 8, 13.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+We discern the run of the Apostle's thought best by thus omitting
+the intervening verses and connecting these two. The part omitted
+is but a buttress of what has been stated in the former of our two
+verses; and when we thus unite them there is disclosed plainly the
+Apostle's intention of contrasting two sets of things, three in
+each set. The one set is `prophecies, tongues, knowledge'; the
+other, `faith, hope, charity.' There also comes out distinctly
+that the point mainly intended by the contrast is the transiency
+of the one and the permanence of the other. Now, that contrast has
+been obscured and weakened by two mistakes, about which I must say
+a word.
+
+With regard to the former statement, `Whether there be prophecies,
+they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease,' that
+has been misunderstood as if it amounted to a declaration that the
+miraculous gifts in the early Church were intended to be of brief
+duration. However true that may be, it is not what Paul means
+here. The cessation to which he refers is their cessation in the
+light of the perfect Future. With regard to the other statement,
+the abiding of faith, hope, charity, that, too, has been
+misapprehended as if it indicated that faith and hope belonged to
+this state of things only, and that love was the greatest of the
+three, because it was permanent. The reason for that misconception
+has mainly lain in the misunderstanding of the force of
+`\textit{Now},' which has been taken to mean `for the present,' as
+an implied contrast to an unspoken `then'; just as in the previous
+verse we have, `\textit{Now} we see through a glass, \textit{then}
+face to face.' But the `now' in this text is not, as the
+grammarians say, temporal, but logical. That is, it does not refer
+to time, but to the sequence of the Apostle's thought, and is
+equivalent to `so then.' `So then abideth faith, hope, charity.'
+
+The scope of the whole, then, is to contrast the transient with
+the permanent, in Christian experience. If we firmly grasped the
+truth involved, our estimates would be rectified and our practice
+revolutionised.
+
+I. I ask this question---What will drop away?
+
+Paul answers, `prophecies, tongues, knowledge.' Now these three
+were all extraordinary gifts belonging to the present phase of the
+Christian life. But inasmuch as these gifts were the heightening
+of natural capacities and faculties, it is perfectly legitimate to
+enlarge the declaration and to use these three words in their
+widest signification. So understood, they come to this, that all
+our present modes of apprehension and of utterance are transient,
+and will be left behind.
+
+`Knowledge, it shall cease,' and as the Apostle goes on to
+explain, in the verses which I have passed over for my present
+purpose, it shall cease because the perfect will absorb into
+itself the imperfect, as the inrushing tide will obliterate the
+little pools in the rocks on the seashore. For another reason, the
+knowledge, the mode of apprehension belonging to the present, will
+pass---because here it is indirect, and there it will be
+immediate. `We shall know face to face,' which is what
+philosophers mean by intuition. Here our knowledge `creeps from
+point to point,' painfully amassing facts, and thence, with many
+hesitations and errors, groping its way towards principles and
+laws. Here it is imperfect, with many a gap in the circumference;
+or like the thin red line on a map which shows the traveller's
+route across a prairie, or like the spider's thread in the
+telescope, stretched athwart the blazing disc of the sun---`but
+then face to face.' Incomplete knowledge shall be done away; and
+many of its objects will drop, and much of what makes the science
+of earth will be antiquated and effete. What would the hand-loom
+weaver's knowledge of how to throw his shuttle be worth in a
+weaving-shed with a thousand looms? Just so much will the
+knowledges of earth be when we get yonder.
+
+Modes of utterance will cease. With new experiences will come new
+methods of communication. As a man can speak, and a beast can only
+growl or bark, so a man in heaven, with new experiences, will have
+new methods of communication. The comparison between that mode of
+utterance which we now have, and that which we shall then possess,
+will be like the difference between the old-fashioned semaphore,
+that used to wave about clumsy wooden arms in order to convey
+intelligence, and the telegraph.
+
+Think, then, of a man going into that future life, and saying `I
+knew more about Sanscrit than anybody that ever lived in Europe';
+`I sang sweet songs'; `I was a past master in philology, grammars,
+and lexicons'; `I was a great orator.' `Tongues shall cease'; and
+the modes of utterance that belonged to earth, and all that holds
+of them, will drop away, and be of no more use.
+
+If these things are true, brethren, with regard even to the
+highest form of these high and noble things, how much more and
+more solemnly true are they with regard to the aims and objects
+which most of us have in view? They will all drop away, and we
+shall be left, stripped of what, for most of us, has made the
+whole interest and activity of our lives.
+
+II. What will last?
+
+`So then, abideth these three, faith, hope, love.' When Paul takes
+three nouns and couples them with a verb in the singular, he is
+not making a slip of the pen, or committing a grammatical blunder
+which a child could correct. But there is a great truth in that
+piece of apparent grammatical irregularity; for the faith, the
+hope, and the love, for which he can only afford a singular verb,
+are thereby declared to be in their depth and essence one thing,
+and it, the triple star, abides, and continues to shine. The three
+primitive colours are unified in the white beam of light. Do not
+correct the grammar, and spoil the sense, but discern what he
+means when he says, `Now, abid\textit{eth} faith, hope, love.' For
+this is what he means, that the two latter come out of the former,
+and that without it they are nought, and that it without them is
+dead.
+
+Faith breeds Hope. \textit{There} is the difference between
+earthly hopes and Christian people's hopes. Our hopes, apart from
+the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, are but the balancing of
+probabilities, and the scale is often dragged down by the clutch
+of eager desires. But all is baseless and uncertain, unless our
+hopes are the outcome of our faith. Which, being translated into
+other words, is just this, that the one basis on which men can
+rest---ay! even for the immediate future, and the contingencies of
+life, as well as for the solemnities and certainties of
+heaven---any legitimate and substantial hope is trust in Jesus
+Christ, His word, His love, His power, and for the heavenly
+future, in His Resurrection and present glory. A man who believes
+these things, and only that man, has a rock foundation on which he
+can build his hope.
+
+Faith, in like manner, is the parent of Love. Paul and John,
+diverse as they are in the whole cast of their minds, the one
+being speculative and the other mystical, the one argumentative
+and the other simply gazing and telling what he sees, are
+precisely agreed in regard to this matter. For, to the Apostle of
+Love, the foundation of all human love towards God is, `We have
+known and believed the love that God hath to us,' and `We love Him
+because He first loved us,' and to Paul the first step is the
+trusting reception of the love of God, `commended to us' by the
+fact that `whilst we were yet sinners Christ died for us,' and
+from that necessarily flows, if the faith be genuine, the love
+that answers the sacrifice and obeys the Beloved. So faith, hope,
+love, these three are a trinity in unity, and it abideth. That is
+the main point of our last text. Let me say a word or two about
+it.
+
+I have said that the words have often been misunderstood as if the
+`now' referred only to the present order of things, in which faith
+and hope are supposed to find their only appropriate sphere. But
+that is clearly not the Apostle's meaning here, for many reasons
+with which I need not trouble you. The abiding of all three is
+eternal abiding, and there is a heavenly as well as an earthly
+form of faith and hope as well as of love. Just look at these
+points for a moment.
+
+`Faith abides,' says Paul, yonder, as here. Now, there is a common
+saying, which I suppose ninety out of a hundred people think comes
+out of the Bible, about faith being lost in sight. There is no
+such teaching in Scripture. True, in one aspect, faith is the
+antithesis of sight. True, Paul does say `We walk by faith, not by
+sight.' But that antithesis refers only to part of faith's
+significance. In so far as it is the opposite of sight, of course
+it will cease to be in operation when `we shall know even as we
+are known' and `see Him as He is.' But the essence of faith is not
+in the absence of the person trusted, but the emotion of trust
+which goes out to the person, present or absent. And in its
+deepest meaning of absolute dependence and happy confidence, faith
+abides through all the glories and the lustres of the heavens, as
+it burns amidst the dimnesses and the darknesses of earth. For
+ever and ever, on through the irrevoluble ages of eternity,
+dependence on God in Christ will be the life of the glorified, as
+it was the life of the militant, Church. No millenniums of
+possession, and no imaginable increases in beauty and perfectness
+and enrichment with the wealth of God, will bring us one inch
+nearer to casting off the state of filial dependence which is, and
+ever will be, the condition of our receiving them all. Faith
+`abides.'
+
+Hope `abides.' For it is no more a Scriptural idea that hope is
+lost in fruition, than it is that faith is lost in sight. Rather
+that Future presents itself to us as the continual communication
+of an inexhaustible God to our progressively capacious and capable
+spirits. In that continual communication there is continual
+progress. Wherever there is progress there must be hope. And thus
+the fair form, which has so often danced before us elusive, and
+has led us into bogs and miry places and then faded away, will
+move before us through all the long avenues of an endless
+progress, and will ever and anon come back to tell us of the
+unseen glories that lie beyond the next turn, and to woo us
+further into the depths of heaven and the fulness of God. Hope
+`abides.'
+
+Love `abides.' I need not, I suppose, enlarge upon that thought
+which nobody denies, that love is the eternal form of the human
+relation to God. It, too, like the mercy which it clasps,
+`endureth for ever.'
+
+But I may remind you of what the Apostle does not explain in our
+text, that it is greater than its linked sisters, because whilst
+faith and hope belong only to a creature, and are dependent and
+expectant of some good to come to themselves, and correspond to
+something which is in God in Christ, the love which springs from
+faith and hope not only corresponds to, but resembles, that from
+which it comes and by which it lives. The fire kindled is cognate
+with the fire that kindles; and the love that is in man is like
+the love that is in God. It is the climax of his nature; it is the
+fulfilling of all duty; it is the crown and jewelled clasp of all
+perfection. And so `abideth faith, hope, love, and the greatest of
+these is love.'
+
+III. Lastly, what follows from all this?
+
+First, let us be quite sure that we understand what this abiding
+love is. I dare say you have heard people say `Ah! I do not care
+much about Paul's theology. Give me the thirteenth chapter of the
+first Epistle to the Corinthians. That is beautiful; that praise
+of Love; \textit{that} comes home to men.' Yes, very beautiful.
+Are you quite sure that you know what Paul means by `love'? I do
+not use the word charity, because that lovely word, like a
+glistening meteor that falls upon the earth, has a rust, as it
+were, upon its surface that dims its brightness very quickly.
+Charity has come to mean an indulgent estimate of other people's
+faults; or, still more degradingly, the giving of money out of
+your pockets to other people's necessities. These are what the
+people who do not care much about Paul's theology generally
+suppose that he means here. But these do not exhaust his meaning.
+Paul's notion of love is the response of the human love to the
+divine, which divine is received into the heart by simple faith in
+Jesus Christ. And his notion of love which never faileth, and
+endureth all things, and hopeth all things, is love to men, which
+is but one stream of the great river of love to God. If we rightly
+understand what he means by love, we shall find that his praise of
+love is as theological as anything that he ever wrote. We shall
+never get further than barren admiration of a beautiful piece of
+writing, unless our love to men has the source and root to which
+Paul points us.
+
+Again, let us take this great thought of the permanence of faith,
+hope, and love as being the highest conception that we can form of
+our future condition. It is very easy to bewilder ourselves with
+speculations and theories of another life. I do not care much
+about them. The great gates keep their secret well. Few stray
+beams of light find their way through their crevices. The less we
+say the less likely we are to err. It is easy to let ourselves be
+led away, by turning rhetoric into revelation, and accepting the
+symbols of the New Testament as if they carried anything more than
+images of the realities. But far beyond golden pavements, and
+harps, and crowns, and white robes, lies this one great thought
+that the elements of the imperfect, Christlike life of earth are
+the essence of the perfect, Godlike life in heaven. `Now abide
+these three, faith, hope, love.'
+
+Last of all, let us shape our lives in accordance with these
+certainties. The dropping away of the transient things is no
+argument for neglecting or despising them; for our handling of
+them makes our characters, and our characters abide. But it is a
+very excellent argument for shaping our lives so as to seek first
+the first things, and to secure the permanent qualities, and so to
+use the transient as that it shall all help us towards that which
+does not pass.
+
+What will a Manchester man that knows nothing except goods and
+office work, and knows these only in their superficial aspect, and
+not as related to God, what, in the name of common-sense, will he
+do with himself when he gets into a world where there is not a
+single ledger, nor a desk, nor a yard of cloth of any sort? What
+will some of us do when, in like manner, we are stripped of all
+the things that we have cared about, and worked for, and have made
+our aims down here? Suppose that you knew that you were under
+sailing orders to go somewhere or other, and that at any moment a
+breathless messenger might appear and say, `Come along! we are all
+waiting for you'; and suppose that you never did a single thing
+towards getting your outfit ready, or preparing yourself in any
+way for that which might come at any moment, and could not but
+come before very long. Would you be a wise man? But that is what a
+great many of us are doing; doing every day, and all day long, and
+doing that only. `He shall leave them in the midst of his days,'
+says a grim text, `and at his latter end shall be a fool.'
+
+What will drop? Modes of apprehension, modes of utterance,
+occupations, duties, relationships, loves; and we shall be left
+standing naked, stripped, as it were, to the very quick, and only
+as much left as will keep our souls alive. But if we are clothed
+with faith, hope, love, we shall not be found naked. Cultivate the
+high things, the permanent things; then death will not wrench you
+violently from all that you have been and cared for; but it will
+usher you into the perfect form of all that you have been and done
+upon earth. All these things will pass, but faith, hope, love,
+`stay not behind nor in the grave are trod,' but will last as long
+as Christ, their Object, lives, and as long as we in Him live
+also.
+
+\chapter{The Power of the Resurrection}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how
+that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; 4.\ And
+that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according
+to the Scriptures.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} xv. 3, 4.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+Christmas day is probably not the true anniversary of the
+Nativity, but Easter is certainly that of the Resurrection. The
+season is appropriate. In the climate of Palestine the first
+fruits of the harvest were ready at the Passover for presentation
+in the Temple. It was an agricultural as well as a historical
+festival; and the connection between that aspect of the feast and
+the Resurrection of our Lord is in the Apostle's mind when he
+says, in a subsequent part of this chapter, that Christ is `risen
+from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept.'
+
+In our colder climate the season is no less appropriate. The `life
+re-orient out of dust' which shows itself to-day in every bursting
+leaf-bud and springing flower is Nature's parable of the spring
+that awaits man after the winter of death. No doubt, apart from
+the Resurrection of Jesus, the yearly miracle kindles sad thoughts
+in mourning hearts, and suggests bitter contrasts to those who
+sorrow, having no hope, but the grave in the garden has turned
+every blossom into a smiling prophet of the Resurrection.
+
+And so the season, illuminated by the event, teaches us lessons of
+hope that `we shall not all die.' Let us turn, then, to the
+thoughts naturally suggested by the day, and the great fact which
+it brings to each mind, and confirmed thereafter by the miracle
+that is being wrought round about us.
+
+I. First, then, in my text, I would have you note the facts of
+Paul's gospel.
+
+`First of all ... I delivered' these things. And the `first' not
+only points to the order of time in the proclamation, but to the
+order of importance as well. For these initial facts are the
+fundamental facts, on which all that may follow thereafter is
+certainly built. Now the first thing that strikes me here is that,
+whatever else the system unfolded in the New Testament is, it is
+to begin with a simple record of historical fact. It becomes a
+philosophy, it becomes a religious system; it is a revelation of
+God; it is an unveiling of man; it is a body of ethical precepts.
+It is morals and philosophy and religion all in one; but it is
+first of all a story of something that took place in the world.
+
+If that be so, there is a lesson for men whose work it is to
+preach it. Let them never forget that their business is to insist
+upon the truth of these great, supernatural, all-important, and
+fundamental facts, the death and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
+They must evolve all the deep meanings that lie in them; and the
+deeper they dig for their meanings the better. They must open out
+the endless treasures of consolation and enforce the omnipotent
+motives of action which are wrapped up in the facts; but howsoever
+far they may carry their evolving and their application of them,
+they will neither be faithful to their Lord nor true stewards of
+their message unless, clear above all other aspects of their work,
+and underlying all other forms of their ministry, there be the
+unfaltering proclamation---`first of all,' midst of all, last of
+all---`how that Christ died for our sins according to the
+Scriptures,' and `that He was raised again according to the
+Scriptures.'
+
+Note, too, how this fundamental and original character of the
+gospel which Paul preached, as a record of facts, makes short work
+of a great deal that calls itself `liberal Christianity' in these
+days. We are told that it is quite possible to be a very good
+Christian man, and reject the supernatural, and turn away with
+incredulity from the story of the Resurrection. It may be so, but
+I confess that it puzzles me to understand how, if the fundamental
+character of Christian teaching be the proclamation of certain
+facts, a man who does not believe those facts has the right to
+call himself a Christian.
+
+Note, further, how there is an element of explanation involved in
+the proclamation of the facts which turns them into a gospel. Mark
+how `that \textit{Christ} died,' not \emph{Jesus}. It is a great
+truth, that the man, our Brother, Jesus, passed through the common
+lot, but that is not what Paul says here, though he often says it.
+What he says is that `\textit{Christ} died.' Christ is the name of
+an office, into which is condensed a whole system of truth,
+declaring that it is He who is the Apex, the Seal, and ultimate Word
+of all divine revelation. It was the \textit{Christ} who died;
+unless it was so, the death of Jesus is no gospel.
+
+`He died for our sins.' Now, if the Apostle had only said `He died
+for us,' that might conceivably have meant that, in a multitude of
+different ways of example, appeal to our pity and compassion and
+the like, His death was of use to mankind. But when he says `He
+died \textit{for our sins},' I take leave to think that that
+expression has no meaning, unless it means that He died as the
+expiation and sacrifice for men's sins. I ask you, in what
+intelligible sense could Christ `die for our sins' unless He died
+as bearing their punishment and as bearing it for us? And then,
+finally, `He died and rose ... according to the Scriptures,' and
+so fulfilled the divine purposes revealed from of old.
+
+To the fact that a man was crucified outside the gates of
+Jerusalem, `and rose again the third day,' which is the narrative,
+there are added these three things---the dignity of the Person,
+the purpose of His death, the fulfilment of the divine intention
+manifested from of old. And these three things, as I said, turn
+the narrative into a Gospel.
+
+So, brethren, let us remember that, without all three of them, the
+death of Jesus Christ is nothing to us, any more than the death of
+thousands of sweet and saintly men in the past has been, who may
+have seen a little more of the supreme goodness and greatness than
+their fellows, and tried in vain to make purblind eyes participate
+in their vision. Do you think that these twelve fishermen would
+ever have shaken the world if they had gone out with the story of
+the Cross, unless they had carried along with it the commentary
+which is included in the words which I have emphasised? And do you
+suppose that the type of Christianity which slurs over the
+explanation, and so does not know what to do with the facts, will
+ever do much in the world, or will ever touch men? Let us
+liberalise our Christianity by all means, but do not let us
+evaporate it; and evaporate it we surely shall if we falter in
+saying with Paul, `I declare, first of all, that which received,'
+how that the death and resurrection were the death and
+resurrection of the Christ, `for our sins, according to the
+Scriptures.' These are the facts which make Paul's gospel.
+
+II. Now I ask you to look, in the second place, at what
+establishes the facts.
+
+We have here, in this chapter, a statement very much older than
+our existing written gospels. This epistle is one of the four
+letters of Paul which nobody that I know of---with some quite
+insignificant exceptions in modern times---has ever ventured to
+dispute. It is admittedly the writing of the Apostle, written
+before the gospels, and in all probability within five-and-twenty
+years of the date of the Crucifixion. And what do we find alleged
+by it as the state of things at its date? That the belief in the
+Resurrection of Jesus Christ was the subject of universal
+Christian teaching, and was accepted by all the Christian
+communities. Its evidence to that fact is undeniable; because
+there was in the early Christian Church a very formidable and
+large body of bitter antagonists of Paul's, who would have been
+only too glad to have convicted him, if they could, of any
+misrepresentation of the usual notions, or divergence from the
+usual type of teaching. So we may take it as undeniable that the
+representation of this chapter is historically true; and that
+within five-and-twenty years of the death of Jesus Christ every
+Christian community and every Christian teacher believed in and
+proclaimed the fact of the Resurrection.
+
+But if that be so, we necessarily are carried a great deal nearer
+the Cross than five-and-twenty years; and, in fact, there is not,
+between the moment when Paul penned these words and the day of
+Pentecost, a single chink in the history where you can insert such
+a tremendous innovation as the full-fledged belief in a
+resurrection coming in as something new.
+
+I do not need to dwell at all upon this other thought, that,
+unless the belief that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead
+originated at the time of His death, there would never have been a
+Church at all. Why was it that they did not tumble to pieces? Take
+the nave out of the wheel and what becomes of the spokes? A dead
+Christ could never have been the basis of a living Church. If He
+had not risen from the dead, the story of His disciples would have
+been the same as that which Gamaliel told the Sanhedrim was the
+story of all former pseudo-Messiahs such as that man Theudas. `He
+was slain, and as many as followed him were dispersed and came to
+naught.' Of course! The existence of the Church demands, as a
+pre-requisite, the initial belief in the Resurrection. I think,
+then, that the contemporaneousness of the evidence is sufficiently
+established.
+
+What about its good faith? I suppose that nobody, nowadays, doubts
+the veracity of these witnesses. Anybody that knows an honest man
+when he sees him, anybody that has the least ear for the tone of
+sincerity and the accent of conviction, must say that they may
+have been fanatics, they may have been mistaken, but one thing is
+clear as sunlight, they were not false witnesses for God.
+
+What, then, about their competency? Their simplicity, their
+ignorance, their slowness to believe, their stupor of surprise
+when the fact first dawned upon them, which they tell not with any
+idea of manufacturing evidence in their own favour, but simply as
+a piece of history, all tend to make us certain that there was no
+play of a morbid imagination, no hysterical turning of a wish into
+a fact, on the part of these men. The sort of things which they
+say that they saw and experienced are such as to make any such
+supposition altogether absurd. There are long conversations,
+appearances appealing to more than one sense, appearances followed
+by withdrawals, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the
+evening, sometimes at a distance, as on the mountain, sometimes
+close by, as in the chamber, to single souls and to multitudes.
+Fancy five hundred people all at once smitten with the same
+mistake, imagining that they saw what they did not see! Miracles
+may be difficult to believe, they are not half so difficult to
+believe as absurdities. And this modern explanation of the faith
+in the Resurrection I venture respectfully to designate as absurd.
+
+But there is one other point to which I would like to turn for a
+moment; and that is that little clause in my text that `He was
+buried.' Why does Paul introduce that amongst his facts? Possibly
+in order to affirm the reality of Christ's death; but I think for
+another reason. If it be true that Jesus Christ was laid in that
+sepulchre, a stone's throw outside the city gate, do you not see
+what a difficulty that fact puts in the way of disbelief or denial
+of His Resurrection? If the grave---and it was not a grave,
+remember, like ours, but a cave, with a stone at the door of it,
+that anybody could roll away for entrance---if the grave was
+there, why, in the name of common-sense, did not the rulers put an
+end to the pestilent heresy by saying, `Let us go and see if the
+body is there'?
+
+Modern deniers of the Resurrection may fairly be asked to front this
+thought---If Jesus Christ's body was in the sepulchre, how was it
+possible for belief in the Resurrection to have been originated, or
+maintained? If His body was not in the grave, what had become of it?
+If His friends stole it away then they were deceivers of the worst
+type in preaching a resurrection; and we have already seen that that
+hypothesis is ridiculous. If His enemies took it away, for which
+they had no motive, why did they not produce it and say, `There is
+an answer to your nonsense. There is the dead man. Let us hear no
+more of this absurdity of His having risen from the dead'?
+
+`He died ... according to the Scriptures, and He was buried.' And
+the angels' word carries the only explanation of the fact which it
+proclaims, `He is not here---He is risen.'
+
+I take leave to say that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is
+established by evidence which nobody would ever have thought of
+doubting unless for the theory that miracles were impossible. The
+reason for disbelief is not the deficiency of the evidence, but
+the bias of the judge.
+
+III. And now I have no time to do more than touch the last thought.
+I have tried to show what establishes the facts. Let me remind you,
+in a sentence or two, what the facts establish.
+
+I by no means desire to suspend the whole of the evidence for
+Christianity on the testimony of the eyewitnesses to the
+Resurrection. There are a great many other ways of establishing
+the truth of the Gospel besides that, upon which I do not need to
+dwell now. But, taking this one specific ground which my text
+suggests, what do the facts thus established prove?
+
+Well, the first point to which I would refer, and on which I
+should like to enlarge, if I had time, is the bearing of Christ's
+Resurrection on the acceptance of the miraculous. We hear a great
+deal about the impossibility of miracle and the like. It upsets
+the certainty and fixedness of the order of things, and so forth,
+and so forth. Jesus Christ has risen from the dead; and that opens
+a door wide enough to admit all the rest of the Gospel miracles.
+It is of no use paring down the supernatural in Christianity, in
+order to meet the prejudices of a quasi-scientific scepticism,
+unless you are prepared to go the whole length, and give up the
+Resurrection. There is the turning point. The question is, Do you
+believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, or do you not? If
+your objections to the supernatural are valid, then Christ is not
+risen from the dead; and you must face the consequences of that.
+If He is risen from the dead, then you must cease all your talk
+about the impossibility of miracle, and be willing to accept a
+supernatural revelation as God's way of making Himself known to
+man.
+
+But, further, let me remind you of the bearing of the Resurrection
+upon Christ's work and claims. If He be lying in some forgotten
+grave, and if all that fair thought of His having burst the bands
+of death is a blunder, then there was nothing in His death that
+had the least bearing upon men's sin, and it is no more to me than
+the deaths of thousands in the past. But if He is risen from the
+dead, then the Resurrection casts back a light upon the Cross, and
+we understand that His death is the life of the world, and that
+`by His stripes we are healed.'
+
+But, further, remember what He said about Himself when He was in
+the world---how He claimed to be the Son of God; how He demanded
+absolute obedience, implicit trust, supreme love, how He
+identified faith in Himself with faith in God---and consider the
+Resurrection as bearing on the reception or rejection of these
+tremendous claims. It seems to me that we are brought sharp up to
+this alternative---Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and was
+declared by the Resurrection to be the Son of God with power; or
+Jesus Christ has \textit{not} risen from the dead---and what then?
+Then He was either deceiver or deceived, and in either case has no
+right to my reverence and my love. We may be thankful that men are
+illogical, and that many who reject the Resurrection retain
+reverence, genuine and deep, for Jesus Christ. But whether they
+have any right to do so is another matter. I confess for myself
+that, if I did not believe that Jesus Christ had risen from the
+dead, I should find it very hard to accept, as an example of
+conduct, or as religious teacher, a man who had made such great
+claims as He did, and had asked from me what He asked. It seems to
+me that He is either a great deal more, or a great deal less, than
+a beautiful saintly soul. If He rose from the dead He is much
+more; if He did not, I am afraid to say how much less He is.
+
+And, finally, the bearing of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ upon
+our own hopes of the future may be suggested. It teaches us that
+life has nothing to do with organisation, but persists apart from
+the body. It teaches us that a man may pass from death and be
+unaltered in the substance of his being; and it teaches us that
+the earthly house of our tabernacle may be fashioned like unto the
+glorious house in which He dwells now at the right hand of God.
+There is no other absolute proof of immortality than the
+Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
+
+If we accept with all our hearts and minds Paul's Gospel in its
+fundamental facts, we need not fear to die, because He has died,
+and by dying has been the death of death. We need not doubt that
+we shall live again, because He was dead and is alive for ever
+more. This Samson has carried away the gates on His strong
+shoulders, and death is no more a dungeon but a passage. If we
+rest ourselves upon Him, then we can take up, for ourselves and
+for all that are dear to us and have gone before us, the
+triumphant song, `O Death, where is thy sting?' `Thanks be to God,
+which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.'
+
+\chapter{Remaining and Falling Asleep}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS xv. 6}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`After that He was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of
+whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are
+fallen asleep.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} xv. 6.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+There were, then, some five-and-twenty years after the
+Resurrection, several hundred disciples who were known amongst the
+churches as having been eyewitnesses of the risen Saviour. The
+greater part survived; some, evidently a very few, had died. The
+proportion of the living to the dead, after five-and-twenty years,
+is generally the opposite. The greater part have `fallen asleep';
+some, a comparatively few, remain `unto this present.' Possibly
+there was some divine intervention which supernaturally prolonged
+the lives of these witnesses, in order that their testimony might
+be the more lasting. But, be that as it may, they evidently were
+men of mark, and some kind of honour and observance surrounded
+them, as was very natural, and as appears from the fact that Paul
+here knows so accurately (and can appeal to His fellow-Christians'
+accurate knowledge) the proportion between the survivors and the
+departed. We read of one of them in the Acts of the Apostles at a
+later date than this, one Mnason, an `original disciple.'
+
+So we get a glimpse into the conditions of life in the early
+Church, interesting and of value in an evidential point of view.
+But my purpose at present is to draw your attention to the
+remarkable language in which the Apostle here speaks of the living
+and the dead amongst these witnesses. In neither case does he use
+the simple, common words `living' or `dead'; but in the one clause
+he speaks of their `remaining,' and in the other of their `falling
+asleep'; both phrases being significant, and, as I take it, both
+being traced up to the fact of their having seen the risen Lord as
+the cause why their life could be described as a `remaining,' and
+their death as a `falling asleep.' In other words, we have here
+brought before us, by these two striking expressions, the
+transforming effect upon life and upon death of the faith in a
+risen Lord, whether grounded on sight or not. And it is simply to
+these two points that I desire to turn now.
+
+I. First, then, we have to consider what life may become to those
+who see the risen Christ.
+
+`The greater part remain until this present.' Now the word
+\textit{remain} is no mere synonym for living or surviving. It not
+only tells us the fact that the survivors were living, but the
+kind of life that they did live. It is very significant that it is
+the same expression as our Lord used in the profound prophetic
+words, `If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to
+thee?' Now we are told in John's Gospel that `that saying went
+abroad amongst the brethren,' and inasmuch as it was a matter of
+common notoriety in the early Church, it is by no means a violent
+supposition that it may be floating in Paul's memory here, and may
+determine his selection of this remarkable expression `they
+remain,' or `they tarry,' and they were tarrying till the Master
+came. So, then, I think if we give due weight to the significance
+of the phrase, we get two or three thoughts worth pondering.
+
+One of them is that the sight of a risen Christ will make life
+calm and tranquil. Fancy one of these 500 brethren, after that
+vision, going back to his quiet rural home in some little village
+amongst the hills of Galilee. How small and remote from Him, and
+unworthy to ruffle or disturb the heart in which the memory of
+that vision was burning, would seem the things that otherwise
+would have been important and distracting! The faith which we have
+in the risen Christ ought to do the same thing for us, and will do
+it in the measure in which there shines clearly before that inward
+eye, which is our true means of apprehending Him, the vision which
+shone before the outward gaze of that company of wondering
+witnesses. If we build our nests amidst the tossing branches of
+the world's trees, they will sway with every wind, and perhaps be
+blown from their hold altogether by such a storm as we all have
+sometimes to meet. But we may build our nests in the clefts of the
+rock, like the doves, and be quiet, as they are. Distractions will
+cease to distract, and troubles will cease to agitate, and across
+the heaving surface of the great ocean there will come a Form
+beneath whose feet the waves smooth themselves, and at whose voice
+the winds are still. They who see Christ need not be troubled. The
+ship that is empty is tossed upon the ocean, that which is well
+laden is steady. The heart that has Christ for a passenger need
+not fear being rocked by any storm. Calmness will come with the
+vision of the Lord, and we shall abide or `remain,' for there will
+be no need for us to flee from this Refuge to that, nor shall we
+be driven from our secure abode by any contingencies. `He that
+believeth shall not make haste.'
+
+It is a good thing to cultivate the disposition that says about
+most of the trifles of this life, `It does not much matter'; but
+the only way to prevent wholesome contempt of the world's
+trivialities from degenerating into supercilious indifference is,
+to base it upon Christ, discerned as near us and bestowing upon us
+the calmness of His risen life. Make Him your scale of importance,
+and nothing will be too small to demand and be worthy of the best
+efforts of your work, but nothing will be too great to sweep you
+away from the serenity of your faith.
+
+Again, the vision of the risen Christ will also lead to patient
+persistence in duty. If we have Him before us, the distasteful
+duty which He sets us will not be distasteful, and the small
+tasks, in which great faithfulness may be manifested, will cease
+to be small. If we have Him before us we have in that risen Christ
+the great and lasting Example of how patient continuance in
+well-doing triumphs over the sorrows that it bears, by and in
+patiently bearing them, and is crowned at last with glory and
+honour. The risen Christ is the Pattern for the men who will not
+be turned aside from the path of duty by any obstacles, dangers,
+or threats. The risen Christ is the signal Example of glory
+following upon faithfulness, and of the crown being the result of
+the Cross. The risen Christ is the manifest Helper of them that
+put their trust in Him; and one of the plainest lessons and of the
+most imperative commands which come from the believing gaze upon
+that Lord who died because He would do the will of the Father, and
+is throned and crowned in the heavens because He died, is---By
+patient continuance in well-doing let us commit the keeping of our
+souls to Him: and abide in the calling wherewith we are called.
+
+And, again, the sight of the risen Christ leads to a life of calm
+expectancy. `If I will that He \textit{tarry} till I come' conveys
+that shade of meaning. The Apostle was to wait for the Lord from
+Heaven, and that vision which was given to these 500 men sent them
+home to their abodes to make all the rest of their lives one calm
+aspiration for, and patient expectation of, the return of the
+Lord. These primitive Christians expected that Jesus Christ would
+come speedily. That expectation was disappointed in so far as the
+date was concerned, but after nineteen centuries it still remains
+true that all vigorous and vital Christian life must have in it,
+as a very important element of its vitality, the onward look which
+ever is anticipating, which often is desiring, and which
+constantly is confident of, the coming of the Lord from Heaven.
+The Resurrection has for its consequences, its sequel and
+corollary, first the Ascension; then the long tract of time during
+which Jesus Christ is absent, but still in divine presence rules
+the world; and, finally, His coming again in that same body in
+which the disciples saw Him depart from them. And no Christian
+life is up to the level of its privileges, nor has any Christian
+faith grasped the whole articles of its creed, except that which
+sets in the very centre of all its visions of the future that
+great thought---He shall come again.
+
+Questions of chronology have nothing to do with that. It stands
+there before us, the certain fact, made certain and inevitable by
+the past facts of the Cross and the Grave and Olivet. He has come,
+He will come; He has gone, He will come back. And for us the life
+that we live in the flesh ought to be a life of waiting for God's
+Son from Heaven, and of patient, confident expectancy that when He
+shall be manifested we also shall be manifested with Him in glory.
+
+So much, then, for life---calm, persistent in every duty, and
+animated by that blessed and far-off, but certain, hope, and all
+of these founded upon the vision and the faith of a risen Lord.
+What have fears and cares and distractions and faint-heartedness
+and gloomy sorrow to do with the eyes that have beheld the Christ,
+and with the lives that are based on faith in the risen Lord?
+
+II. So, secondly, consider what death becomes to those who have
+seen Christ risen from the dead.
+
+`Some are fallen asleep.' Now that most natural and obvious
+me\-ta\-phor for death is not only a Christian idea, but is found,
+as would be expected, in many tongues, but yet with a great and
+significant difference. The Christian reason for calling death a
+sleep embraces a great deal more than the heathen reason for doing
+so, and in some respects is precisely the opposite of that,
+inasmuch as to most others who have used the word, death has been
+a sleep that knew no waking, whereas the very pith and centre of
+the Christian reason for employing the symbol are that it makes
+our waking sure. We have here what the act of dying and the
+condition of the dead become by virtue of faith in the
+Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
+
+They have `fallen asleep.' The act of dying is but a laying one's
+self down to rest, and a dropping out of consciousness of the
+surrounding world. It is very remarkable and very beautiful that
+the new Testament scarcely ever employs the words \textit{dying}
+and \textit{death} for the act of separating body and spirit, or
+for the condition either of the spirit parted from the body, or of
+the body parted from the spirit. It keeps those grim words for the
+reality, the separation of the soul from God; and it only
+exceptionally uses them for the shadow and the symbol, the
+physical fact of the parting of the man from the house which here
+he has dwelt in. But the reason why Christianity uses these
+periphrases or metaphors, these euphemisms for death, is the
+opposite of the reason why the world uses them. The world is so
+afraid of dying that it durst not name the grim, ugly thing. The
+Christian, or at least the Christian faith, is so little afraid of
+death that it does not think such a trivial matter worth calling
+by the name, but only names it `falling asleep.'
+
+Even when the circumstances of that dropping off to slumber are
+painful and violent, the Bible still employs the term. Is it not
+striking that the first martyr, kneeling outside the city, bruised
+by stones and dying a bloody death, should have been said to fall
+asleep? If ever there was an instance in which the gentle metaphor
+seemed all inappropriate it was that cruel death, amidst a howling
+crowd, and with fatal bruises, and bleeding limbs mangled by the
+heavy rocks that lay upon them. But yet, `when he had said this he
+fell asleep.' If that be true of such a death, no physical pains
+of any kind make the sweet word inappropriate for any.
+
+We have here not only the designation of the act of dying, but
+that of the condition of the dead. They are fallen asleep, and
+they continue asleep. How many great thoughts gather round that
+metaphor on which it is needless for me to try to dilate! They
+will suggest themselves without many words to you all.
+
+There lies in it the idea of repose. `They rest from their
+labours.' Sleep restores strength, and withdraws a man at once
+from effort on the outer world, and from communication from it. We
+may carry the analogy into that unseen world. We know nothing
+about the relations to an external universe of the departed who
+sleep in Jesus. It may be that, if they sleep in Him, since He
+knows all, they, through Him, may know, too, something---so much
+as He pleases to impart to them---of what is happening here. And
+it may even be that, if they sleep in Him, and He wields the
+energies of Omnipotence, they, through Him, may have some service
+to do, even while they wait for their house which is from heaven.
+But there is no need for, nor profit in, such speculations. It is
+enough that the sweet emblem suggests repose, and that in that
+sleep there are folded around the sleepers the arms of the Christ
+on whose bosom they rest, as an infant does on its first and
+happiest home---its mother's breast.
+
+But then, besides that, the emblem suggests the idea of continuous
+and conscious existence. A man asleep does not cease to be a man;
+a dead man does not cease to live. It has often been argued from
+this metaphor that we are to conceive of the space between death
+and the resurrection as being a period of unconsciousness, but the
+analogies seem to me to be in the opposite direction. A sleeping
+man does not cease to know himself to be, and he does not cease to
+know himself to be himself. That mysterious consciousness of
+personal identity survives the passage from waking to sleep, as
+dreams sufficiently show us. And, therefore, they that sleep know
+themselves to be.
+
+And, finally, the emblem suggests the idea of waking. Sleep is a
+parenthesis. If the night comes, the morning comes. `If winter
+comes, can spring be far behind?' They that sleep will awake, and
+be satisfied when they `awake with Thy likeness.' And so these
+three things---repose, conscious, continuous existence, and the
+certainty of awaking---all lie in that metaphor.
+
+Now, then, the risen Christ is the only ground of such hope, and
+faith in Him is the only state of mind which is entitled to
+cherish it. Nothing proves immortality except that open grave.
+Every other foundation is too weak to bear the weight of such a
+superstructure. The current of present opinion shows, I think,
+that neither metaphysical nor ethical arguments for the future
+life will stand the force of the disintegrating criticism which is
+brought to bear upon that hope by the fashionable materialism of
+this generation. There is one barrier that will resist that force,
+and only one, and that is the historical facts that Jesus Christ
+died, and that Jesus Christ has risen again. He rose; therefore
+death is not the end of individual existence. He rose; therefore
+life beyond the grave is possible for humanity. He rose; therefore
+His sacrifice for the world's sin is accepted, and I may be
+delivered from my guilt and my burden. He rose; therefore He is
+declared to be the Son of God with power. He rose; therefore we,
+if we trust Him, may partake in His Resurrection and in some
+reflection of His glory. The old Greek architects were often
+careless of the solidity of the soil on which they built their
+temples, and so, many of them have fallen in ruins. The Temple of
+Immortality can be built only upon the rock of that
+proclamation---Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. And we, dear
+brethren, should have all our hopes founded upon that one fact.
+
+So then, for us, the calm, peaceful passage from life into what
+else is the great darkness is possible on condition of our having
+beheld the risen Lord. These witnesses of whom my text speaks,
+Paul would suggest to us, laid themselves quietly down to sleep,
+because before them there still hovered the memory of the vision
+which they had beheld. Faith in the risen Christ is the anchor of
+the soul in death, and there is nothing else by which we can hold
+then.
+
+As the same Apostle, in one of his other letters, puts it, the
+belief that Christ is risen is not only the irrefragable ground of
+our hope that we, too, shall rise, but has the power to change the
+whole aspect of our death. Did you ever observe the emphasis with
+which He says, `If we believe that Jesus \textit{died} and rose
+again, even so them also which \textit{sleep} in Jesus will God
+bring with Him?' His death was death indeed, and faith in it
+softens ours to sleep. He bore the reality that we might never
+need to know it, and if our poor hearts are resting upon that dear
+Lord, then the flames are but painted ones and will not burn, and
+we shall pass through them, and no smell of fire will be upon us,
+and all that will be consumed will be the bonds which bind us. He
+has abolished death. The physical fact remains, but all which to
+men makes the idea of death is gone if we trust the risen Lord. So
+that, between two men dying under precisely the same
+circumstances, of the same disease, in adjacent beds in the same
+hospital, there may be such a difference as that the same word
+cannot be applied to the experiences of both.
+
+My dear friends, we have each of us to pass through that last
+struggle; but we may make it either a quiet going to sleep with a
+loved Face bending over our closing eyes, like a mother's over her
+child's cradle, and the same Face meeting us when we open them in
+the morning of heaven; or we may make it a reluctant departure
+from all that we care for, and a trembling advance into all from
+which conscience and heart shrink.
+
+Which is it going to be to you? The answer depends upon that to
+another question. Are you looking to that Christ that died and is
+alive for evermore as your life and your salvation? Do you hold
+fast that Gospel which Paul preached, `how that Christ died for
+our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and
+that He rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures'? If
+you do, life will be a calm, persevering, expectant waiting upon
+Him, and death will be nothing more terrible than falling asleep.
+
+\chapter{Paul's Estimate of Himself}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS xv. 10}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`By the grace of God I am what I am: and His grace which was
+bestowed upon me was not in vain.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} xv. 10.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The Apostle was, all his life, under the hateful necessity of
+vindicating his character and Apostleship. Thus here, though his
+main purpose in the context is simply to declare the Gospel which
+he preached, he is obliged to turn aside in order to assert, and
+to back up his assertion, that there was no sort of difference
+between him and the other recognised teachers of Christian truth.
+He was forced to do this by persistent endeavours in the
+Corinthian Church to deny his Apostleship, and the faithfulness of
+his representation of the Christian verities. The way in which he
+does it is eminently beautiful and remarkable. He fires up in
+vindication of himself; and then he checks himself. `By the grace
+of God I am'---and he is going to say what he is, but he bethinks
+himself, as if he had reflected; `No! I will leave other people to
+say what that is. By the grace of God I am---what I am, whatever
+that be. And all that I have to say is that God made me, and that
+I helped Him. For the grace of God which was bestowed upon me was
+not in vain. You Corinthians may judge what the product is. I tell
+you how it has come about.' So there are thoughts here, I think,
+well worth our pondering and taking into our hearts and lives.
+
+I. First, as to the one power that makes men.
+
+`By the grace of God I am what I am.' Now that word `grace' has got
+to be worn threadbare, and to mean next door to nothing, in the ears
+and minds of a great many continual hearers of the Gospel. But Paul
+had a very definite idea of what he meant by it; and what he meant
+by it was a very large thing, which we may well ponder for a moment
+as being the only thing which will transform and ennoble character
+and will produce fruit that a man need not be ashamed of. The grace
+of God, in Paul's use of the words, which is the scriptural use of
+them generally, implies these two things which are connected as root
+and product---the active love of God, in exercise towards us low and
+sinful creatures, and the gifts with which that love comes full
+charged to men. These two things, which at bottom are one, love and
+its gifts, are all, in the Apostle's judgment, gathered up and
+stored, as in a great storehouse, in Jesus Christ Himself, and
+through Him are made accessible to us, and brought to bear upon us
+for the ennobling of our natures, and the investing of us with
+graces and beauties of character, all strange to us apart from
+these.
+
+Now it seems to me that these two things, which come from one
+root, are the precise things which you and I need in order to make
+us nobler and purer and more Godlike men than otherwise we could
+ever become. For what is it that men need most for noble and pure
+living? These two things precisely---motive and power to carry out
+the dictates of conscience.
+
+Every man in the world knows enough of duty and of right to be a
+far nobler man than any man in the world is. And it is not for
+want of clear convictions of duty, it is not for want of
+recognised models and patterns of life, that men go wrong; but it
+is because there are these two things lacking, motives for nobler
+service, and power to do and be what they know they ought to be.
+And precisely here Paul's gospel comes in, `By the grace of God I
+am what I am.' That grace, considered in its two sides of love and
+of giving, supplies all that we want.
+
+It supplies motives. There is nothing that will bend a man's will
+like the recognition of divine love which it is blessedness to
+come in contact with, and to obey. You may try to sway him by
+motives of advantage and self-interest, and to thunder into his
+ears the pealing words of duty and right and `ought,' and there is
+no adequate response. You cannot soften a heart by the hammers of
+the law. You cannot force a man to do right by brandishing before
+him the whip that punishes doing wrong. You cannot sway the will
+by anything but the heart; and when you can touch the deepest
+spring it moves the whole mass.
+
+You have seen some ponderous piece of machinery, which resists all
+attempts of a puny hand laid upon it to make it revolve. But down
+in one corner is a little hidden spring. Touch that and with
+majestic slowness and certainty the mighty mass turns. You know
+those rocking-stones down in the south of England; tons of weight
+poised upon a pin point, and so exquisitely balanced that a
+child's finger rightly applied may move the mass. So the whole man
+is made mobile only by the touch of love; and the grace that comes
+to us, and says, `If ye love Me, keep My commandments'---is, as I
+believe, the sole motive which will continuously and adequately
+sway the rebellious, self-centred wills of men, to obedience
+resulting in nobility of life.
+
+The other aspect of this same great word is, in like manner, that
+which we need. What men want is, first of all, the will to be
+noble and good; and, second, the power to carry out the will. It
+is God that worketh in us both the willing and the doing. I
+venture to affirm that there is no power known, either to
+thinkers, or philanthropists, or doctrinaires, or strivers after
+excellence in the world---no power known and available which will
+lift a life to such heights of beauty and self-sacrificing
+nobility, as will the power that comes to us by communication of
+the grace that is in Jesus Christ.
+
+I am perpetually trying to insist, dear brethren, upon this one
+thought, that the communication of actual new life is the central
+gift of the Gospel; and this new life it is, this nature endowed
+with new desires, hopes, aims, capacities, which alone will lift
+the whole man into unwonted heights of beauty and serenity. It is
+the grace of God, the gift of His Divine Spirit who will dwell
+with all of us, if we will, which alone can be trusted to make men
+good.
+
+And now, if that be true, what follows? Surely this, that for all
+you who have, in any measure, caught a glimpse of what you ought
+to be, and have been more or less vainly trying to realise your
+ideal, and reach your goal, there is a better way than the way of
+self-centred and self-derived and self-dependent effort. There is
+the way of opening your hearts and spirits to the entrance and
+access of that great power, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
+which will do in us and for us all that we know we ought to do,
+and yet feel hampered and hindered in performing.
+
+Oh, dear friends! there are many of you, I believe, who have more
+or less spasmodically and interruptedly, but with a continual
+recurrence to the effort, sought to plant your feet firmly in the
+paths of righteousness, and have more or less failed. Listen to
+this Gospel, and accept it, and put it to the proof. The love of
+God which is in Christ Jesus, and the life which that love brings
+in its hands, for all of us who will trust it, will dwell in you
+if you will, and mould you into His own likeness, and the law of
+the spirit of life which was in Christ Jesus will make us free
+from the law of sin and death.
+
+All noble living is a battle. Can you and I, with our ten
+thousand, meet him that cometh against us with his twenty, the
+temptations of the world and of its Prince? Send for the
+reinforcements, and Jesus Christ will come and teach your hands to
+war and your fingers to fight. All noble life is self-denial,
+coercion, restraint; and can my poor, feeble hands apply muscular
+force enough to the brake to keep the wheels clogged, and prevent
+them from whirling me downhill into ruin? Let Him come and put His
+great gentle hand on the top of yours, and that will enable you to
+scotch the wheels, and make self-denial possible. All noble life
+is a building up by slow degrees from the foundation. And can you
+and I complete the task with our own limited resources, and our
+own feeble strengths? Will not `all that pass by begin to mock' us
+and say, `This man began to build and was not able to finish'?
+That is the epitaph written over all moralities and over all lives
+which, catching some glimpse of the good and the true and the
+noble, have tried, apart from Christ, to reproduce them in
+themselves. Frightful gaps, and an unfinished, however fair
+structure end them all. Go to Him. `His hand hath laid the
+foundation of the house, His hand shall also finish it.' He who is
+Himself the foundation-stone is also the headstone of the corner,
+which is brought forth with shouting of `Grace! Grace unto it!'
+
+I need not, I suppose, linger to remind you what important and
+large lessons these thoughts carry, not only for men who are
+trying to work at the task of mending and making their own
+characters, but on the larger scale, for all who seek to benefit
+and elevate their fellows. Brethren, it is not for me to
+depreciate any workers who, in any department, and by any methods,
+seek, and partially effect, the elevation of humanity. But I
+should be untrue to my own deepest convictions, and unfaithful to
+the message which God's providence has given it to me as my life's
+task to proclaim, if I did not declare that nothing will truly
+\textit{re-form} humanity, society, the nation, the city, except
+that which re-creates the individual: `the grace of our Lord Jesus
+Christ' entering into their midst.
+
+II. And so, secondly, and very briefly, notice the lesson we get
+here as to how we should think of our own attainments.
+
+I have already pointed out that there are two beautiful touches in
+my text. The Apostle traces everything that he is, in his
+character and in his Christian standing and in his Apostolic work
+and success, to that grace that has come down upon him, and
+clothed his nakedness with so glorious a garment. And then, in
+addition to that, he modestly, and with a fine sense of dignity,
+refrains from parading his attainments or his achievements, and
+says, `It is not for me to estimate what I am; it is for you to do
+it.' True, indeed, in the next verse he does set forth, in very
+lofty language, his claims to be in nothing behind the very
+chiefest of the Apostles, and `to have laboured more abundantly
+than they all.' But still the spirit of that humble and yet
+dignified silence runs through the whole context. `By the grace of
+God I am---what I am.'
+
+Well, then, it is not necessary for a man to be ignorant, or to
+pretend that he is ignorant, of what he can do. We hear a great
+deal about the unconsciousness of genius. There is a partial truth
+in it; and possibly the highest examples of power and success, in
+any department of mental or intellectual effort, are unaware of
+their achievements and stature. But if a man can do a certain kind
+of service there is no harm whatever in his recognising the fact
+that he can do it. The only harm is in his thinking that because
+he can, he is a very fine fellow, and that the work itself is a
+great work; and so setting himself up above his brethren. There is
+a vast deal of hypocrisy in what is called unconsciousness of
+power. Most men who have been chosen and empowered to do a great
+work for God or for men, in any department, have been aware that
+they could do it. But the less we think about ourselves, in any
+way, the better. The more entire our recognition of the influx of
+grace on which we depend for keeping our reservoir full, the less
+likelihood there will be of touchy self-assertion, the less
+likelihood of the misuse of the powers that we have. If we are to
+do much for God, if we are to keep what we have already attained,
+if we are to make our own lives sweet and beautiful, if we are to
+be invested with any increase of capacity, or led to any higher
+heights of nobleness and Christlikeness, we must copy, and make a
+conscious effort to copy, these two things, which marked the
+Apostle's estimate of himself---a distinct recognition that we are
+only reservoirs and nothing more---`What hast thou that thou hast
+not received? Why then dost thou glory as if thou hadst not
+received it?'---and a humble waiving aside of the attempt to
+determine what it is that we are. For however clearly a man may
+know his own powers and achievements, it is hard for him to
+estimate the relations of these to his whole character.
+
+So, dear brethren, although it is a very homely piece of advice,
+and may seem to be beneath the so-called dignity of the pulpit,
+let me venture just to remind you that self-conceit is no disease
+peculiar to the ten-talented people, but is quite as rife, if not
+a good deal rifer, among those with one talent. They are very
+humble when it comes to work, and are quite contented to wrap the
+one talent up in a napkin then; but when it comes to
+self-assertion, or what they expect to receive of recognition from
+others, they need to be reminded quite as much as their betters in
+endowment---`By the grace of God I am what I am.'
+
+III. And so, lastly, one word about the responsibility for our
+co-operation with the grace, in order to the accomplishment of its
+results.
+
+`The grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain,' says Paul.
+`Not I, but the grace of God which was with me, and so I laboured
+more abundantly than they all.' That is to say, God in His giving
+love; Christ with His ever out-flowing Spirit, move round our
+hearts, and desire to enter. But the grace, the love, the gifts of
+the love may all be put away by our unfaithfulness, by our
+non-receptivity, by our misuse, and by our negligence. Paul
+yielded himself to the grace that was brought to work upon him.
+Have you yielded yourselves?
+
+Paul said, `By the grace of God I am what I am.' He could not have
+said that, could he, if he had known that the most part of what he
+was was dead against God's will and purpose? Has God anything to
+do with making you what you are, or has it been the devil that has
+had the greater share in it? This man, because he knew that he had
+submitted himself to the often painful, searching, crucifying,
+self-restraining and stimulating influences of the Gospel and
+Spirit of Christ, could say, `God's grace has made me what I am,
+and I helped Him to make me.' And can you say anything like that?
+
+Take your life. In how many of its deeds has there been present
+the consciousness of God and His love? Take your character. How
+much of it has been shot through and through, so to speak, by the
+fiery darts of that cleansing, warming, consuming grace of God?
+Are you daily being baptized in that Spirit, searched by that
+Spirit, condemned by that grace? Is it the grace of God, or nature
+and self and the world and the flesh that have made you what you
+are?
+
+Oh, brethren I let us cultivate the sense of our need of this
+divine help, for it does not come where men do not know how weak
+they are, and how much they want it. The mountain tops are
+high,---yes! and they are dry; there is no water there. The rivers
+run in the green valleys deep down. `God resisteth the proud, and
+giveth grace to the humble.' Let us see that we open our hearts to
+the reception of these quickening and cleansing influences, for it
+is possible for us to cover ourselves over with such an
+impenetrable covering that that grace cannot pass through it. Let
+us see to it that we keep ourselves in close contact with the
+foundation of all this grace, even Jesus Christ Himself, by
+desire, by faith, by love, by communion, by meditation, by
+approximation, by sympathy, by service. And let us see that we use
+the grace that we possess. `For to him that hath shall be given,
+and from him that hath not'---not possessing in any real sense
+because not utilising for its appointed purpose---`shall be taken
+away even that he hath.' Wherefore, brethren, I `beseech you that
+ye receive not the grace of God in vain.'
+
+\chapter{The Unity of Apostolic Teaching}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS xv. 11}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Whether it were I or they, so we preach, and so ye believed.'---1
+\textsc{Cor.} xv. 11.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+Party spirit and faction were the curses of Greek civic life, and
+they had crept into at least one of the Greek churches---that in
+the luxurious and powerful city of Corinth. We know that there was
+a very considerable body of antagonists to Paul, who ranked
+themselves under the banner of Apollos or of Cephas \textit{i.e.}
+Peter. Therefore, Paul, keenly conscious that he was speaking to
+some unfriendly critics, hastens in the context to remove the
+possible objection which might be made, that the Gospel which he
+preached was peculiar to himself, and proceeds to assert that the
+whole substance of what he had to say to men, was held with
+unbroken unanimity by the other apostles. `They' means all of
+\textit{them}; and `so' means the summary of the Gospel teaching
+in the preceding verses.
+
+Now, Paul would not have ventured to make that assertion, in the
+face of men whom he knew to be eager to pick holes in anything
+that he said, unless he had been perfectly sure of his ground.
+There were broad differences between him and the others. But their
+partisans might squabble, as is often the case, and the men, whose
+partisans they were, be unanimous. There were differences of
+individual character, of temper, and of views about certain points
+of Christian truth. But there was an unbroken front of unanimity
+in regard to all that lies within the compass of that little word
+which covers so much ground---`\textit{So} we preach.'
+
+Now, I wish to turn to that outstanding fact---which does not
+always attract the attention which it deserves---of the absolute
+identity of the message which all the apostles and primitive
+teachers delivered, and to seek to enforce some of the
+considerations and lessons which seem to me naturally to flow from
+it.
+
+I. First, then, I ask you to think of the fact itself---the
+unbroken unanimity of the whole body of Apostolic teachers.
+
+As I have said, there were wide differences of characteristics
+between them, but there was a broad tract of teaching wherein they
+all agreed. Let me briefly gather up the points of unanimity, the
+contents of the one Gospel, which every man of them felt was his
+message to the world. I may take it all from the two clauses in
+the preceding context, `how that Christ died for our sins
+according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He
+rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.' These are
+the things about which, as Paul declares, there was not the
+whisper of a dissentient voice. There is the vital centre which he
+declares every Christian teacher grasped as being the essential of
+his message, and in various tones and manners, but in substantial
+identity of content, declared to the world.
+
+Now, what lies in it? The Person spoken of---the Christ, and all
+that that word involves of reference to the ancient and incomplete
+Revelation in the past, its shadows and types, its prophecies and
+ceremonies, its priesthood and its sacrifices; with all that it
+involves of reference to the ancient hopes on which a thousand
+generations had lived, and which either are baseless delusions, or
+are realised in Jesus---the Person whom all the Apostles
+proclaimed was One anointed from God as Prophet, Priest, and King;
+who had come into the world to fulfil all that the ancient system
+had shadowed by sacrifice, temple, and priest, and was the Monarch
+of Israel and of the world.
+
+And not only were they absolutely unanimous in regard to the
+Person, but they were unbrokenly consentient in regard to the
+facts of His life, His death, and His Resurrection. But the
+proclamation of the external fact is no gospel. You must add the
+clause `for our sins,' and then the record, which is a mere piece
+of history, with no more good news in it than the record of the
+death of any other martyr, hero, or saint, starts into being truly
+the good news for the world. The least part of a historical fact
+is the fact; the greatest part of it is the explanation of the
+fact, and the setting it in its place in regard to other facts,
+the exhibition of the principles which it expresses, and of the
+conclusions to which it leads. So the bare historical declaration
+of a death and a resurrection is transmuted into a gospel, by that
+which is the most important part of the Gospel, the explanation of
+the meaning of the fact---`He died for our sins.'
+
+If redemption from sin through the death of a Person is the
+fundamental conception of the Gospel for the world, then it is
+clear that, for such a purpose, a divine nature in the Person is
+wanted. Your notion of what Christ came to do will determine your
+notion of who He is. If you only recognise that His work is to
+teach, or to show in exercise a fair human character, then you may
+rest content with the lower notion of His nature which sees in Him
+but the foremost of the sons of men. But if we grasp `died for our
+sins,' then for such a task the incarnation of the Eternal Son of
+God is the absolute pre-requisite.
+
+Still further, our text brings out the contents of this gospel as
+being the declaration of the Resurrection. On that I need not here
+and now dwell at any length. But these are the points, the Person,
+the two facts, death and resurrection, and the great meaning of
+the death---viz. the expiation for the world's sins: these are the
+things on which the whole of the primitive teachers of the
+Apostolic Church had one voice and one message.
+
+Now, I do not suppose that I need spend any time in showing to you
+how the extant records bear out, absolutely, this contention of
+the Apostle's. I need only remind you how the opposition that was
+waged against him---and it was a very vigorous and a very bitter
+opposition---from a section of the Church, had no bearing at all
+upon the question of what he taught, but only upon the question of
+to whom it was to be taught. The only objection that the so-called
+Judaising party in the early Church had against Paul and his
+preaching, was not the Gospel that he declared, but his assertion
+that the Gentile nations might enter into the Church through faith
+in Jesus Christ, without passing through the gate of circumcision.
+Depend upon it, if there had been any, even the most microscopic,
+divergence on his part from the general, broad stream of Christian
+teaching, the sleepless, keen-eyed, unscrupulous enemies that
+dogged him all his days would have pounced upon it eagerly, and
+would never have ceased talking about it. But not one of them ever
+said a word of the sort, but allowed his teaching to pass, because
+it was the teaching of every one of the apostles.
+
+If I had time, or if it were necessary, it would be easy to point
+you to the records that we have left of the Apostolic teaching, in
+order to confirm this unbroken unanimity. I do not need to spend
+time on that. Proof-texts are not worth so much as the fact that
+these doctrines are interwoven into the whole structure of the New
+Testament as a whole---just as they are into Paul's letters. But I
+may gather one or two sayings, in which the substance of each
+writer's teaching has been concentrated by himself. For instance,
+Peter speaks about being `redeemed by the precious blood of Christ
+as of a Lamb without blemish and without spot,' and declares that
+`He Himself bare our sins in His own body on the tree.' John comes
+in with his doxology: `Unto Him that loved us, and loosed us from
+our sins in His own blood'; and it is his pen that records how in
+the heavens there echoed `glory and honour and thanks and
+blessing, for ever and ever, to the Lamb that was slain, and has
+redeemed us unto God by His blood.' The writer of the Epistle to
+the Hebrews, steeped as he is in ceremonial and sacrificial ideas,
+and having for his one purpose to work out the thought that Jesus
+Christ is all that the ancient ritual, sacerdotal and sacrificial
+system shadows and foretells, sums up his teaching in the
+statement that Christ having come, a high priest of good things to
+come, `through His own blood, entered in, once for all, into the
+holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.'
+
+There were limits to the unanimity, as I have already said. Paul
+and Peter had a great quarrel about circumcision and related
+subjects. The Apostolic writings are wondrously diverse from one
+another. Peter is far less constructive and profound than Paul.
+Paul and Peter are both untouched with the mystic wisdom of the
+Apostle John. But, in regard to the facts that I have signalised,
+the divinity, the person of Jesus Christ, His death and
+Resurrection, and the significance to be attached to that death,
+they are absolutely one. The instruments in the orchestra are
+various, the tender flute, the ringing trumpet, and many another,
+but the note they strike is the same. `Whether it were I or they,
+so we preach.'
+
+II. Now, let me ask you to consider the only explanation of this
+unanimity.
+
+Time was when the people, who did not believe in Christ's divinity
+and sacrificial death, tortured themselves to try and make out
+meanings for these epistles, which should not include the
+obnoxious doctrines. That is nearly antiquated. I suppose that
+there is nobody now, or next to nobody, who does not admit that,
+right or wrong, Paul, Peter, John---all of them---teach these two
+things, that Christ is the Eternal Son of the Father, and that His
+death is the Sacrifice for the world's sin. But they say that that
+is not the primitive, simple teaching of the Man of Nazareth; and
+that the unanimity is a unanimity of misapprehension of, and
+addition to, His words and to the drift of His teaching.
+
+Now, just think what a huge---I was going to
+say---inconceivability that supposition is. For there is no point,
+say from the time at which the Apostle who wrote the words of my
+text, which was somewhere about the year 56 or 57 A.D.,---there is
+no point between that period, working backwards through the
+history of the Church to the Crucifixion, where you can insert
+such a tremendous revolution of teaching as this. There is no
+trace of such a change. Peter's earliest speeches, as recorded in
+Acts, are in some important respects less developed doctrinally
+than are the epistles, but Christ's Messiahship, death, and
+Resurrection, with which is connected the remission of sins, are
+as clearly and emphatically proclaimed as at any later time. So
+these points of the Apostolic testimony were preached from the
+first, and, if in preaching them, the witnesses perverted the
+simple teaching of the Carpenter of Nazareth, and ascribed to Him
+a character which He had not claimed, and to His death a power of
+which He had not dreamed, they did so at the very time when the
+impressions of His personality and teaching were most recent and
+strong. It seems to me, apart altogether from other
+considerations, that such a right-about-face movement on the part
+of the early teachers of Christianity, is an absolute
+impossibility, regard being had to the facts of the case, even if
+you make much allowance for possible errors in the record.
+
+But I would make another remark. If misapprehension came in, if
+these men, in their unanimous declaration of Christ's death as the
+Sacrifice for sin, were not fairly representing the conclusions
+inevitable from the facts of Christ's life and death, and from His
+own words, is it not an odd thing that the same misapprehension
+affected them all? When people misconceive a teacher's doctrine,
+they generally differ in the nature of their misconceptions, and
+split into sections and parties. But here you have to account for
+the fact that every man of them, with all their diversity of
+idiosyncrasy and character, tumbled into the same pit of error,
+and that there was not one of them left sane enough to protest.
+Does that seem to be a likely thing?
+
+And what about the worth of the teacher's teaching, that did not
+guard its receivers from such absolute misapprehension as that? If
+the whole Church unanimously mistook everything that Jesus Christ
+had said to them, and unwarrantably made out of Him what they did,
+on this hypothesis, I do not think that there is much left to
+honour or admire in a teacher, whose teaching was so ambiguous, as
+that it led all that received it into such an error as that into
+which, by the supposition, they fell.
+
+No, brethren; they were one, because their Gospel was the only
+possible statement of the principles that underlay, and the
+conclusions that flowed from, the plain facts of the life and the
+teaching of Jesus Christ. I am not going to spend time in quoting
+His own words. I can only refer to one or two of them very
+succinctly. `Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise
+it up.' `As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so
+must the Son of Man be lifted up.' `My flesh is the bread which I
+will give for the life of the world.' `The Son of Man came not to
+be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom
+for many.' `This is My body broken for you; take, eat, in
+remembrance of Me.' `This is My blood, shed for many for the
+remission of sins; this do ye, as often as ye drink it, in
+remembrance of Me.' What possible explanation, doing justice to
+these words, is there, except `Jesus Christ died for our sins
+according to the Scriptures'? And how could men who had heard them
+with their own ears, and with their own eyes had seen Him risen
+from the dead and ascending into heaven, do otherwise than
+eagerly, enthusiastically, at the cost of all, and with
+unhesitating voice of unbroken unanimity, `so preach'?
+
+I quite admit that in Christ's teaching in the gospels you will
+not find the articulate drawing out into doctrinal statement of
+the principles that underlay, and the conclusions that flow from,
+the historical fact of Christ's propitiatory death. I do not
+wonder at that, nor do I admit that it is any argument against the
+truth of the divine revelation which is made in these doctrinal
+statements, to allege that we find nothing corresponding to them
+in Jesus Christ's own words. The silence is not as absolute as is
+alleged, as the quotations which I have made, and which might have
+been multiplied, do distinctly enough show. Even if it were more
+absolute than it is, the silence is by no means unintelligible.
+Christ had to offer the Sacrifice before the Sacrifice could be
+preached. He Himself warned His disciples against accepting His
+own words prior to the Cross, as the conclusive and ultimate
+revelation. `I have many things to say unto you, but you cannot
+carry them now.' There was need that the Cross should be a fact
+before it was evolved into a doctrine. And so I venture to say
+that the unanimity of the preaching is only explicable on the
+ground of that preaching in both its parts---its assertion of
+Jesus' Messiahship and of His propitiatory death---being the
+repetition on the housetop of the lessons which they had heard in
+the ear from Him.
+
+III. Note, briefly, the lesson from this unanimity.
+
+Let us distinctly apprehend where is the living heart of the
+Gospel---that it is the message of redemption by the incarnation and
+sacrifice of the Son of God. There follows from that incarnation and
+sacrifice all the great teaching about the work of the Divine Spirit
+in men, dwelling in them for evermore. But the beginning of all is,
+`Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.' And,
+brethren, that message meets, as nothing else meets, the deepest
+needs of every human soul. It is able, as nothing else is able, to
+open out into a whole encyclop\ae{}dia and universe of wisdom and
+truth and power. If we strike it out of our conception of
+Christianity, or if we obscure it as being the very palpitating
+centre of the whole, then feebleness will creep over the
+Christianity that is \textit{minus} a Cross, or does not see in it
+the Sacrifice for the world's sin. You may cast overboard the sails
+to lighten the ship. If you do, she lies a log on the waters. And
+if, for the sake of meeting new phases of thought, Christian
+churches tamper with this central truth, they have flung away their
+means of progress and of power.
+
+Let me say again, and in a word only, that the considerations that I
+have been trying to submit to you in this sermon, show us the limits
+within which the modern cry of `Back to the Christ of the Gospels,'
+is right, and where it may be wrong. I believe that in former days,
+and to some extent in the present day, we evangelical teachers have
+too much sometimes talked rather about the doctrines than about the
+Person who is the doctrines. And if the cry of `Back to the Christ'
+means, `Do not talk so much about the Atonement and Propitiation;
+talk about the Christ who atones,' then, with all my heart, I say,
+`Amen!' But put the Person in the foreground, the living-loving, the
+dying-loving, the risen-loving Christ, put Him in the foreground.
+But if it is implied, as I am afraid it is often implied, that the
+Christ of the Gospels is one and the Christ of the epistles is
+another, and that to go back to the Christ of the gospels means to
+drop `died for our sins according to the Scriptures,' and to retain
+only the non-miraculous, moral and religious teachings that are
+recorded in the three first gospels, then I say that it is fatal for
+the Church, and it is false to the facts, for the Christ of the
+epistles is the Christ of the gospels: the difference only being
+that in the one you have the facts, and in the other you have their
+meaning and their power.
+
+So, lastly, let this text teach us what we ourselves have to do
+with this unanimous testimony. `So we preach, and so ye believed.'
+Brother! Do you believe \textit{so}? That is to say, is your
+conception of the Gospel the mighty redemptive agency which is
+wrought by the Incarnate Son of God, who was crucified for our
+offences, and rose that we might live, and is glorified that we,
+too, may share His glory? Is that your Gospel? But do not be
+content with an intellectual grasp of the thing. `So ye believed'
+means a great deal more than `I believe that Christ died for our
+sins.' It means `I believe in the Christ who did die for my sins.'
+You must cast yourself as a sinful man on Him; and, so casting,
+you will find that it is no vain story which is commended to us by
+all these august voices from the past, but you will have in your
+own experience the verification of the fact that He died for our
+sins, in your own consciousness of sins forgiven, and new love
+bestowed; and so may turn round to Paul, the leader of the chorus,
+and to all the apostolic band, and say to them, `Now I believe,
+not because of thy saying, but because I have seen Him, and myself
+heard Him.'
+
+\chapter{The Certainty and Joy of the Resurrection}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS xv. 20}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`But now is Christ risen from the dead ... the first fruits of
+them that slept.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} xv. 20.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The Apostle has been contemplating the long train of dismal
+consequences which he sees would arise if we only had a dead
+Christ. He thinks that he, the Apostle, would have nothing to
+preach, and we, nothing to believe. He thinks that all hope of
+deliverance from sin would fade away. He thinks that the one fact
+which gives assurance of immortality having vanished, the dead who
+had nurtured the assurance have perished. And he thinks that if
+things were so, then Christian men, who had believed a false
+gospel, and nourished an empty faith, and died clinging to a
+baseless hope, were far more to be pitied than men who had had
+less splendid dreams and less utter illusions.
+
+Then, with a swift revulsion of feeling, he turns away from that
+dreary picture, and with a change of key, which the dullest ear
+can appreciate, from the wailing minors of the preceding verses,
+he breaks into this burst of triumph. `Now'---things being as they
+are, for it is the logical `now,' and not the temporal
+one---things being as they are, `Christ is risen from the dead,
+and that as the first fruits of them that slept.'
+
+Part of the ceremonial of the Passover was the presentation in the
+Temple of a barley sheaf, the first of the harvest, waved before
+the Lord in dedication to Him, and in sign of thankful confidence
+that all the fields would be reaped and their blessing gathered.
+There may be some allusion to that ceremony, which coincided in
+time with the Resurrection of our Lord, in the words here, which
+regard that one solitary Resurrection as the early ripe and early
+reaped sheaf, the pledge and the prophecy of the whole
+ingathering.
+
+Now there seem to me, in these words, to ring out mainly two
+things---an expression of absolute certainty in the fact, and an
+expression of unbounded triumph in the certainty of the fact.
+
+And if we look at these two things, I think we shall get the main
+thoughts that the Apostle would impress upon our minds.
+
+I. The certainty of Christ's Resurrection.
+
+`Now \textit{is} Christ risen,' says he, defying, as it were,
+doubt and negation, and basing himself upon the firm assurance
+which he possesses of that historical fact. `Ah!' you say, `seeing
+is believing; and he had evidence such as we can never have.'
+Well! let us see. Is it possible for us, nineteen centuries nearly
+after that day, to catch some echo of this assured confidence, and
+in the face of modern doubts and disbeliefs, to reiterate with as
+unfaltering assurance as that with which they came from his
+glowing lips, the great words of my text? Can we, logically and
+reasonably, as men who are guided by evidence and not by feeling,
+stand up before the world, and take for ours the ancient
+confession: `I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord,
+who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and
+buried. The third day He rose again from the dead'? I think we
+can.
+
+The way to prove a fact is by the evidence of witnesses. You
+cannot argue that it would be very convenient, if such and such a
+thing should be true; that great moral effects would follow if we
+believed it was true, and so on. The way to do is to put people
+who have seen it into the witness-box, and to make sure that their
+evidence is worth accepting.
+
+And at the beginning of my remarks I wish to protest, in a
+sentence, against confusing the issues about this question of the
+Resurrection of Jesus Christ in that fashion which is popular
+nowadays, when we are told that miracle is impossible, and
+\textit{therefore} there has been no Resurrection, or that death
+is the end of human existence, and that \textit{therefore} there
+has been no Resurrection. That is not the way to go about
+ascertaining the truth as to asserted facts. Let us hear the
+evidence. The men who brush aside the testimony of the New
+Testament writers, in obedience to a theory, either about the
+impossibility of the supernatural, or about the fatal and final
+issues of human death, are victims of prejudice, in the strictest
+meaning of the word; and are no more logical than the well-known
+and proverbial reasoner who, when told that facts were against
+him, with sublime confidence in his own infallibility, is reported
+to have said, `So much the worse for the facts.' Let us deal with
+evidence, and not with theory, when we are talking about alleged
+facts of history.
+
+So then, let me remind you that, in this chapter from which my
+text is taken, we have a record of the Resurrection of Jesus
+Christ, older than, and altogether independent of, the records
+contained in the gospels, which are all subsequent in date to it;
+that this Epistle to the Corinthians is one of the four undisputed
+Epistles of the Apostle, which not the most advanced school of
+modern criticism has a word to say against; that, therefore, this
+chapter, written, at the latest, some seven and twenty years after
+the date of the Crucifixion, carries us up very close to that
+event; that it shows that the Resurrection was
+\textit{universally} believed all over the Church, and therefore
+must have then been long believed; that it enables us to trace the
+same belief as universal, and in undisputed possession of the
+field among the churches, at the time of Paul's conversion, which
+cannot be put down at much more than five or six years after the
+Crucifixion, and that so we are standing in the presence of
+absolutely contemporaneous testimony. This is not a case in which
+a belief slowly and gradually grew up. Whether we accept the
+evidence or not, we are bound to admit that it is strictly
+contemporaneous testimony to the fact of Christ's Resurrection.
+
+And the witnesses are reliable and competent, as well as
+contemporaneous. The old belief that their testimony was imposture
+is dead long ago; as, indeed, how could it live? It would be an
+anomaly, far greater than the Resurrection, to believe that these
+people, Mary, Peter, John, Paul, and all the rest of them, were
+conspirators in a lie, and that the fairest system of morality and
+the noblest consecration that the world has ever seen, grew up out
+of a fraud, like flowers upon a dunghill. That theory will not
+hold water; and even those who will not accept the testimony have
+long since confessed that it will not. But the Apostle, in my
+context, seems to think that that is the only tenable alternative
+to the other theory that the witnesses were veracious, and I am
+disposed to believe that he is right. He says, `If Christ be not
+risen, then, are we' the utterly impossible thing of `false
+witnesses to God,' devout perjurers, as the phrase might be
+paraphrased: men who are lying to please God. If Christ be not
+risen, they have sworn to a thing that they know to be untrue, in
+order to advance His cause and His kingdom. If that theory be not
+accepted, there is no other about these men and their message that
+will hold water for a minute, except the admission of its truth.
+
+The fashionable modern one, that it was hallucination, is
+preposterous. Hallucinations that five hundred people at once
+shared! Hallucinations that lasted all through long talks, spread
+at intervals over more than a month! Hallucinations that included
+eating and drinking, speech and answer; the clasp of the hand and
+the feeling of the breath! Hallucinations that brought
+instruction! Hallucinations that culminated in the fancy that a
+gathered multitude of them saw Him going up into heaven! The
+hallucination is on the other side, I think. They have got the
+saddle on the wrong horse when they talk about the Apostolic
+witnesses being the victims of hallucination. It is the people who
+believe it possible that they should be who are so. The old
+argument against miracles used to say that it is more consonant
+with experience that testimony should be false, than that a
+miracle should be true. I venture to say it is a much greater
+strain on a man's credulity, to believe that \textit{such}
+evidence is false than that \textit{such} a miracle, \textit{so}
+attested, is true. And I, for my part, venture to think that the
+reasonable men are the men who listen to these eye-witnesses when
+they say, `We saw Him rise'; and echo back in answer the
+triumphant certitude, `Christ is risen indeed!'
+
+There is another consideration that I might put briefly. A very
+valuable way of establishing facts is to point to the existence of
+other facts, which indispensably require the previous ones for their
+explanation. Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. I
+believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, amongst other reasons,
+because I do not understand how it was possible for the Church to
+exist for a week after the Crucifixion, unless Jesus Christ rose
+again. Why was it that they did not all scatter? Why was it that the
+spirit of despondency and the tendency to separation, which were
+beginning to creep over them when they were saying: `Ah! it is all
+up! We \textit{trusted} that this had been He,' did not go on to
+their natural issue? How came it that these people, with their
+Master taken away from the midst of them, and the bond of union
+between them removed, and all their hopes crushed did not say: `We
+have made a mistake, let us go back to Gennesareth and take to our
+fishing again, and try and forget our bright illusions'? That is
+what John the Baptist's followers did when he died. Why did not
+Christ's do the same? Because Christ rose again and re-knit them
+together. When the Shepherd was smitten, the flock would have been
+scattered, and never drawn together any more, unless there had been
+just such a thing as the Resurrection asserts there was, to reunite
+the dispersed and to encourage the depressed. And so I say,
+Christianity with a \textit{dead} Christ, and a Church gathered
+round a grave from which the stone has \textit{not} been rolled
+away, is more unbelievable than the miracle, for it is an absurdity.
+
+Then there is another thing that I would say in a word. Let me put
+an illustration to explain what I mean. Suppose, after the
+execution of King Charles I., in some corner of the country a
+Pretender had sprung up and said, `I am the King!' the way to end
+that would have been for the Puritan leaders to have taken people
+to St. George's Chapel, and said, `Look! there is the coffin,
+there is the body, is that the king, or is it not?' Jesus Christ
+was said to have risen again, within a week of the time of His
+death. The rulers of the nation had the grave, the watch, the
+stone, the seal. They could have put an end to the pestilent
+nonsense in two minutes, if it had been nonsense, by the simple
+process of saying, `Go and look at the tomb, and you will see Him
+there.' But this question has never been answered, and never will
+be---What became of that sacred corpse if Jesus Christ did not
+rise again from the dead? The clumsy lie that the rulers told,
+that the disciples had stolen away the body, was only their
+acknowledgment that the grave was empty. If the grave were empty,
+either His servants were impostors, which we have seen it is
+incredible that they were, or the Christ was risen again.
+
+And so, dear brethren, for many other reasons besides this handful
+that I have ventured to gather and put before you, and in spite of
+the prejudices of modern theories, I lift up here once more, with
+unfaltering certitude, the glad message which I beseech you to
+accept: `Christ is risen, the first fruits of them that slept.'
+
+II. So much, then, for the first point in this passage. A word or
+two about the second---the triumph in the certitude of that
+Resurrection.
+
+As I remarked at a previous point of this discourse, the Apostle
+has been speaking about the consequences which would follow from
+the fact that Christ was not raised. If we take all these
+consequences and reverse them, we get the glad issues of His
+Resurrection, and understand why it was that this great burst of
+triumph comes from the Apostle's lips. And though I must
+necessarily treat this part of my subject very inadequately, let
+me try to gather together the various points on which, as I think,
+our Easter gladness ought to be built.
+
+First, then, I say, the risen Christ gives us a complete Gospel. A
+dead Christ annihilates the Gospel. `If Christ be not risen,' says
+the Apostle, `our preaching,' by which he means not the act but
+the substance of his preaching, `is vain.' Or, as the word might
+be more accurately rendered, `empty.' There is nothing in it; no
+contents. It is a blown bladder; nothing in it but wind.
+
+What was Paul's `preaching'? It all turned upon these
+points---that Jesus Christ was the Son of God; that He was
+Incarnate in the flesh for us men; that He died on the Cross for
+our offences; that He was raised again, and had ascended into
+Heaven, ruling the world and breathing His presence into believing
+hearts; and that He would come again to be our Judge. These were
+the elements of what Paul called `his Gospel.' He faces the
+supposition of a dead Christ, and he says, `It is all gone! It is
+all vanished into thin air. I have nothing to preach if I have not
+a Cross to preach which is man's deliverance from sin, because on
+it the Son of God hath died, and I only know that Jesus Christ's
+sacrifice is accepted and sufficient, because I have it attested
+to me in His rising again from the dead.'
+
+Dear brethren, on the fact of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is
+suspended everything which makes the Gospel a gospel. Strike that
+out, and what have you left? Some beautiful bits of moral
+teaching, a lovely life, marred by tremendous mistakes about
+Himself and His own importance and His relation to men and to God;
+but you have got nothing left that is worth calling a gospel. You
+have the cross rising there, gaunt, black, solitary; but, unless
+on the other side of the river you have the Resurrection, no
+bridge will ever be thrown across the black gulf, and the Cross
+remains `dead, being alone.' You must have a Resurrection to
+explain the Cross, and then the Life and the Death tower up into
+the manifestation of God in the flesh and the propitiation for our
+sins. Without it we have nothing to preach which is worth calling
+a gospel.
+
+Again, a living Christ gives faith something to lay hold of. The
+Apostle here in the context twice says, according to the
+Authorised Version, that a dead Christ makes our faith `vain.' But
+he really uses two different words, the former of which is applied
+to `preaching,' and means literally `empty,' while the latter
+means `of none effect' or `powerless.' So there are two ideas
+suggested here which I can only touch with the lightest hand.
+
+The risen Christ puts some contents, so to speak, into my faith;
+He gives me something for it to lay hold of.
+
+Who can trust a \textit{dead} Christ, or who can trust a
+\textit{human} Christ? That would be as much a blasphemy as
+trusting any other man. It is only when we recognise Him as
+declared to be the Son of God, and that by the Resurrection from
+the dead, that our faith has anything round which it can twine,
+and to which it can cleave. That living Saviour will stretch out
+His hand to us if we look to Him, and if I put my poor, trembling
+little hand up towards Him, He will bend to me and clasp it. You
+cannot exercise faith unless you have a risen Saviour, and unless
+you exercise faith in Him your lives are marred and sad.
+
+Again, if Christ be dead, our faith, if it could exist, would be
+as devoid of effect as it would be empty of substance. For such a
+faith would be like an infant seeking nourishment at a dead
+mother's breast, or men trying to kindle their torches at an
+extinguished lamp. And chiefly would it fail to bring the first
+blessing which the believing soul receives through and from a
+risen Christ, namely, deliverance from sin. If He whom we believed
+to be our sacrifice by His death and our sanctification by His
+life has not risen, then, as we have seen, all which makes His
+death other than a martyr's vanishes, and with it vanish
+forgiveness and purifying. Only when we recognise that in His
+Cross explained by His Resurrection, we have redemption through
+His blood, even the forgiveness of sins, and by the communication
+of the risen life from the risen Lord possess that new nature
+which sets us free from the dominion of our evil, is faith
+operative in setting us free from our sins.
+
+So, dear friends, the risen Christ gives us something for faith to
+lay hold of, and will make it the hand by which we grasp His
+strong hand, which lifts us `out of the horrible pit and the miry
+clay, and sets our feet upon a rock.' But if He lie dead in the
+grave your faith is vain, because it grasps nothing but a shadow;
+and it is vain as being purposeless; you are yet in your sins.
+
+The last thought is that the risen Christ gives us the certitude
+of our Resurrection. I do not for a moment mean to say that, apart
+from the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the thought, be it a wish
+or a dread, of immortality, has not been found in men, but there
+is all the difference in the world between forebodings,
+aspirations, wishes it were so, fears that it might be so, and the
+calm certitude that it is so. Many men talked about a western
+continent, but Columbus went there and came back again, and that
+ended doubt. Many men before, and apart from Jesus, have cherished
+thoughts of an immortal life beyond the grave, but He has been
+there and returned. And that, and, as I believe, that only puts
+the doctrine of immortality upon an irrefragable foundation; and
+we can say, `Now, I know that there is that land beyond.' They
+tell us that death ends everything. Modern materialism, in all its
+forms, asserts that it is the extinction of the personality. Jesus
+Christ died, and went through it, and came out of it the same, and
+I will trust Him. Brethren, the set of opinion amongst the
+educated and cultured classes in England, and all over Europe, at
+this moment, proves to anybody who has eyes to see, that for this
+generation, rejection of immortality will follow certainly on the
+rejection of Jesus Christ. And for England to-day, as for Greece
+when Paul sent his letter to Corinth, the one light of certitude
+in the great darkness is the fact that Jesus Christ hath died, and
+is risen again.
+
+If you will let Him, He will make you partakers of His own
+immortal life. `The first fruits of them that slept' is the pledge
+and the prophecy of all the waving abundance of golden grain that
+shall be gathered into the great husbandman's barns. The Apostle
+goes on to represent the resurrection of `them that are Christ's'
+as a consequence of their union to Jesus. He has conquered for us
+all. He has entered the prison-house and come forth bearing its
+iron gates on His shoulders, and henceforth it is not possible
+that we should be holden of it. There are two resurrections---one,
+that of Christ's servants, one that of others. They are not the
+same in principle---and, alas, they are awfully different in
+issue. `Some shall wake to everlasting life, and some to shame and
+everlasting contempt.'
+
+Let me beseech you to make Jesus Christ the life of your dead
+souls, by humble, penitent trust in Him. And then, in due time, He
+will be the life of your transformed bodies, changing these into
+the likeness of the body of His glory, `according to the working
+whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself.'
+
+\chapter{The Death of Death}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS xv. 20, 21; 50--58}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the
+first-fruits of them that slept. 21.\ For since by man came death,
+by man came also the resurrection of the dead.... 50.\ Now this I
+say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of
+God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. 51.\ Behold, I
+shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be
+changed, 52.\ In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last
+trump, (for the trumpet shall sound;) and the dead shall be raised
+incorruptible, and we shall be changed. 53.\ For this corruptible
+must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.
+54.\ So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and
+this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought
+to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in
+victory. 55.\ O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy
+victory? 56.\ The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin
+is the law. 57.\ But thanks be to God, which giveth us the
+victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ. 58.\ Therefore, my beloved
+brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work
+of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain
+in the Lord.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} xv. 20, 21; 50--58.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+This passage begins with the triumphant ringing out of the great
+fact which changes all the darkness of an earthly life without a
+heavenly hope into a blaze of light. All the dreariness for
+humanity, and all the vanity for Christian faith and preaching,
+vanish, like ghosts at cock-crow, when the Resurrection of Jesus
+rises sun-like on the world's night. It is a historical fact,
+established by the evidence proper for such,---namely, the
+credible testimony of eye-witnesses. They could attest His rising,
+but the knowledge of the worldwide significance of it comes, not
+from testimony, but from revelation. Those who saw Him risen join
+to declare: `Now is Christ risen from the dead,' but it is a
+higher Voice that goes on to say, `and become the first-fruits of
+them that slept.'
+
+That one Man risen from the grave was like the solitary sheaf of
+paschal first-fruits, prophesying of many more, a gathered harvest
+that will fill the great Husbandman's barns. The Resurrection of
+Jesus is not only a prophecy, showing, as it and it alone does,
+that death is not the end of man, but that life persists through
+death and emerges from it, like a buried river coming again
+flashing into the light of day, but it is the source or cause of
+the Christian's resurrection. The oneness of the race necessitated
+the diffusion through all its members of sin and of its
+consequence---physical death. If the fountain is poisoned, all the
+stream will be tainted. If men are to be redeemed from the power
+of the grave, there must be a new personal centre of life; and
+union with Him, which can only be effected by faith, is the
+condition of receiving life from Him, which gradually conquers the
+death of sin now, and will triumph over bodily death in the final
+resurrection. It is the resurrection of Christians that Paul is
+dealing with. Others are to be raised, but on a different
+principle, and to sadly different issues. Since Christ's
+Resurrection assures us of the future waking, it changes death
+into `sleep,' and that sleep does not mean unconsciousness any
+more than natural sleep does, but only rest from toil, and
+cessation of intercourse with the external world.
+
+In the part of the passage, verses 50 to 58, the Apostle becomes,
+not the witness or the reasoner, as in the earlier parts of the
+chapter, but the revealer of a `mystery.' That word, so tragically
+misunderstood, has here its uniform scriptural sense of truth,
+otherwise unknown, made known by revelation. But before he unveils
+the mystery, Paul states with the utmost force a difficulty which
+might seem to crush all hope,---namely, that corporeity, as we
+know it, is clearly incapable of living in such a world as that
+future one must be. To use modern terms, organism and environment
+must be adapted to each other. A fish must have the water, the
+creatures that flourish at the poles would not survive at the
+equator. A man with his gross earthly body, so thoroughly adapted
+to his earthly abode, would be all out of harmony with his
+surroundings in that higher world, and its rarified air would be
+too thin and pure for his lungs. Can there be any possibility of
+making him fit to live in a spiritual world? Apart from
+revelation, the dreary answer must be `No.' But the `mystery'
+answers with `Yes.' The change from physical to spiritual is
+clearly necessary, if there is to be a blessed life hereafter.
+
+That necessary change is assured to all Christians, whether they
+die or `remain till the coming of the Lord.' Paul varies in his
+anticipations as to whether he and his contemporaries will belong
+to the one class or the other; but he is quite sure that in either
+case the indwelling Spirit of Jesus will effect on living and dead
+the needful change. The grand description in verse 52, like the
+parallel in 1 Thessalonians iv. 16, is modelled on the account of
+the theophany on Sinai. The trumpet was the signal of the Divine
+Presence. That last manifestation will be sudden, and its
+startling breaking in on daily commonplace is intensified by the
+reduplication: `In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.' With
+sudden crash that awful blare of `loud, uplifted angel trumpet'
+will silence all other sounds, and hush the world. The stages of
+what follows are distinctly marked. First, the rising of the dead
+changed in passing through death, so as to rise in incorruptible
+bodies, and then the change of the bodies of the living into like
+incorruption. The former will not be found naked, but will be
+clothed with their white garments; the latter will, as it were,
+put on the glorious robes above the `muddy vesture of decay,' or,
+more truly, will see the miracle of these being transfigured till
+they shine `so as no fuller on earth could white them.' The living
+will witness the resurrection of the dead; the risen dead will
+witness the transformation of the living. Then both hosts will be
+united, and, through all eternity, `live together,' and that `with
+Him.' Paul evidently expects that he and the Corinthians will be
+in the latter class, as appears by the `we' in verse 52. He, as it
+were, points to his own body when he says, recurring to his former
+thought of the necessity of harmony between organism and
+environment, `\textit{this} corruptible must put on incorruption.'
+Here `corruption' is used in its physical application, though the
+ethical meaning may be in the background.
+
+The Apostle closes his long argument and revelation with a burst,
+almost a shout, of triumph. Glowing words of old prophets rush
+into his mind, and he breathes a new, grander meaning into them.
+Isaiah had sung of a time when the veil over all nations should be
+destroyed `in this mountain,' and when death should be swallowed
+up for ever; and Paul grasps the words and says that the prophet's
+loftiest anticipations will be fulfilled when that monster, whose
+insatiable maw swallows down youth, beauty, strength, wisdom, will
+himself be swallowed up. Hosea had prophesied of Israel's
+restoration under figure of a resurrection, and Paul grasps
+\textit{his} words and fills them with a larger meaning. He
+modifies them, in a manner on which we need not enlarge, to
+express the great Christian thought that death has conquered man
+but that man in Christ will conquer the conqueror. With swift
+change of metaphor he represents death as a serpent, armed with a
+poisoned sting, and that suggests to him the thought, never far
+away in his view of man, that death's power to slay is derived
+from---or, so to say, concentrated in---sin; and that at once
+raises the other equally characteristic and familiar thought that
+law stimulates sin, since to know a thing to be forbidden creates
+in perverse humanity an itching to do it, and law reveals sin by
+setting up the ideal from which sin is the departure. But just as
+the tracks in Paul's mind were well worn, by which the thought of
+death brought in that of sin, and that of sin drew after it that
+of law, so with equal closeness of established association, that
+of law condemnatory and slaying, brought up that of Christ the
+all-sufficient refuge from that gloomy triad---Death Sin, Law.
+Through union with Him each of us may possess His immortal risen
+life, in which Death, the engulfer, is himself engulfed; Death,
+the conqueror, is conquered utterly and for ever; Death, the
+serpent, has his sting drawn, and is harmless. That participation
+in Christ's life is begun even here, and God `giveth us the
+victory' now, even while we live outward lives that must end in
+death, and will give it perfectly in the resurrection, when `they
+cannot die any more,' and death itself is dead.
+
+The loftiest Christian hopes have close relation to the lowliest
+Christian duties, and Paul's triumphant song ends with plain,
+practical, prose exhortations to steadfastness, unmovable
+tenacity, and abundant fruitfulness, the motive and power of which
+will be found in the assurance that, since there is a life beyond,
+all labour here, however it may fail in the eyes of men, will not
+be in vain, but will tell on character and therefore on condition
+through eternity. If our peace does not rest where we would fain
+see it settle, it will not be wasted, but will return to us again,
+like the dove to the ark, and we shall `self-enfold the large
+results of' labour that seemed to have been thrown away.
+
+\chapter{Strong and Loving}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS xvi. 13, 14}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.
+14.\ Let all your things be done with charity.'---1 \textsc{Cor.}
+xvi. 13, 14.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+There is a singular contrast between the first four of these
+exhortations and the last. The former ring sharp and short like
+pistol-shots; the last is of gentler mould. The former sound like
+the word of command shouted from an officer along the ranks; and
+there is a military metaphor running all through them. The foe
+threatens to advance; let the guards keep their eyes open. He
+comes nearer; prepare for the charge, stand firm in your ranks.
+The battle is joined; `quit you like men'---strike a man's
+stroke---`be strong.'
+
+And then all the apparatus of warfare is put away out of sight,
+and the captain's word of command is softened into the Christian
+teacher's exhortation: `Let all your deeds be done in charity.'
+For love is better than fighting, and is stronger than swords. And
+yet, although there is a contrast here, there is also a sequence
+and connection. No doubt these exhortations, which are Paul's last
+word to that Corinthian Church on whom he had lavished in turn the
+treasures of his manifold eloquence, indignation, argumentation,
+and tenderness, reflected the deficiencies of the people to whom
+he was speaking. They were schismatic and factious to the very
+core, and so they needed the exhortation to be left last in their
+ears, as it were, that everything should be done in love. They
+were ill-grounded in regard to the very fundamental doctrines of
+the faith, as all Paul's argumentation about the resurrection
+proves, and so they needed to be bidden to `stand fast in the
+faith.' Their slothful carelessness as to the discipline of the
+Christian life, and their consequent feebleness of grasp of the
+Christian verities, made them loose-braced and weak in all
+respects, and incapacitated them for vigorous warfare. Thus, we
+see a picture in these injunctions of the sort of community that
+Paul had to deal with in Corinth, which yet he called a Church of
+saints, and for which he loved and laboured. Let me then run over
+and try to bring out the importance and mutual connection of what
+I may call this drill-book for the Christian warfare, which is the
+Christian life.
+
+`Watch ye.' That means one of two things certainly, probably
+both---Keep awake, and keep your eyes open. Our Lord used the same
+metaphor, you remember, very frequently, but with a special
+significance. On His lips it generally referred to the attitude of
+expectation of His coming in judgment. Paul uses sometimes the
+figure with the same application, but here, distinctly, it has
+another. As I said, there is the military idea underlying it. What
+will become of an army if the sentries go to sleep? And what
+chance will a Christian man have of doing his \textit{devoir}
+against his enemy, unless he keeps himself awake, and keeps
+himself alert? Watchfulness, in the sense of always having eyes
+open for the possible rush down upon us of temptation and evil, is
+no small part of the discipline and the duty of the Christian
+life. One part of that watchfulness consists in exercising a very
+rigid and a very constant and comprehensive scrutiny of our
+motives. For there is no way by which evil creeps upon us so
+unobserved, as when it slips in at the back door of a specious
+motive. Many a man contents himself with the avoidance of actual
+evil actions, and lets any kind of motives come in and out of his
+mind unexamined. It is all right to look after our
+\textit{doings}, but `as a man \textit{thinketh} in his heart, so
+is he.' The good or the evil of anything that I do is determined
+wholly by the motive with which I do it. And we are a great deal
+too apt to palm off deceptions on ourselves to make sure that our
+motives are right, unless we give them a very careful and minute
+scrutiny. One side of this watchfulness, then, is a habitual
+inspection of our motives and reasons for action. `What am I doing
+this for?' is a question that would stop dead an enormous
+proportion of our activity, as if you had turned the steam off
+from an engine. If you will use a very fine sieve through which to
+strain your motives, you will go a long way to keeping your
+actions right. We should establish a rigid examination for
+applicants for entrance, and make quite sure that each that
+presents itself is not a wolf in sheep's clothing. Make them all
+bring out their passports. Let every vessel that comes into your
+harbour remain isolated from all communication with the shore,
+until the health officer has been on board and given a clean bill.
+`Watch ye,' for yonder, away in the dark, in the shadow of the
+trees, the black masses of the enemy are gathered, and a midnight
+attack is but too likely to bring a bloody awakening to a camp
+full of sleepers.
+
+My text goes on to bring the enemy nearer and nearer and nearer.
+`Watch ye'---and if, not unnoticed, they come down on you, `stand
+fast in the faith.' There will be no keeping our ranks, or keeping
+our feet---or at least, it is not nearly so likely that there will
+be---unless there has been the preceding watchfulness. If the
+first command has not been obeyed, there is small chance of the
+second's being so. If there has not been any watchfulness, it is
+not at all likely that there will be much steadfastness. Just as
+with a man going along a crowded pavement, a little touch from a
+passer-by will throw him off his balance, whereas if he had known
+it was coming, and had adjusted his poise rightly, he would have
+stood against thrice as violent a shock, so, in order that we may
+stand fast, we must watch. A sudden assault will be a great deal
+less formidable when it is a foreseen assault.
+
+`Stand fast \textit{in the faith}.' I take it that this does not
+mean `the thing that we believe,' which use of the word `faith' is
+the ecclesiastical, but not the New Testament meaning. In
+Scripture, faith means not the body of truths that we believe, but
+the act of believing them. This further command tells us that, in
+addition to our watchfulness, and as the basis of our
+steadfastness, confidence in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ
+will enable us to keep our feet whatever comes against us, and to
+hold our ground, whoever may assault us.
+
+But remember that it is not because I have faith that I stand
+fast, but because of that in which I have faith. My feet may be
+well shod---and it used to be said that a soldier's shoes were of
+as much importance in the battle as his musket---my feet may be
+well shod, but if they are not well planted upon firm ground I
+never shall be able to stand the collision of the foe. So then, it
+is not my grasp of the blessed truth, God in Christ my Friend and
+Helper, but it is that truth which I grasp at, that makes me
+strong. Or, to put it into other words, it is the foothold, and
+not the foot that holds it, that ensures our standing firm. Only
+there is no steadfastness communicated to us from the source of
+all stability, except by way of our faith, which brings Christ
+into us. `Watch ye; stand fast in the faith.'
+
+The next two words of command are very closely connected, though
+not quite identical. `Quit you like men.' Play a man's part in the
+battle; strike with all the force of your muscles. But the Apostle
+adds, `be strong.' You cannot play a man's part unless you are.
+`Be strong'---the original would rather bear `become strong.' What
+is the use of telling men to `\textit{be} strong'? It is a waste
+of words, in nine cases out of ten, to say to a weak man, `Pluck
+up your courage, and show strength.' But the Apostle uses a very
+uncommon word here, at least uncommon in the New Testament, and
+another place where he uses it will throw light upon what he
+means: `Strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man.'
+Then is it so vain a mockery to tell a poor, weak creature like me
+to become strong, when you can point me to the source of all
+strength, in that `Spirit of power and of love and of a sound
+mind'? We have only to take our weakness there to have it
+stiffened into strength; as people put bits of wood into what are
+called `petrifying wells' which infiltrate into them mineral
+particles, that do not turn the wood into stone, but make the wood
+as strong as stone. So my manhood, with all its weakness, may have
+filtered into it divine strength, which will brace me for all
+needful duty, and make me `more than conqueror through Him that
+loved us.' Then, it is not mockery and cruelty, vanity and
+surplusage to preach `Quit you like men; be strong, and be a man';
+because if we will observe the plain and not hard conditions,
+strength will come to us according to our day, in fulfilment of
+the great promises: `My grace is sufficient for thee; and My
+strength is made perfect in weakness.'
+
+And now we have done with the fighting words of command, and come
+to the gentler exhortation: `Let all your things be done in
+charity.'
+
+That was a hard lesson for these Corinthians who were splitting
+themselves into factions and sects, and tearing each other's eyes
+out in their partisanship for various Christian teachers. But the
+advice has a much wider application than to the suppression of
+squabbles in Christian communities. It is the sum of all
+commandments of the Christian life, if you will take love in its
+widest sense, in the sense, that is, in which it is always used in
+Paul's writings. We cut it into two halves, and think of it as
+sometimes meaning love to God, and sometimes love to man. The two
+are inseparably inter-penetrated in the New Testament writings;
+and so we have to interpret this supreme commandment in the whole
+breadth and meaning of that great word \textit{Love}. And then it
+just comes to this, that love is the victor in all the Christian
+warfare. If we love God, at any given moment, consciously having
+our affection engaged with Him, and our heart going out to Him, do
+you think that any evil or temptation would have power over us?
+Should we not see them as they are, to be devils in disguise? In
+the proportion in which I love God I conquer all sin. And at the
+moment in which that great, sweet, all-satisfying light floods
+into my soul, I see through the hollowness and the shams, and
+detect the ugliness and the filth of the things that otherwise
+would be temptations. If you desire to be conquerors in the
+Christian fight, remember that the true way of conquest is, as
+another Apostle says, `Keep yourselves in the love of God.' `Let
+all your things be done in charity.'
+
+And, further, how beautifully the Apostle here puts the great
+truth that we are all apt to forget, that the strongest type of
+human character is the gentlest and most loving, and that the
+mighty man is not the man of intellectual or material force, such
+as the world idolises, but the man who is much because he loves
+much. If we would come to supreme beauty of Christian character,
+there must be inseparably manifested in our lives, and lived in
+our hearts, strength and love, might and gentleness. That is the
+perfect man, and that was the union which was set before us, in
+the highest form, in the `Strong Son of God, Immortal Love,' whom
+we call our Saviour, and whom we are bound to follow. His soldiers
+conquer as the Captain of their salvation has conquered, when
+watchfulness and steadfastness and courage and strength are all
+baptized in love and perfected thereby.
+
+\chapter{Anathema and Grace}
+\markright{1 CORINTHIANS xvi. 21--24}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`The salutation of me Paul with mine own hand. 22.\ If any man
+love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha.
+23.\ The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. 24.\ My love
+be with you all in Christ Jesus.'---1 \textsc{Cor.} xvi. 21--24.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+Terror and tenderness are strangely mingled in this parting
+salutation, which was added in the great characters shaped by
+Paul's own hand, to the letter written by an amanuensis. He has
+been obliged, throughout the whole epistle, to assume a tone of
+remonstrance abundantly mingled with irony and sarcasm and
+indignation. He has had to rebuke the Corinthians for many faults,
+party spirit, lax morality, toleration of foul sins, grave abuses
+in their worship even at the Lord's Supper, gross errors in
+opinion in the denial of the Resurrection. And in this last solemn
+warning he traces all these vices to their fountainhead---the
+defect of love to Jesus Christ---and warns of their fatal issue.
+`Let him be Anathema.'
+
+But he will not leave these terrible words for his last. The
+thunder is followed by gentle rain, and the sun glistens on the
+drops; `The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.' Nor
+for himself will he let the last impression be one of rebuke or
+even of warning. He desires to show that his heart yearns over
+them all; so he gathers them all---the partisans; the poor brother
+that has fallen into sin; the lax ones who, in their misplaced
+tenderness, had left him in his sin; the misguided reasoners who
+had struck the Resurrection out of the articles of the Christian
+creed---he gathers them all into his final salutation, and he
+says, `Take and share my love---though I have had to
+rebuke---amongst the whole of you.'
+
+Is not that beautiful? And does not the juxtaposition of such
+messages in this farewell go deeper than the revelation of Paul's
+character? May we not see, in these terrible and tender thoughts
+thus inextricably intertwined and braided together, a revelation
+of the true nature both of the terror and the tenderness of the
+Gospel which Paul preached? It is from that point of view that I
+wish to look at them now.
+
+I. I take first that thought---the terror of the fate of the
+unloving.
+
+Now, I must ask you for a moment's attention in regard to these
+two untranslated words. \textit{Anathema Maran-atha}. The first
+thing to be noticed is that the latter of them stands
+independently of the former, and forms a sentence by itself, as I
+shall have to show you presently. `Anathema' means an offering, or
+a thing devoted; and its use in the New Testament arises from its
+use in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, where it is
+employed for persons and things that, in a peculiar sense, were
+set apart and devoted to God. In the story of the conquest of
+Canaan, for instance, we read of Jericho and other places,
+persons, or things that were, as our version somewhat
+unfortunately renders it, `accursed,' or as it ought rather to be
+rendered, `devoted,' or `put under a ban.' And this `devotion' was
+of such a sort as that the things or persons devoted were doomed
+to destruction. All the dreadful things that were done in the
+Conquest were the consequences of the persons that endured them
+being thus `consecrated,' in a very dreadful sense, or set apart
+for God. The underlying idea was that evil things brought into
+contact with Him were necessarily destroyed with a swift
+destruction. That being the meaning of the word, it is clear that
+its use in my text is distinctly metaphorical, and that it
+suggests to us that the unloving, like those cities full of
+uncleanness, when they are brought into contact with the infinite
+love of the coming Judge, shrivel up and are destroyed.
+
+The other word `Maran-atha,' as I said, is to be taken as a
+separate sentence. It belongs to the dialect, which was probably
+the vernacular of Palestine in the time of Paul, and to which
+belong, for the most part, the other untranslated words that are
+scattered up and down the Gospels, such as `Aceldama,'
+`Ephphatha,' and the like. It means `our Lord comes.' Why Paul
+chose to use that untranslated scrap of another tongue in a letter
+to a Gentile Church we cannot tell. Perhaps it had come to be a
+kind of watchword amongst the early Jewish Christians, which came
+naturally to his lips. But, at any rate, the use of it here is
+distinctly to confirm the warning of the previous clause, by
+pointing to the time at which that warning shall be fulfilled. `If
+any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be devoted and
+destroyed. Our Lord comes.' The only other thing to be noticed by
+way of introduction is that this first clause is not an
+imprecation, nor any wish on the part of the Apostle, but is a
+solemn prophetic warning (acquiesced in by every righteous heart)
+of that which will certainly come. The significance of the whole
+may be gathered into one simple sentence---The coming of the Lord
+of Love is the destruction of the unloving.
+
+`Our Lord comes.' Paul's Christianity gathered round two facts and
+mo\-ments---one in the past, Christ has come; one in the future,
+Christ will come. For memory, the coming by the cradle and the
+Cross; for hope, the coming on His throne in glory; and between
+these two moments, like the solid piers of a suspension bridge,
+the frail structure of the Present hangs swinging. In this day men
+have lost their expectation of the one, and to a large extent
+their faith in the other. But we shall not understand Scripture
+unless we seek to make as prominent in our thoughts as on its
+pages that second coming as the complement and necessary issue of
+the first. It stands stamped on every line. It colours all the New
+Testament views of life. It is used as a motive for every duty,
+and as a magnet to draw men to Jesus Christ by salutary dread.
+There is no hint in my text about the time of the Lord's coming,
+no disturbing of the solemnity of the thought by non-essential
+details of chronology, so we may dismiss these from our minds. The
+fact is the same, and has the same force as a motive for life,
+whether it is to be fulfilled in the next moment or thousands of
+years hence, provided only that you and I are to be there when He
+comes.
+
+There have been many comings in the past, besides the comings in
+the flesh. The days of the Lord that have already appeared in the
+history of the world are not few. One characteristic is stamped
+upon them all, and that is the swift annihilation of what is
+opposed to Him. The Bible has a set of standing metaphors by which
+to illustrate this thought of the Coming of the Lord---a flood, a
+harvest when the ears are ripe for the sickle, the waking of God
+from slumber, and the like; all suggesting similar thoughts.
+\textit{The} day of the Lord, \textit{the} coming of the Lord,
+will include and surpass all the characteristics which these
+lesser and premonitory judgment days presented in miniature. I do
+not enlarge on this theme. I would not play the orator about it if
+I could; but I appeal to your consciences, which, in the case of
+most of us, not only testify of right and wrong, but of
+responsibility, and suggest a judge to whom we are responsible.
+And I urge on each, and on myself, this simple question: Have I
+allowed its due weight on my life and character to that watchword
+of the ancient church---\textit{Maran-atha}, `our Lord cometh'?
+
+Now, the coming of the Lord of Love is the annihilation of the
+unloving. The destruction implied in Anathema does not mean the
+cessation of Being, but a death which is worse than death, because
+it is a death in life. Suppose a man with all his past
+annihilated, with all its effort foiled and crushed, with all its
+possessions evaporated and disappeared, and with his memory and
+his conscience stung into clear-sighted activity, so that he looks
+back upon his former self and into his present self, and feels
+that it is all waste and chaos, would not that fulfil the word of
+my text---`Let him be Anathema'? And suppose that such a man, in
+addition to these thoughts, and as the root and the source of
+them, had ever the quivering consciousness that he was and must be
+in the presence of an unloved Judge; have you not there the naked
+bones of a very dreadful thing, which does not need any tawdry
+eloquence of man to make it more solemn and more real? The
+unloving heart is always ill at ease in the presence of Him whom
+it does not love. The unloving heart does not love, because it
+does not trust, nor see the love. Therefore, the unloving heart is
+a heart that is only capable of apprehending the wrathful side of
+Christ's character. It is a heart devoid of the fruits of love
+which are likeness and righteousness, `without which no man shall
+see the Lord,' nor stand the flash of the brightness of His
+coming. So there is no cruelty nor arbitrariness in the decree
+that the heart that loves not, when brought into contact with the
+infinite Lord of Love, must find in the touch death and not life,
+darkness and not light, terror and not hope. Notice that Paul's
+negation \textit{is} a negation and not an affirmation. He does
+not say `he that hateth,' but `he that doth not love.' The absence
+of the active emotion of love, which is the child of faith, the
+parent of righteousness, the condition of joy in His presence, is
+sufficient to ensure that this fate shall fall upon a man. I durst
+not enlarge. I leave the truth on your hearts.
+
+II. Secondly, notice the present grace of the coming Lord. `Our
+Lord cometh. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.'
+These two things are not contradictory, but we often deal with
+them as if they were. And some men lay hold of the one side of the
+antithesis, and some men lay hold of the other, and rend them
+apart, and make antagonistic theories of Christianity out of them.
+But the real doctrine puts the two together and says there is no
+terror without tenderness, and there is no tenderness without
+terror. If we sacrifice the aspects of the divine nature, as
+revealed to us in the gentle Christ, which kindle a wholesome
+dread, we have, all unwittingly, robbed the aspects of the divine
+nature, which warm in us a gracious love, of their power to
+inflame and to illuminate. You cannot have love which is anything
+nobler than facile good nature and unrighteous indifference,
+unless you have along with it aspects of God's character and
+government which ought to make some men afraid. And you cannot
+keep these latter aspects from being exaggerated and darkened into
+a Moloch of cruelty, unless you remember that, side by side with
+them, or rather underlying them and determining them, are aspects
+of the divine nature to which only child-like confidence and calm
+beatific returns of love do rightly respond. The terror of the
+Lord is a garb which our sins force upon the love of the Lord, and
+when the one is presented it brings with it the other. Never
+should they be parted in our thoughts or in our teaching.
+
+Note what that present grace is. It is a tenderness which gathers
+into its embrace all these imperfect, immoral, lax, heretical people
+in Corinth, as well as everywhere else---`The grace of our Lord
+Jesus Christ be with \textit{you all}.' There were men in that
+church that said, `I am of Paul, I of Apollos, I of Cephas, I of
+Christ.' There were men in that church that had defiled their souls
+and their flesh, and corrupted the community, and blasphemed the
+name of Christ by such foul, sensual sin as was `not even named
+among the Gentiles.' There were men in that church so dead to all
+the sanctities even of the communion-table as that, with the bread
+between their teeth and the wine-cup in their hands, one was hungry
+and another drunken. There were men in that church, whose
+Christianity was so anomalous and singularly fragmentary that they
+did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. And yet Paul flings
+the great rainbow, as it were, of Christ's enclosing love over them
+all. And surely the love which gathers in such people leaves none
+outside its sweep; and the tenderness which stoops from heaven to
+pity, to pardon, to cleanse such is a tenderness to which the
+weakest, saddest, sinfullest, foulest of the sons of men may
+confidently resort. Let nothing rob you of this assurance, that
+Christ, the coming Lord, is present with us all, and with all our
+weak and wicked brethren, in the full condescension of His
+all-embracing, all-hoping, all-forgetting, and all-restoring love.
+All that we need, in order to get its full sunshine into our hearts,
+is that we trust Him utterly, and, so trusting, love Him back again
+with that love which is the fulfilling of the Law and the crown of
+the Gospel.
+
+III. And now, lastly, note the tenderness, caught from the Master
+Himself, of the servant who rebukes.
+
+This last message of love from the Apostle himself, in verse 24,
+is quite anomalous. There is no other instance in his letters
+where he introduces himself and his own love at the end, after he
+has pronounced solemn benediction commending to Christ's grace.
+But here, as if he had felt that he must leave an impression of
+himself on their minds, which corresponded to the impression of
+his Master that he desired to leave, he deviates from his ordinary
+habit, and makes his last word a personal word---`\textit{My love}
+be with you all in Christ Jesus.' Rebuke is the sign of love.
+Sharp condemnation may be the language of love. Plain warning of
+possible evils is the simple duty of love. So Paul folds all whom
+he has been rebuking in the warm embrace of his proffered love,
+which was the very cause of his rebuke. The healing balm of this
+closing message was to be applied to the wounds which his keen
+edged words had made, and to show that they were wounds by a
+surgeon, not by a foe. In effect, this parting smile of love says,
+`I am not become your enemy because I tell you the truth; I show
+my love to you by the plainness and roughness of my words.'
+Generalise that, free it from its personal reference, and it just
+comes to this: There never was a shallower sneer than the sneer
+which is cast at Christianity, as if it were harsh, `ferocious,'
+or unloving, when it preaches the terror of the Lord. No! rather,
+because the Gospel \textit{is} a Gospel, it must speak plainly
+about death and destruction to the unloving. The danger signal is
+not to be blamed for a collision, which it is hoisted to avert;
+and it is a strange sign of an unfeeling and unsympathetic, or of
+a harsh and gloomy system, that it should tell men where they are
+driving, in order that they may never reach the miserable goal.
+`Knowing, therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men.' And
+when people say to us preachers, `Is that your Gospel, a Gospel
+that talks about everlasting destruction from the presence of the
+Lord at the glory of His coming---is that your Gospel?' We can
+only answer, `Yes, it is! Because, so to talk, may by God's mercy,
+secure that some who hear shall never know anything of the wrath,
+save the hearing of it with the ear, and may, by the warning of
+it, be drawn to the Rock of Ages for safety and shelter from the
+storm.'
+
+Therefore, dear friends, the upshot of all that I have been feebly
+trying to say is just this; let us lay hold with all our hearts,
+and by simple faith, of the present grace of the coming, loving
+Lord and Judge. You can do it. It is your only hope to do it.
+\textit{Have} you done it? If so, then you may lift up your heads
+to the throne, and be glad, as those who know that their Friend
+and Deliverer will come at last, to help, to bless, to save. If
+not, dear friend, take the warning, that not to love is to be
+shrivelled like a leaf in the flame, at that coming which is life
+to them that love, and destruction to all besides. `Herein is our
+love made perfect, that we may have boldness before Him in the day
+of judgment.'
+
+\newpage
+\addcontentsline{toc}{part}{II. CORINTHIANS}
+
+\chapter{God's Yea; Man's Amen}
+\markright{2 CORINTHIANS i. 20}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`For how many soever be the promises of God, in Him is the yea:
+wherefore also through Him is the Amen.'---2 \textsc{Cor.} i. 20
+(R.~V.).
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+This is one of the many passages the force and beauty of which
+are, for the first time, brought within the reach of an English
+reader by the alterations in the Revised Version. These are partly
+dependent upon the reading of the text and partly upon the
+translation. As the words stand in the Authorised Version, `yea'
+and `amen' seem to be very nearly synonymous expressions, and to
+point substantially to the same thing---viz. that Jesus Christ is,
+as it were, the confirmation and seal of God's promises. But in
+the Revised Version the alterations, especially in the pronouns,
+indicate more distinctly that the Apostle means two different
+things by the `yea' and the `amen'. The one is God's voice, the
+other is man's. The one has to do with the certainty of the divine
+revelation, the other has to do with the certitude of our faith in
+the revelation. When God speaks in Christ, He confirms everything
+that He has said before, and when we listen to God speaking in
+Christ, our lips are, through Christ, opened to utter our
+assenting `Amen' to His great promises. So, then, we have the
+double form of our Lord's work, covering the whole ground of His
+relations to man, set forth in these two clauses, in the one of
+which God's confirmation of His past revelations by Jesus Christ
+is treated of, and in the other of which the full and confident
+assent which men may give to that revelation is set before us. I
+deal, then, with these two points---God's certainties in Christ,
+and man's certitudes through Christ.
+
+Now these two things do not always go together. We may be very
+certain, as far as our persuasion is concerned, of a very doubtful
+fact, or we may be very doubtful, as far as our persuasion is
+concerned, of a very certain fact. We speak about truths or facts
+as being certain, and we ought to mean by that, not how we think
+about them, but what they are in the evidence on which they rest.
+A certain truth is a truth which has its evidence irrefragable;
+and the only fitting attitude for men, in the presence of a
+certain truth, is to have a certitude of the truth. And these two
+things are, our Apostle tells us, both given to us in and through
+Jesus Christ. Let me deal, then, with these two sides.
+
+I. First, God's certainties in Christ.
+
+Of course the original reference of the text is to the whole
+series of great promises given in the Old Testament. These, says
+Paul, are sealed and confirmed to men by the revelation and work
+of Jesus Christ, but it is obvious that the principle which is
+good in reference to them is good on a wider field. I venture to
+take that extension, and to ask you to think briefly about some of
+the things that are made for us indubitably certain in Jesus
+Christ.
+
+And, first of all, there is the certainty about God's heart.
+Everywhere else we have only peradventures, hopes, fears, guesses
+more or less doubtful, and roundabout inferences as to His
+disposition and attitude towards us. As one of the old divines
+says somewhere, `All other ways of knowing God are like the bended
+bow, Christ is the straight string.' The only means by which,
+indubitably, as a matter of demonstration, men can be sure that
+God in the heavens has a heart of love towards them is by Jesus
+Christ. For consider what will make us sure of that. Nothing but
+facts; words are of little use, arguments are of little use. A
+revelation, however precious, which simply says to us, `God is
+Love' is not sufficient for our need. We want to see love in
+operation if we are to be sure of it, and the only demonstration
+of the love of God is to witness the love of God in actual
+working. And you get it---where? On the Cross of Jesus Christ. I
+do not believe that anything else irrefragably establishes the
+fact for the yearning hearts of us poor men who want love, and yet
+cannot grope our way in amidst the mysteries and the clouds in
+providence and nature, except this---`Herein is love, not that we
+loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the
+propitiation for our sins.'
+
+The question may arise in some minds, Is there any need for
+proving God's love? The question never arose except within the
+limits of Christianity. It is only men who have lived all their
+lives in an atmosphere saturated by Christian sentiment and
+conviction that ever come to the point of saying, `We do not want
+historical revelation to prove to us the fact of a loving God.'
+They would never have fancied that they did not need the
+revelation unless, unconsciously to themselves, and indirectly,
+all their thoughts had been coloured and illuminated by the
+revelation that they profess they reject. God as Love is `our
+dearest faith, our ghastliest doubt,' and the only way to make
+absolutely certain of the fact that His heart is full of mercy to
+us is to look upon Him as He stands revealed to us, not merely in
+the words of Christ, for, precious as they are, these are the
+smallest part of His revelation, but in the life and in the death
+which open for us the heart of God. Remember what He said Himself,
+\textit{not} `He who hath listened to Me, doth understand the
+Father,' but `He that hath \textit{seen} Me hath seen the Father.'
+`In Him is yea,' and the hopes and shadowy fore-revelations of the
+loving heart of God are confirmed by the fact of His life and
+death. God \textit{establishes}, not `commends' as our translation
+has it, `His love towards us in that whilst we were yet sinners
+Christ died for us.'
+
+Further, in Him we have the certainty of pardon. Every deep
+heart-ex\-per\-i\-ence amongst men has felt the necessity of
+having a clear certainty and knowledge about forgiveness. Men do
+not feel it always. A man can skate over the surface of the great
+deeps that lie beneath the most frivolous life, and may suppose,
+in his superficial way of looking at things, that there is no need
+for any definite teaching about sin and the mode of dealing with
+it. But once bring that man face to face, in a quiet hour, with
+the facts of his life and of a divine law, and all that
+superficial ignoring of evil in himself and of the dread of
+punishment and consequences, passes away. I am sure of this, that
+no religion will ever go far and last long and work mightily, and
+lay a sovereign hand upon human life, which has not a most plain
+and decisive message to preach in reference to pardon. And I am
+sure of this, that one reason for the comparative feebleness of
+much so-called Christian teaching in this generation is just that
+the deepest needs of a man's conscience are not met by it. In a
+religion on which the whole spirit of a man may rest itself, there
+must be a very plain message about what is to be done with sin.
+The only message which answers to the needs of an awakened
+conscience and an alarmed heart is the old-fashioned message that
+Jesus Christ the Righteous has died for us sinful men. All other
+religions have felt after a clear doctrine of forgiveness, and all
+have failed to find it. Here is the divine `Yea!' And on it alone
+we can suspend the whole weight of our soul's salvation. The rope
+that is to haul us out of the horrible pit and the miry clay had
+much need to be tested before we commit ourselves to it. There are
+plenty of easygoing superficial theories about forgiveness
+predominant in the world to-day. Except the one that says, `In
+whom we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of
+sin,' they are all like the rope let down into the dark mine to
+lift the captives beneath, half of the strands of which have been
+cut on the sharp edge above, and when the weight hangs on to it,
+it will snap. There is nothing on which a man who has once learned
+the tragical meaning and awful reality and depth of the fact of
+his transgression can suspend his forgiveness, except this, that
+`Christ has died, the just for the unjust, to bring us unto God.'
+`In Him the promise is yea.'
+
+And, again, we have in Christ divine certainties in regard to
+life. We have in Him the absolutely perfect pattern to which we
+are to conform our whole doings. And so, notwithstanding that
+there may, and will still be many uncertainties and much
+perplexity, we have the great broad lines of morals and of duty
+traced with a firm hand, and all that we need to know of
+obligation and of perfectness lies in this---Be like Jesus Christ!
+So the solemn commandments of the ethical side of Divine
+Revelation, as well as the promises of it, get their `yea' in
+Jesus Christ, and He stands the Law of our lives.
+
+We have certainties for life, in the matter of protection,
+guidance, supply of all necessity, and the like, treasured and
+garnered in Jesus Christ. For He not only confirms, but fulfils,
+the promises which God has made. If we have that dear Lord for our
+very own, and He belongs to us as He does belong to them who love
+Him and trust Him, then in Him we have in actual possession these
+promises, how many soever they be, which are given by God's other
+words.
+
+Christ is Protean, and becomes everything to each man that each
+man requires. He is, as it were, `a box where sweets compacted
+lie.' `In Him are hid all the treasures,' not only of wisdom and
+knowledge, but of divine gifts, and we have but to go to Him in
+order to have that which at each moment as it emerges, we most
+require. As in some of those sunny islands of the Southern
+Pacific, one tree supplies the people with all that they need for
+their simple wants, fruit for their food, leaves for their houses,
+staves, thread, needles, clothing, drink, everything---so Jesus
+Christ, this Tree of Life, is Himself the sum of all the promises,
+and, having Him, we have everything that we need.
+
+And, lastly, in Christ we have the divine certainties as to the
+Future over which, apart from Him, lie cloud and darkness. As I
+said about the revelation of the heart of God, so I say about the
+revelation of a future life---a verbal revelation is not enough.
+We have enough of arguments; what we want is facts. We have enough
+of man's peradventures about a future life, enough of evidence
+more or less valid to show that it is `probable,' or `not
+inconceivable,' or `more likely than not,' and so on and so on.
+What we want is that somebody shall cross the gulf and come back
+again, and so we get in the Resurrection of Christ the one fact on
+which men may safely rest their convictions of immortality, and I
+do not think that there is a second anywhere. On it alone, as I
+believe, hinges the whole answer to the question---`If a man die,
+shall he live again?' This generation is brought, in my reading of
+it, right up to this alternative---Christ's Resurrection,---or we
+die like the brutes that perish. `All the promises of God in Him
+are yea.'
+
+II. And now a word as to the second portion of my text---viz.
+man's certitudes, which answer to God's certainties.
+
+The latter are \textit{in} Christ, the former are \textit{through}
+Christ. Now it is clear that the only fitting attitude for
+professing Christians in reference to these certainties of God is
+the attitude of unhesitating affirmation and joyful assent.
+Certitude is the fitting response to certainty.
+
+There should be some kind of correspondence between the firmness
+with which we grasp, the tenacity with which we hold, the
+assurance with which we believe, these great truths, and the
+rock-like firmness and immovableness of the evidence upon which
+they rest. It is a poor compliment to God to come to His most
+veracious affirmations, sealed with the broad seal of His Son's
+life and death, and to answer with a hesitating `Amen,' that
+falters and almost sticks in our throat. Build rock upon rock. Be
+sure of the certain things. Grasp with a firm hand the firm stay.
+Immovably cling to the immovable foundation; and though you be but
+like the limpet on the rock hold fast by the Rock, as the limpet
+does; for it is an insult to the certainty of the revelation, when
+there is hesitation in the believer.
+
+I need not dwell for more than a moment upon the lamentable
+contrast which is presented between this certitude, which is our
+only fitting attitude, and the hesitating assent and half belief
+in which so many professing Christians pass their lives. The
+reasons for that are partly moral, partly intellectual. This is
+not a day which is favourable to the unhesitating avowal of
+convictions in reference to an unseen world, and many of us are
+afraid of being called narrow, or dogmatisers, and think it looks
+like breadth, and liberality, and culture, and I know not what, to
+say `Well! perhaps it is, but I am not quite sure; I think it is,
+but I will not commit myself.' All the promises of God, which in
+Him are yea, ought through Him to get from us an `Amen.'
+
+There is a great deal that will always be uncertain. The firmer
+our convictions, the fewer will be the things that they grasp;
+but, if they be few, they will be large, and enough for us. These
+truths certified in Christ concerning the heart of God, the
+message of pardon, the law for life, the gifts of guidance,
+defence, and sanctifying, the sure and certain hope of
+immortality---these things we ought to be sure about, whatever
+borderland of uncertainty may lie beyond them. The Christian verb
+is `we \textit{know},' not `we hope, we calculate, we infer, we
+think,' but `we \textit{know}.' And it becomes us to apprehend for
+ourselves the full blessedness and power of the certitude which
+Christ has given to us by the certainties which he has brought us.
+
+I need not speak about the blessedness of such a calm assurance,
+about the need of it for power, for peace, for effort, for
+fixedness in the midst of a world and age of change. But I must,
+before I close, point you to the only path by which that certitude
+is attainable. `\textit{Through} Him is the amen.' He is the Door.
+The truths which He confirms are so inextricably intertwined with
+Himself that you cannot get them and put away Him. Christ's
+relation to Christ's Gospel is not the relation of other teachers
+to their words. You may accept the words of a Plato, whatever you
+think of the Plato who spoke the words. But you cannot separate
+Christ and His teaching in that fashion, and you must have
+\textit{Him} if you are to get \textit{it}. So, faith in Him, the
+intellectual acceptance of Him, as the authoritative and
+infallible Revealer, the bowing down of heart and will to Him as
+our Commander and our Lord, the absolute trust in Him as the
+foundation of all our hope and the source of all our
+blessedness---that is the way to certitude, and there is no other
+road that we can take.
+
+If thus we keep near Him, our faith will bring us the present
+experience and fulfilment of the promises, and we shall be sure of
+them, because we have them already. And whilst men are asking, `Do
+we know anything about God? Is there a God at all? Is there such a
+thing as forgiveness? Can anybody find anywhere absolute rules for
+his life? Is there anything beyond the grave but mist and
+darkness?' we can say, `One thing I know, Jesus Christ is my
+Saviour, and in Him I know God, and pardon, and duty, and
+sanctifying, and safety, and immortality; and whatever is dark,
+this, at least, is sun-clear.' Get high enough up and you will be
+above the fog; and while the men down in it are squabbling as to
+whether there is anything outside the mist, you, from your sunny
+station, will see the far-off coasts, and haply catch some whiff
+of perfume from their shore, and see some glinting of a glory upon
+the shining turrets of `the city that hath foundations.' We have a
+present possession of all the promises of God; and whoever doubts
+their certitude, the man who knows himself a son of God by faith,
+and has experience of forgiveness and guidance and answered prayer
+and hopes whose `sweetness yieldeth proof that they were born for
+immortality,' \textit{knows} the things which others question and
+doubt.
+
+So live near Jesus Christ, and, holding fast by His hand, you may
+lift up your joyful `Amen' to every one of God's `Yeas.' For in
+Him we know the Father, in Him we know that we have the
+forgiveness of sins, in Him we know that God is near to bless and
+succour and guide, and in Him `we know that, though our earthly
+house were dissolved, we have a building of God.' Wherefore we are
+always confident; and when the Voice from Heaven says `Yea!' our
+choral shout may go up `Amen! Thou art the faithful and true
+witness.'
+
+\chapter{Anointed and Stablished}
+\markright{2 CORINTHIANS i. 21}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Now He which stablisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed
+us, is God.'---2 \textsc{Cor.} i. 21.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+The connection in which these words occur is a remarkable
+illustration of the Apostle's habit of looking at the most trivial
+things in the light of the highest truths. He had been obliged, as
+the context informs us, to abandon an intended visit to Corinth.
+The miserable crew of antagonists, who yelped at his heels all his
+life, seized this change of purpose as the occasion for a
+double-barrelled charge. They said he was either fickle and infirm
+of purpose, or insincere, and saying `Yea' with one side of his
+mouth and `Nay' with the other. He rebuts this accusation with
+apparently quite disproportionate vehemence and great solemnity.
+He points in the context to the faithfulness of God, to the firm
+Gospel which he had preached, to God's great `Yea!' as his answer.
+He says in effect, `How could I, with such a word burning in my
+heart, move in a region of equivocation and double-dealing; or how
+could I, whose whole being is saturated with so firm and stable a
+Gospel, be unreliable and fickle? The message must make the
+messenger like itself. Communion with a faithful God must make
+faith-keeping men; the certainties of God's ``Yea,'' and the
+certitudes of our ``Amen,'' must influence our characters.' And so
+to suppose that a man, influenced by Christianity, is a weak,
+double-dealing, unsteadfast man is a contradiction in terms. In
+the text he carries his argument a step further, and points, not
+only to the power of the Gospel to steady and confirm, but also to
+the fact that God Himself communicates to the believing soul
+Christian stability by the anointing which He bestows.
+
+So, then, we have in these words the declaration that inflexible,
+immovable steadfastness is a mark of a Christian, and that this
+Christian steadfastness, without which there is no Christianity
+worth the naming, is a direct gift from God Himself by means of
+that great anointing which He confers upon men. To that thought,
+in one or two of its aspects, I ask your attention.
+
+I. Notice the deep source of this Christian steadfastness.
+
+The language of the original, carefully considered, seems to me to
+bear this interpretation, that the `anointing' of the second
+clause is the means of the `establishing' of the first---that is
+to say, that God confers Christian steadfastness of character by
+the bestowment of the unction of His Divine Spirit.
+
+Now notice how deep Paul digs in order to get a foundation for a
+common virtue. There are many ways by which men may cultivate the
+tenacity and steadfastness of purpose which ought to mark us all.
+Much discipline may be brought to bear in order to secure that;
+but the text says that the deepest ground upon which it can be
+rested is nothing less divine and solemn than this, the actual
+communication to men, to feeble, vacillating, fluctuating wills,
+and treacherous, wayward, wandering hearts, of the strength and
+fixedness which are given by God's own Spirit.
+
+I suppose I need not remind you that from beginning to end of
+Scripture, `anointing' is taken as the symbol of the communication
+of a true divine influence. The oil poured on the head of prophet,
+priest, and king was but the expression of the communication to
+the recipient of a divine influence which fitted him as well as
+designated him, for the office that he filled. And although it is
+aside from my present purpose, I may just, in a sentence, point to
+the felicity of the emblem. The flowing oil smoothes the surface
+upon which it is spread, supples the limbs, and is nutritive and
+illuminating; thus giving an appropriate emblem of the secret,
+silent, quickening, nourishing, enlightening influences of that
+Spirit which God gives to all His sons.
+
+And inasmuch as here this oil of the Divine Spirit is stated as
+being the true ground and basis of Christian steadfastness, it is
+obvious that the anointing intended cannot be that of mere
+designation to, and inspiration for, apostolic or other office,
+but must be the universal possession of all Christian men and
+women. `Ye,' says another Apostle, speaking to the whole democracy
+of the Christian Church, and not to any little group of selected
+aristocrats therein---`ye have an unction from the Holy One,' and
+every man and woman who has a living grasp of the living Christ,
+receives from Him this great gift.
+
+Then, notice further that this anointing by a Divine Spirit, which
+is a true source of life to those that possess it, is derived
+from, and parallel with, Christ's anointing. We use the word
+`Christ' as a proper name, and forget what it means. The `Christ'
+is \textit{the Anointed One}. And do you think that it was a mere
+accident, or the result of a scanty vocabulary, which compelled
+the Apostle, in these two contiguous clauses, to use cognate words
+when he said:---`He that establisheth us with you in the
+\textit{Anointed}, and hath \textit{anointed} us, is God'? Did he
+not mean to say thereby, `Each of you in a very true sense, if you
+are a Christian, is a \textit{Christ}'? You, too, are anointed;
+you, too, are God's Messiahs. On you in a measure the same Spirit
+rests which dwelt without measure in Him. The chief of Christ's
+gifts to the Church is the gift of His own life. All His brethren
+are anointed with the oil that was poured upon His head, even as
+the oil upon Aaron's locks percolated to the very skirts of his
+garments. Being anointed with the anointing which was on Him, all
+His people may claim an identity of nature, may hope for an
+identity of destiny, and are bound to a prolongation of part of
+His function and a similarity of character. If He by that
+anointing was made Prophet, Priest, and King for the world, all
+His children partake of these offices in subordinate but real
+fashion, and are prophets to make God known to men, priests to
+offer up spiritual sacrifices, and kings at least over themselves,
+and, if they will, over a world which obeys and serves those that
+serve and love God. Ye are anointed---`Messiahs' and `Christs,' by
+derivation of the life of Jesus Christ.
+
+And if these things be true, it is plain enough how this divine
+unction, which is granted to all Christians, lies at the root of
+steadfastness.
+
+We talk a great deal about the gentleness of Christ; we cannot
+celebrate it too much, but we may forget that it is the gentleness
+of strength. We do not sufficiently mark the masculine features in
+that character, the tremendous tenacity of will, the inflexible
+fixedness of purpose, the irremovable constancy of obedience in
+the face of all temptations to the contrary. The figure that rises
+before us is that of the Christ yearning over weaklings far
+oftener than it is that of the Christ with knitted brow, and
+tightened lips, and far-off gazing eye, `steadfastly setting His
+face to go to Jerusalem,' and followed as He pressed up the rocky
+road from Jericho, by that wondering group, astonished at the
+rigidity of purpose that was stamped on His features. That Christ
+gives us His Spirit to make us tenacious, constant, righteously
+obstinate, inflexible in the pursuit of all that is lovely and of
+good report, like Himself. That Divine Spirit will cure the
+fickleness of our natures; for our wills are never fixed till they
+are fixed in obedience, and never free until they elect to serve
+Him. That Divine Spirit will cure the wandering of our hearts and
+bind us to Himself. It will lift us above the selfish and cowardly
+dependence on externals and surroundings, men and things, in which
+we are all tempted to live. We are all too like aneroid
+barometers, that go up and down with every variation of a foot or
+two in our level, but if we have the Spirit of Christ dwelling in
+us, it will cut the bonds that bind us to the world, and give us
+possession of a deeper love than can be sustained by, or is
+derived from, these superficial sources. The true possession of
+the Divine Spirit, if I might use such a metaphor, sets a man on
+an insulating stool, and all the currents that move round about
+him are powerless to reach him. If we have that Divine Spirit
+within us, it will give us an experience of the preciousness and
+the truth, the certitude and the sweetness, of Christ's Gospel,
+which will make it impossible that we should ever cast away the
+confidence which has such `recompense of reward.' No man will be
+surely bound to the truth and person of Christ with bonds that
+cannot be snapped, except he who in his heart has the knowledge of
+Him which is possession, and by the gift of the Divine Spirit is
+knit to Jesus Christ.
+
+So, dear friends, whilst the world is full of wise words about
+steadfastness, and exalts determination of character and fixity of
+purpose, rightly, as the basis of much good, our Gospel comes to
+us poor, light, thistledown creatures, and lets us see how we can
+be steadfast and settled by being fastened to a steadfast and
+settled Christ. When storms are raging they lash light articles on
+deck to holdfasts. Let us lash ourselves to the abiding Christ,
+and we, too, shall abide.
+
+II. In the next place, notice the aim or purpose of this Christian
+steadfastness.
+
+`He stablisheth us with you in Christ,' or as the original has it
+even more significantly, \textit{into} or `\textit{unto} Christ.'
+Now that seems to me to imply two things---first, that our
+steadfastness, made possible by our possession of that Divine
+Spirit, is steadfastness in our relations to Jesus Christ. We are
+established in reference or in regard to Him. In other words, what
+Paul here means is, first, a fixed conviction of the truth that He
+is the Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, and my
+Saviour. That is the first step. Men who are steadfast without
+their intellect guiding and settling the steadfastness are not
+steadfast, but obstinate and pigheaded. We are meant to be guided
+by our understandings, and no fixity is anything better than the
+immobility of a stone, unless it be based upon a distinct and
+whole-brained intellectual acceptance of Jesus Christ as the
+All-in-all for us, for life and death, for inward and outward
+being.
+
+Paul means, next, a steadfastness in regard to Christ in our trust
+and love. Surely if from Him there is for ever streaming out an
+unbroken flow of tenderness, there should be ever on our sides an
+equally unbroken opening of our hearts for the reception of His
+love, and an equally uninterrupted response to it in our grateful
+affection. There can be no more damning condemnation of the
+vacillations and fluctuations of Christian men's affections than the
+steadfastness of Christ's love to them. He loves ever; He is
+unalterable in the communication and effluence of His heart. Surely
+it is most fitting that we should be steadfast in our devotion and
+answering love to Him. And Paul means not only fixedness of
+intellectual conviction and continuity of loving response, but also
+habitual obedience, which is always ready to do His will.
+
+So we should answer His `Yea!' with our `Amen!' and having an
+unchanging Christ to rest upon, we should rest upon Him
+unchanging. The broken, fluctuating affections and trusts and
+obediences which mark so much of the average Christian life of
+this day are only too sad proofs of how scant our possession of
+that Spirit of steadfastness must be supposed to be. God's `Yea'
+is answered by our faltering `Amen'; God's truth is hesitatingly
+accepted; God's love is partially returned; God's work is
+slothfully and negligently done. `Be ye steadfast, unmovable,
+always abounding in the work of the Lord.'
+
+Another thought is suggested by these words---viz. that such
+steadfastness as we have been trying to describe has for its result
+a deeper penetration into Jesus Christ and a fuller possession of
+Him. The only way by which we can grow nearer and nearer to our Lord
+is by steadfastly keeping beside Him. You cannot get the spirit of a
+landscape unless you sit down and gaze, and let it soak into you.
+The cheap tripper never sees the lake. You cannot get to know a man
+until you summer and winter with him. No subject worth studying
+opens itself to the hasty glance. Was it not Sir Isaac Newton who
+used to say, `I have no genius, but I keep a subject before me'?
+`Abide in Me; as the branch cannot bear fruit except it abide in the
+vine, no more can ye except ye abide in Me.' Continuous, steadfast
+adhesion to Him is the condition of growing up into His likeness,
+and receiving more and more of His beauty into our waiting hearts.
+`Wait on the Lord; wait, I say, on the Lord.'
+
+III. Lastly, notice the very humble and commonplace sphere in
+which the Christian steadfastness manifests itself.
+
+It was nothing of more importance than that Paul had said he was
+going to Corinth, and did not, on which he brings all this array
+of great principles to bear. From which I gather just this
+thought, that the highest gifts of God's grace and the greatest
+truths of God's Word are meant to regulate the tiniest things in
+our daily life. It is no degradation to the lightning to have to
+carry messages. It is no profanation of the sun to gather its rays
+into a burning glass to light a kitchen fire with. And it is no
+unworthy use of the Divine Spirit that God gives to His children,
+to say it will keep a man from hasty and precipitate decisions as
+to little things in life, and from chopping and changing about,
+with a levity of purpose and without a sufficient reason. If our
+religion is not going to influence the trifles, what is it going
+to influence? Our life is made up of trifles, and if these are not
+its field, where is its field? You may be quite sure that, if your
+religion does not influence the little things, it will never
+influence the great ones. If it has not power enough to guide the
+horses when they are at a slow, sober walk, what do you think it
+will do when they are at a gallop and plunging? `He that is
+faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.' So let
+us see to two things---first, that all our religion is worked into
+our life, for only so much of it as is so inwrought is our
+religion---and, second, that all our life is brought under the
+sway of motives derived from our religion: for only in proportion
+as it is, will it be pure and good.
+
+And as regards this special virtue and prime quality of
+steadfastness and fixedness of purpose, you can do no good in the
+world without it. Unless a man can hold his own, and turn an
+obstinate negative to the temptations that lie thick about him, he
+will never come to any good at all, either in this life or in the
+next. The basis of all excellence is a wholesome disregard of
+externals, and the cultivation of a strong self-reliant and
+self-centred, because God-trusting and Christ-centred, will. And I
+tell you, especially you young men and women, if you want to do or
+be anything worth doing or being, you must try to get your natures
+hardened into being `steadfast, unmovable.' There is only one
+infallible way of doing it, and that is to let the `strong Son of
+God' live in you, and in Him to find your strength for resistance,
+your strength for obedience, your strength for submission. `I have
+set the Lord always before me; because He is at my right hand, I
+shall not be moved.'
+
+There are two types of men in the world. The one has his emblem in
+the chaff, rootless, with no hold, swept out of the
+threshing-floor by every gust of wind. That the picture of many
+whose principles lie at the mercy of the babble of tongues round
+about them, whose rectitude goes at a puff of temptation, like the
+smoke out of a chimney when the wind blows; who have no will for
+what is good, but live as it happens. The other type of man has
+his emblem in the tree, rooted deep, and therefore rising high,
+with its roots going as far underground as its branches spread in
+the blue, and therefore green of leaf and rich of fruit `We are
+made partakers of Christ if we hold fast the beginning of our
+confidence, steadfast until the end.'
+
+\chapter{Seal and Earnest}
+\markright{2 CORINTHIANS i. 23}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in
+our hearts.'---2 \textsc{Cor.} i. 23.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+There are three strong metaphors in this and the preceding
+verse---`a\-noint\-ing,' `sealing,' and `giving the earnest'---all
+of which find their reality in the same divine act. These three
+metaphors all refer to the same subject, and what that subject is
+is sufficiently explained in the last of them. The `earnest'
+consists of `the Spirit in our hearts,' and the same explanation
+might have been appended to both the preceding clauses, for the
+`anointing' is the anointing of the Spirit, and the `seal' is the
+seal of the Spirit. Further, these three metaphors all refer to
+one and the same act. They are not three things, but three aspects
+of one thing, just as a sunbeam might be regarded either as the
+source of warmth, or of light, or of chemical action. So the one
+gift of the one Spirit, `anoints,' `seals,' and is the `earnest.'
+Further, these three metaphors all declare a universal prerogative
+of Christians. Every man that loves Jesus Christ has the Spirit in
+the measure of his faith,' and if any man have not the Spirit of
+Christ he is none of His.'
+
+I. Note the first metaphor in the text---the `seal' of the Spirit.
+
+A seal is impressed upon a recipient material made soft by warmth,
+in order to leave there a copy of itself. Now it is not fanciful,
+nor riding a metaphor to death, when I dwell upon these features
+of the emblem in order to suggest their analogies in Christian
+life. The Spirit of God comes into our spirits, and by gentle
+contact impresses upon the material, which was intractable until
+it was melted by the genial warmth of faith and love, the likeness
+of Himself, but yet so as that prominences correspond to the
+hollows, and what is in relief in the one is sunk in the other.
+Expand that general statement for a moment or two.
+
+The effect of all the divine indwelling, which is the
+characteristic gift of Christ to every Christian soul, is to mould
+the recipient into the image of the divine inhabitant. There is in
+the human spirit---such are its dignity amidst its ruins, and its
+nobility shining through its degradation---a capacity of receiving
+that image of God which consists not only in voluntary and
+intelligent action and the consciousness of personal being, but in
+the love of the things that are fair, and in righteousness, and
+true holiness. His Spirit, entering into a heart, will make that
+heart wise with its own wisdom, strong with some infusion of its
+own strength, gracious with some drops of its own grace, gentle
+with some softening from its own gentleness, holy with some purity
+reflected from its own transcendent whiteness. The Spirit, which
+is life, moulds the heart into which it enters to a kindred, and,
+therefore, similar life.
+
+There are, however, characteristics in this `seal' of the Spirit
+which are not so much copies as correspondences. That is to say,
+just as what is convex in the seal is concave in the impression, and
+\textit{vice versâ}, so, when that Divine Spirit comes into our
+spirits, its promises will excite faith, its gifts will breed
+desire; to every bestowment there will answer an opening
+receptivity. Recipient love will correspond to the love that longs
+to dispense, the sense of need to the divine fulness and
+sufficiency, emptiness to abundance, prayers to promises; the cry
+`Abba! Father'! the yearning consciousness of sonship, to the word
+`Thou art My Son'; and the upward eye of aspiration and petition,
+and necessity, and waiting, to the downward glance of love bestowing
+itself. The open heart answers to the extended hand, and the seal
+which God's Spirit impresses upon the heart that is submitted to it,
+has the two-fold character of resemblance in moral nature and
+righteousness, and of correspondence as regards the mysteries of the
+converse between the recipient man and the giving God.
+
+Then, mark that the material is made capable of receiving the
+stamp, because it is warmed and softened. That is to say, faith
+must prepare the heart for the sanctifying indwelling of that
+Divine Spirit. The hard wax may be struck with the seal, but it
+leaves no trace. God does not do with man as the coiner does with
+his blanks, put them cold into a press, and by violence from
+without stamp an image upon them, but He does as men do with a
+seal, warms the wax first, and then, with a gentle, firm touch,
+leaves the likeness there. So, brother! learn this lesson: if you
+wish to be good, lie under the contact of the Spirit of
+righteousness, and see that your heart is warm.
+
+Still further, note that this aggregate of Christian character, in
+likeness and correspondence, is the true sign that we belong to
+God. The seal is the mark of ownership, is it not? Where the broad
+arrow has been impressed, everybody knows that that is royal
+property. And so this seal of God's Divine Spirit, in its effects
+upon my character, is the one token to myself and to other people
+that I belong to God, and that He belongs to me. Or, to put it
+into plain English, the best reason for any man's being regarded
+as a Christian is his possession of the likeness and
+correspondence to God which that Divine Spirit gives. Likeness and
+correspondence, I say, for the one class of results is the more
+open for the observation of the world, and the other class is of
+the more value for ourselves. I believe that Christian people
+ought to have, and are meant by that Divine Spirit dwelling in
+them to have, a consciousness that they are Christians and God's
+children, for their own peace and rest and joy. But you cannot use
+that in demonstration to other people; you may be as sure of it as
+you will, in your inmost hearts, but it is no sign to anybody
+else. And, on the other hand, there may be much of outward virtue
+and beauty of character which may lead other people to say about a
+man: `\textit{That} is a good Christian man, at any rate,' and yet
+there may be in the heart an all but absolute absence of any
+joyful assurance that we are Christ's, and that He belongs to us.
+So the two facts must go together. Correspondence, the spirit of
+sonship which meets His taking us as sons, the faith which clasps
+the promise, the reception which welcomes bestowment, must be
+stamped upon the inward life. For the outward life there must be
+the manifest impress of righteousness upon my actions, if there is
+to be any real seal and token that I belong to Him. God writes His
+own name upon the men that are His. All their goodness, their
+gentleness, patience, hatred of evil, energy and strenuousness in
+service, submission in suffering, with whatsoever other radiance
+of human virtue may belong to them, are really `His mark!'
+
+There is no other worth talking about, and to you Christian men I
+come and say, Be very sure that your professions of inward
+communion and happy consciousness that you are Christ's are
+verified to yourself and to others by a plain outward life of
+righteousness like the Lord's. Have you got that seal stamped upon
+your lives, like the hall-mark that says, `This is genuine silver,
+and no plated Brummagem stuff'? Have you got that seal of a
+visible righteousness and every-day purity to confirm your
+assertion that you belong to Christ? Is it woven into the whole
+length of your being, like the scarlet thread that is spun into
+every Admiralty cable as a sign that it is Crown property? God's
+seal, visible to me and to nobody else, is my consciousness that I
+am His; but that consciousness is vindicated and delivered from
+the possibility of illusion or hypocrisy, only when it is checked
+and fortified by the outward evidence of the holy life which the
+Spirit of God has wrought.
+
+Further, this sealing, which is thus the token of God's ownership,
+is also the pledge of security. A seal is stamped in order that
+there may be no tampering with what it seals; that it may be kept
+safe from all assaults, thieves, and violence. And in the metaphor
+of our text there is included this thought, too, which is also of an
+intensely practical nature. For it just comes to this---our true
+guarantee that we shall come at last into the sweet security and
+safety of the perfect state is present likeness to the indwelling
+Spirit and present reception of divine grace. The seal is the pledge
+of security, just because it is the mark of ownership. When, by
+God's Spirit dwelling in us, we are led to love the things that are
+fair, and to long after more possession of whatever things are of
+good report, that is like God's hoisting His flag upon a
+newly-annexed territory. And is He going to be so careless in the
+preservation of His property as that He will allow that which is
+thus acquired to slip away from Him? Does He account us as of so
+small value as to hold us with so slack a hand? But no man has a
+right to rest on the assurance of God's saving him into the heavenly
+kingdom, unless He is saving him at this moment from the devil and
+his own evil heart. And, therefore, I say the Christian character,
+in its outward manifestations and in its sweet inward secrets of
+communion, is the guarantee that we shall not fall. Rest upon Him,
+and He will hold you up. We are `kept by the power of God unto
+salvation,' and that power keeps us and that final salvation becomes
+ours, `through faith.'
+
+II. Now, secondly, turn to the other emblem, that `earnest' which
+consists in like manner `of the Spirit.'
+
+The `earnest,' of course, is a small portion of purchase-money, or
+wages, or contract-money, which is given at the making of a
+bargain, as an assurance that the whole amount will be paid in due
+time. And, says the Apostle, this seal is also an earnest. It not
+only makes certain God's ownership and guarantees the security of
+those on whom it is impressed, but it also points onwards to the
+future, and at once guarantees that, and to a large extent reveals
+the nature of it. So, then, we have here two thoughts on which I
+touch.
+
+The Christian character and experience are the earnest of the
+inheritance, in the sense of being its guarantee, inasmuch as the
+experiences of the Christian life here are plainly immortal. The
+Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the objective and
+external proof of a future life. The facts of the Christian life,
+its aspirations, its communion, its clasp of God as its very own,
+are the subjective and inward proofs of a future life. As a matter
+of fact, if you will take the Old Testament, you will see that the
+highest summits in it, to which the hope of immortality soared,
+spring directly from the experience of deep and blessed communion
+with the living God. When the Psalmist said `Thou wilt not leave
+my soul in \textit{Sheol}; neither wilt Thou suffer Thy Holy One
+to see corruption,' he was speaking a conviction that had been
+floated into his mind on the crest of a great wave of religious
+enjoyment and communion. And, in like manner, when the other
+Psalmist said, `Thou art the strength of my heart, and my portion
+for ever,' he was speaking of the glimpse that he had got of the
+land that was very far off, from the height which he had climbed
+on the Mount of fellowship with God. And for us, I suppose that
+the same experience holds good. Howsoever much we may say that we
+believe in a future life and in a heaven, we really grasp them as
+facts that will be true about ourselves, in the proportion in
+which we are living here in direct contact and communion with God.
+The conviction of immortality is the distinct and direct result of
+the present enjoyment of communion with Him, and it is a
+reasonable result. No man who has known what it is to turn himself
+to God with a glow of humble love, and to feel that he is not
+turning his face to vacuity, but to a Face that looks on him with
+love, can believe that anything can ever come to destroy that
+communion. What have faith, love, aspiration, resignation,
+fellowship with God, to do with death? They cannot be cut through
+with the stroke that destroys physical life, any more than you can
+divide a sunbeam with a sword. It unites again, and the impotent
+edge passes through and has effected nothing. Death can shear
+asunder many bonds, but that invisible bond that unites the soul
+to God is of adamant, against which his scythe is in vain. Death
+is the grim porter that opens the door of a dark hole and herds us
+into it as sheep are driven into a slaughter-house. But to those
+who have learned what it is to lay a trusting hand in God's hand,
+the grim porter is turned into the gentle damsel, who keeps the
+door, and opens it for light and warmth and safety to the hunted
+prisoner that has escaped from the dungeon of life. Death cannot
+touch communion, and the consciousness of communion with God is
+the earnest of the inheritance.
+
+It is so for another reason also. All the results of the Divine
+Spirit's sealing of the soul are manifestly incomplete, and as
+manifestly tend towards completeness. The engine is clearly
+working now at half-speed. It is obviously capable of much higher
+pressure than it is going at now. Those powers in the Christian
+man can plainly do a great deal more than they ever have done
+here, and are meant to do a great deal more. Is this imperfect
+Christianity of ours, our little faith so soon shattered, our
+little love so quickly disproved, our faltering resolutions, our
+lame performances, our earthward cleavings---are these things all
+that Jesus Christ's bitter agony was for, and all that a Divine
+Spirit is able to make of us? Manifestly, here is but a segment of
+the circle, in heaven is the perfect round; and the imperfections,
+so far as life is concerned, in the work of so obviously divine an
+Agent, cry aloud for a region where tendency shall become result,
+and all that it was possible for Him to make us we shall become.
+The road evidently leads upwards, and round that sharp corner
+where the black rocks come so near each other and our eyesight
+cannot travel, we may be sure it goes steadily up still to the top
+of the pass, until it reaches `the shining table-lands whereof our
+God Himself is Sun and Moon,' and brings us all to the city set on
+a hill.
+
+And, further, that divine seal is the earnest, inasmuch as itself
+is part of the whole. The truest and the loftiest conception that
+we can form of heaven is as being the perfecting of the religious
+experience of earth. The shilling or two, given to the servant in
+old-fashioned days, when he was hired, is of the same currency as
+the balance that he is to get when the year's work is done. The
+small payment to-day comes out of the same purse, and is coined
+out of the same specie, and is part of the same currency of the
+same kingdom, as what we get when we go yonder and count the
+endless riches to which we have fallen heirs at last. You have but
+to take the faith, the love, the obedience, the communion of the
+highest moments of the Christian life on earth, and free them from
+all their limitations, subtract from them all their imperfections,
+multiply them to their superlative possibility, and endow them
+with a continual power of growth, and stretch them out to absolute
+eternity, and you get heaven. The earnest is of a piece with the
+inheritance.
+
+So, dear brethren, here is a gift offered for us all, a gift which
+our feebleness sorely needs, a gift for every timid nature, for
+every weak will, for every man, woman, and child beset with snares
+and fighting with heavy tasks, the offer of a reinforcement as
+real and as sure to bring victory as when, on that day when the
+fate of Europe was determined, after long hours of conflict, the
+Prussian bugles blew, and the English commander knew that (with
+the fresh troops that came on the field) victory was made certain.
+So you and I may have in our hearts the Spirit of God, the spirit
+of strength, the spirit of love and of a sound mind, the spirit of
+adoption, the spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge
+of Him, to enlighten our darkness, to bind our hearts to Him, to
+quicken and energise our souls, to make the weakest among us
+strong, and the strong as an angel of God. And the condition on
+which we may get it is this simple one which the Apostle lays
+down; `\textit{After that ye believed}, ye were sealed with that
+Holy Spirit of promise, which is the earnest of our inheritance.'
+The Christ, who is the Lord and Giver of the Spirit, has shown us
+how its blessed influences may be ours when, on the great day of
+the feast, He stood and cried with a voice that echoes across the
+centuries, and is meant for each of us, `If any man thirsts, let
+him come unto Me and drink. He that believeth in Me, out of his
+belly shall flow rivers of living water. This spake He of the
+Spirit which they that believe or Him should receive.'
+
+\chapter{The Triumphal Procession}
+\markright{2 CORINTHIANS ii. 14}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Thanks be unto God, which always leadeth us in triumph in Christ
+and maketh manifest through us the savour of His knowledge in
+every place.'---2 \textsc{Cor.} ii. 14 (R.~V.)
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+I suppose most of us have some knowledge of what a Roman Triumph
+was, and can picture to ourselves the long procession, the
+victorious general in his chariot with its white horses, the
+laurelled soldiers, the sullen captives, with suppressed hate
+flashing in their sunken eyes, the wreathing clouds of incense that
+went up into the blue sky, and the shouting multitude of spectators.
+That is the picture in the Apostle's mind here. The Revised Version
+correctly alters the translation into `Thanks unto God which always
+\textit{leadeth us in} triumph in Christ.'
+
+Paul thinks of himself and of his coadjutors in Christian work as
+being conquered captives, made to follow their Conqueror and to
+swell His triumph. He is thankful to be so overcome. What was
+deepest degradation is to him supreme honour. Curses in many a
+strange tongue would break from the lips of the prisoners who had
+to follow the general's victorious chariot. But from Paul's lips
+comes irrepressible praise; he joins in the shout of acclamation
+to the Conqueror.
+
+And then he passes on to another of the parts of the ceremonial.
+As the wreathing incense appealed at once to two senses, and was
+visible in its curling clouds of smoke, and likewise fragrant to
+the nostrils, so says Paul, with a singular combination of
+expression, `He maketh \textit{manifest},' that is visible, the
+\textit{savour} of His knowledge. From a heart kindled by the
+flame of the divine love there will go up the odour of a holy life
+visible and fragrant, sweet and fair.
+
+And thus all Christians, and not Christian workers only in the
+narrower sense of the word, who may be doing evangelistic work,
+have set before them in these great words the very ideal and
+secret of their lives.
+
+There are three things here, on each of which I touch as belonging
+to the true notion of a Christian life---the conquered captive;
+that captive partaking in the triumph of his Conqueror; and the
+conquered captive led as a trophy and a witness to the Conqueror's
+power. These three things, I think, explain the Apostle's thoughts
+here. Let me deal with them now.
+
+I. First then, let us look at that thought of all Christians being
+in the truest sense conquered captives, bound to the chariot
+wheels of One who has overcome them.
+
+The image implies a prior state of hostility and alienation. Now,
+do not let us exaggerate, let us take Paul's own experience. He is
+speaking about himself here; he is not talking doctrine, he is
+giving us autobiography, and he says, `I was an enemy, and I have
+been conquered.'
+
+What sort of an enemy was he? Well! He says that before he became
+a Christian he lived a pure, virtuous, respectable life. He was a
+man `as touching the righteousness which is in the law,
+blameless.' Observant of all relative duties, sober, temperate,
+chaste; no man could say a word against him; he knew nothing
+against himself. His conscience acquitted him of wrong: `I thought
+I ought to do many things,' as I did them. And yet, looking back
+from his present point of view upon a life thus adorned with many
+virtues, pure from all manifest corruption, to a large extent
+regulated by conscientious and religious motives of a kind, he
+says, `Notwithstanding all that, I was an enemy.' Why? Because the
+retrospect let him see that his life was barren of the deepest
+faith and the purest love. And so I come to some of my friends
+here now, and I say to you, `Change the name, and the story is
+true about you,' respectable people, who are trying to live pure
+and righteous lives, doing all duties that present themselves to
+you with a very tolerable measure of completeness and abominating
+and trying to keep yourselves from the things that your
+consciences tell you are wrong, yet needing to be conquered, in
+the deepest recesses of your wills and your hearts, before you
+become the true subjects of the true King. I do not want to
+exaggerate, nor to say of the ordinary run of people who listen to
+us preachers, that they commit manifest sins, `gross as a
+mountain, open, palpable.' Some of you do, no doubt, for, in every
+hundred people, there are always some whose lives are foul and
+whose memories are stained and horrible; but the run of you are
+not like that. And yet I ask you, has your will been bowed and
+broken, and your heart overcome and conquered by this mighty
+Prince, the Prince of Peace, the Prince of Life? Unless it has,
+for all your righteousness and respectability, for all your
+outward religion and real religiousness of a sort, you are still
+hostile and rebellious, in your inmost hearts. That is the basis
+of the representation of my text.
+
+What else does it suggest? It suggests the wonderful struggle and
+victory of weaponless love. As was said about the first Christian
+emperor, so it may be said about the great Emperor in the heavens,
+`\textit{In hoc signo vinces!}' By this sign thou shalt conquer.
+For His only weapon is the Cross of His Son, and He fights only by
+the manifestation of infinite love, sacrifice, suffering, and
+pity. He conquers as the sun conquers the thick-ribbed ice by
+raying down its heat upon it, and melting it into sweet water. So
+God in Christ fights against the mountains of man's cold, hard
+sinfulness and alienation, and by the warmth of His own radiation
+turns them all into rivers that flow in love and praise. He
+conquers simply by forbearance and pity and love.
+
+And what more does this first part of my text say to us? It tells
+us, too, of the true submission of the conquered captive; how we
+are conquered when we perceive and receive His love; how there is
+nothing else needed to win us all for Him except only that we
+shall recognise His great love to us.
+
+This picture of the triumph comes with a solemn appeal and
+commandment to every one of us professing Christians. Think of
+these men, dragged at the conqueror's chariot-wheels, abject, with
+their weapons broken, with their resistance quelled, chained,
+yoked, haled away from their own land, dependant for life or death
+on the caprice of the general who rode before them there. It is a
+picture of what you Christian men and women are bound to be if you
+believe that God in Christ has loved you as we have been saying
+that He does. For abject submission, unconditional surrender, the
+yielding up of our whole will to Him, the yielding of all our
+possessions as His vassals---these are the duties that are
+correspondent to the facts of the case.
+
+If we are thus won by infinite love, and not our own, but bought
+with a price, no conquered king, dragged at an emperor's
+chariot-wheels, was ever half as absolutely and abjectly bound to
+be his slave, and to live or die by his breath, as you are bound
+to your Master. You are Christians in the measure in which you are
+the captives of His spear and of His bow; in the measure in which
+you hold your territories as vassal kings, in the measure in which
+you say, stretching out your willing hands for the fetters, `Lord!
+here am I, do with me as Thou wilt.' `I am not mine own; be Thou
+my will, my Emperor, my Commander, my all.' Loyola used to say, as
+the law of his order, that every man that became a member of the
+Society of Jesus was to be like as a staff in a man's hand, or
+like as a corpse. It was a blasphemous and wicked claim, but it is
+but a poor fragmentary statement of the truth about those of us
+who enter the real Society of Jesus, and put ourselves in His
+hands to be wielded as His staff and His rod, and submit ourselves
+to Him, not as a corpse, but yield yourselves to our Christ `as
+those that are alive from the dead.'
+
+II. Now we have here, as part of the ideal of the Christian life,
+the conquered captives partaking in the triumph of their general.
+
+Two groups made up the triumphal procession---the one that of the
+soldiers who had fought for, the other that of the prisoners who
+had fought against, the leader. And some commentators are inclined
+to believe that the Apostle is here thinking of himself and his
+fellows as belonging to the conquering army, and not to the
+conquered enemy. That seems to me to be less probable and in
+accordance with the whole image than the explanation which I have
+adopted. But be that as it may, it suggests to us this thought,
+that in the deepest reality in that Christian life of which all
+this metaphor is but the expression, they who are conquered foes
+become conquering allies. Or, to put it into other words---to be
+triumphed over by Christ is to triumph with Christ. And the praise
+which breaks from the Apostle's lips suggests the same idea. He
+pours out his thanks for that which he recognises as being no
+degradation but an honour, and a participation in his Conqueror's
+triumph.
+
+We may illustrate that thought, that to be triumphed over by
+Christ is to triumph with Christ, by such considerations as these.
+This submission of which I have been speaking, abject and
+unconditional, extending to life and death, this submission and
+captivity is but another name for liberty. The man who is
+absolutely dependent upon Jesus Christ is absolutely independent
+of everything and everybody besides, himself included. That is to
+say, to be His slave is to be everybody else's master, and when we
+bow ourselves to Him, and take upon us the chains of glad
+obedience, and life-deep as well as life-long consecration, then
+He breaks off all other chains from our hands, and will not suffer
+that any others should have a share with Him in the possession of
+His servant. If you are His servants you are free from all
+besides; if you give yourselves up to Jesus Christ, in the measure
+in which you give yourselves up to Him, you will be set at liberty
+from the worst of all slaveries, that is the slavery of your own
+will and your own weakness, and your own tastes and fancies. You
+will be set at liberty from dependence upon men, from thinking
+about their opinion. You will be set at liberty from your
+dependence upon externals, from feeling as if you could not live
+unless you had this, that, or the other person or thing. You will
+be emancipated from fears and hopes which torture the men who
+strike their roots no deeper than this visible film of time which
+floats upon the surface of the great, invisible abyss of Eternity.
+If you have Christ for your Master you will be the masters of the
+world, and of time and sense and men and all besides; and so,
+being triumphed over by Him, you will share in His triumph.
+
+And again, we may illustrate the same principle in yet another
+way. Such absolute and entire submission of will and love as I
+have been speaking about is the highest honour of a man. It was a
+degradation to be dragged at the chariot-wheels of conquering
+general, emperor, or consul---it broke the heart of many a
+barbarian king, and led some of them to suicide rather than face
+the degradation. It is a degradation to submit ourselves, even as
+much as many of us do, to the domination of human authorities, or
+to depend upon men as much as many of us do for our completeness
+and our satisfaction. But it is the highest ennobling of humanity
+that it shall lay itself down at Christ's feet, and let Him put
+His foot upon its neck. It is the exaltation of human nature to
+submit to Christ. The true nobility are those that `come over with
+the Conqueror.' When we yield ourselves to Him, and let Him be our
+King, then the patent of nobility is given to us, and we are
+lifted in the scale of being. All our powers and faculties are
+heightened in their exercise, and made more blessed in their
+employment, because we have bowed ourselves to His control. And so
+to be triumphed over by Christ is to triumph with Christ.
+
+And the same thought may be yet further illustrated. That
+submission which I have been speaking about so unites us to our
+Lord that we share in all that belongs to Him and thus partake in
+His triumph. If in will and heart we have yielded ourselves to
+Him, he that is thus joined to the Lord is one spirit, and all
+`mine is Thine, and all Thine is mine.' He is the Heir of all
+things, and all things of which He is the Heir are our possession.
+`All things are yours, and ye are Christ's.' Thus His dominion is
+the dominion of all that love Him, and His heritage is the
+heritage of all those that have joined themselves to Him; and no
+sparkle of the glory that falls upon His head but is reflected on
+the heads of His servants. The `many crowns' that He wears are the
+crowns with which He crowns His followers.
+
+Thus, my brother, to be overcome by God is to overcome the world,
+to be triumphed over by Christ is to share in His triumph; and he
+over whom Incarnate Love wins the victory, like the patriarch of
+old in his mystical struggle, conquers in the hour of surrender;
+and to him it is said: `As a prince thou hast power with God and
+hast prevailed.'
+
+III. Lastly, a further picture of the ideal of the Christian life
+is set before us here in the thought of these conquered captives
+being led as the trophies and the witnesses of His overcoming
+power.
+
+That idea is suggested by both halves of our verse. Both the
+emblem of the Apostle as marching in the triumphal procession, and
+the emblem of the Apostle as yielding from his burning heart the
+fragrant visible odour of the ascending incense, convey the same
+idea, viz. that one great purpose which Jesus Christ has in
+conquering men for Himself, and binding them to His chariot
+wheels, is that from them may go forth the witness of His power
+and the knowledge of His name.
+
+That opens very wide subjects for our consideration which I can
+only very briefly touch upon. Let me just for an instant dwell
+upon some of them. First, the fact that Jesus Christ, by His Cross
+and Passion, is able to conquer men's wills, and to bind men's
+hearts to Him, is the highest proof of His power. It is an
+entirely unique thing in the history of the world. There is
+nothing the least like it anywhere else. The passionate attachment
+which this dead Galilean peasant is able to evoke in the hearts of
+people all these centuries after His death, is an unheard of and
+an unparalleled thing. All other teachers `serve their generations
+by the will of God,' and then their names become speedily less and
+less powerful, and thicker and thicker mists of oblivion wrap them
+round until they disappear. But time has no power over Christ's
+influence. The bond which binds you and me to Him nineteen
+centuries after His death is the very same in quality as, and in
+degree is often far deeper and stronger than, the bond which
+united to Him the men that had seen Him. It stands as an unique
+fact in the history of the world, that from Christ of Nazareth
+there rays out through all the ages the spiritual power which
+absolutely takes possession of men, dominates them and turns them
+into His organs and instruments. This generation prides itself
+upon testing all things by an utilitarian test, and about every
+system says:---`Well, let us see it working.' And I do not think
+that Christianity need shrink from the test. With all its
+imperfections, the long procession of holy men and women who, for
+nineteen centuries, have been marching through history, owning
+Christ as their Conqueror, and ascribing all their goodness to
+Him, is a witness to His power to sway and to satisfy men, the
+force of whose testimony it is hard to overthrow. And I would like
+to ask the simple question: Will any system of belief or of no
+belief, except the faith in Christ's atoning sacrifice, do the
+like for men? He leads through the world the train of His
+captives, the evidence of His conquests.
+
+And then, further, let me remind you that out of this
+representation there comes a very stimulating and solemn
+suggestion of duty for us Christian people. We are bound to live,
+setting forth whose we are, and what He has done for us. Just as
+the triumphal procession took its path up the Appian Way and along
+the side of the Forum to the altar of the Capitol, wreathed about
+by curling clouds of fragrant incense, so we should march through
+the world encompassed by the sweet and fragrant odour of His name,
+witnessing for Him by word, witnessing for Him by character,
+speaking for Him and living like Him, showing in our life that He
+rules us, and professing by our words that He does; and so should
+manifest His power.
+
+Still further, Paul's thanksgiving teaches us that we should be
+thankful for all opportunities of doing such work. Christian men
+and women often grudge their services and grudge their money, and
+feel as if the necessities for doing Christian work in the world
+were rather a burden than an honour. This man's generous heart was
+so full of love to his Prince that it glowed with thankfulness at
+the thought that Christ had let him do such things for Him. And He
+lets you do them if you will.
+
+So, dear friends, it comes to be a very solemn question for us.
+What part are we playing in that great triumphal procession? We
+are all of us marching at His chariot wheels, whether we know it
+or not. But there were two sets of people in the old triumph.
+There were those who were conquered by force and unconquered in
+heart, and out of their eyes gleamed unquenchable malice and
+hatred, though their weapons were broken and their arms fettered.
+And there were those who, having shared in the commander's fight,
+shared in his triumph and rejoiced in his rule. And when the
+procession reached the gate of the temple, some, at any rate, of
+the former class were put to death before the gates. I pray you to
+remember that if we are dragged after Him reluctantly, the word
+will come: `These, mine enemies, which would not that I should
+reign over them, bring hither and slay them before Me.' Whereas,
+on the other hand, for those who have yielded heart and soul to
+Him in love and submission born of the reception of His great
+love, the blessed word will come: `He that overcometh shall
+inherit all things.' Which of the two parts of the procession do
+you belong to, my friend? Make your choice where you shall march,
+and whether you will be His loyal allies and soldiers who share in
+His triumph, or His enemies, who, overcome by His power, are not
+melted by His love. The one live, the other perish.
+
+\chapter{Transformation by Beholding}
+\markright{2 CORINTHIANS iii. 18}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the
+Lord, are changed into the same image.'---2 \textsc{Cor.} iii. 18.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+This whole section of the Epistle in which our text occurs is a
+remarkable instance of the fervid richness of the Apostle's mind,
+which acquires force by motion, and, like a chariot-wheel, catches
+fire as it revolves. One of the most obvious peculiarities of his
+style is his habit of `going off at a word.' Each thought is, as
+it were, barbed all round, and catches and draws into sight a
+multitude of others, but slightly related to the main purpose in
+hand. And this characteristic gives at first sight an appearance
+of confusion to his writings. But it is not confusion, it is
+richness. The luxuriant underwood which this fertile soil bears,
+as some tropical forest, does not choke the great trees, though it
+drapes them.
+
+Paul's immediate purpose seems to be to illustrate the frank
+openness which ought to mark the ministry of Christianity. He does
+this by reference to the veil which Moses wore when he came forth
+from talking with God. There, he says in effect, we have a picture
+of the Old Dispensation---a partial revelation, gleaming through a
+veil, flashing through symbols, expressed here in a rite, there in
+a type, there again in an obscure prophecy, but never or scarcely
+ever fronting the world with an unveiled face and the light of God
+shining clear from it. Christianity is, and Christian teachers
+ought to be, the opposite of all this. It has, and they are to
+have, no esoteric doctrines, no hints where plain speech is
+possible, no reserve, no use of symbols and ceremonies to overlay
+truth, but an intelligible revelation in words and deeds, to men's
+understandings. It and they are plentifully to declare the thing
+as it is.
+
+But he gets far beyond this point in his uses of his illustration.
+It opens out into a series of contrasts between the two
+revelations. The veiled Moses represents the clouded revelation of
+old. The vanishing gleam on his face recalls the fading glories of
+that which was abolished; and then, by a quick turn of
+association, Paul thinks of the veiled readers in the synagogues,
+copies, as it were, of the lawgiver with the shrouded countenance;
+only too significant images of the souls obscured by prejudice and
+obstinate unbelief, with which Israel trifles over the
+uncomprehended letter of the old law.
+
+The contrast to all this lies in our text. Judaism had the one
+lawgiver who beheld God, while the people tarried below.
+Christianity leads us all, to the mount of vision, and lets the
+lowliest pass through the fences, and go up where the blazing
+glory is seen. Moses veiled the face that shone with the
+irradiation of Deity. We with unveiled face are to shine among
+men. He had a momentary gleam, a transient brightness; we have a
+perpetual light. Moses' face shone, but the lustre was but skin
+deep. But the light that we have is inward, and works
+transformation into its own likeness.
+
+So there is here set forth the very loftiest conception of the
+Christian life as direct vision, universal, manifest to men,
+permanent, transforming.
+
+I. Note then, first, that the Christian life is a life of
+contemplating and reflecting Christ.
+
+It is a question whether the single word rendered in our version
+`beholding as in a glass,' means that, or `reflecting as a glass
+does.' The latter seems more in accordance with the requirements
+of the context, and with the truth of the matter in hand. Unless
+we bring in the notion of reflected lustre, we do not get any
+parallel with the case of Moses. Looking into a glass does not in
+the least correspond with the allusion, which gave occasion to the
+whole section, to the glory of God smiting him on the face, till
+the reflected lustre with which it glowed became dazzling, and
+needed to be hid. And again, if Paul is here describing Christian
+vision of God as only indirect, as in a mirror, then that would be
+a point of inferiority in us as compared with Moses, who saw Him
+face to face. But the whole tone of the context prepares us to
+expect a setting forth of the particulars in which the Christian
+attitude towards the manifested God is above the Jewish. So, on
+the whole, it seems better to suppose that Paul meant `mirroring,'
+than `seeing in a mirror.'
+
+But, whatever be the exact force of the word, the thing intended
+includes both acts. There is no reflection of the light without a
+previous reception of the light. In bodily sight, the eye is a
+mirror, and there is no sight without an image of the thing
+perceived being formed in the perceiving eye. In spiritual sight,
+the soul which beholds is a mirror, and at once beholds and
+reflects. Thus, then, we may say that we have in our text the
+Christian life described as one of contemplation and manifestation
+of the light of God.
+
+The great truth of a direct, unimpeded vision, as belonging to
+Christian men on earth, sounds strange to many of us. `That cannot
+be,' you say; `does not Paul himself teach that we see through a
+glass darkly? Do we not walk by faith and not by sight? ``No man
+hath seen God at any time, nor can see Him''; and besides that
+absolute impossibility, have we not veils of flesh and sense, to
+say nothing of the covering of sin ``spread over the face of all
+nations,'' which hide from us even so much of the eternal light as
+His servants above behold, who see His face and bear His name on
+their foreheads?'
+
+But these apparent difficulties drop away when we take into
+account two things---first, the object of vision, and second, the
+real nature of the vision itself.
+
+As to the former, who is the Lord whose glory we receive on our
+unveiled faces? He is Jesus Christ. Here, as in the overwhelming
+majority of instances where \textit{Lord} occurs in the New
+Testament, it is the name of the manifested God our brother. The
+glory which we behold and give back is not the incomprehensible,
+incommunicable lustre of the absolute divine perfectness, but that
+glory which, as John says, we beheld in Him who tabernacled with
+us, full of grace and truth; the glory which was manifested in
+loving, pitying words and loveliness of perfect deeds; the glory
+of the will resigned to God, and of God dwelling in and working
+through the will; the glory of faultless and complete manhood, and
+therein of the express image of God.
+
+And as for the vision itself, that seeing which is denied to be
+possible is the bodily perception and the full comprehension of
+the Infinite God; that seeing which is affirmed to be possible,
+and actually bestowed in Christ, is the beholding of Him with the
+soul by faith; the immediate direct consciousness of His presence
+the perception of Him in His truth by the mind, the feeling of Him
+in His love by the heart, the contact with His gracious energy in
+our recipient and opening spirits. Faith is made the antithesis of
+sight. It is so, in certain respects. But faith is also paralleled
+with and exalted above the mere bodily perception. He who
+believing grasps the living Lord has a contact with Him as
+immediate and as real as that of the eyeball with light, and knows
+Him with a certitude as reliable as that which sight gives.
+`Seeing is believing,' says sense; `Believing is seeing' says the
+spirit which clings to the Lord, `whom having not seen' it loves.
+A bridge of perishable flesh, which is not myself but my tool,
+connects me with the outward world. \textit{It} never touches
+myself at all, and I know it only by trust in my senses. But
+nothing intervenes between my Lord and me, when I love and trust.
+Then Spirit is joined to spirit, and of His presence I have the
+witness in myself. He is the light, which proves its own existence
+by revealing itself, which strikes with quickening impulse on the
+eye of the spirit that beholds by faith. Believing we see, and,
+seeing, we have that light in our souls to be `the master light of
+all our seeing.' We need not think that to know by the
+consciousness of our trusting souls is less than to know by the
+vision of our fallible eyes; and though flesh hides from us the
+spiritual world in which we float, yet the only veil which really
+dims God to us---the veil of sin, the one separating
+principle---is done away in Christ, for all who love Him; so as
+that he who has not seen and yet has believed, has but the
+perfecting of his present vision to expect, when flesh drops away
+and the apocalypse of the heaven comes. True, in one view, `We see
+through a glass darkly'; but also true, `We all, with unveiled
+face, behold and reflect the glory of the Lord.'
+
+Then note still further Paul's emphasis on the universality of
+this pre\-ro\-ga\-tive---`We all.' This vision does not belong to
+any select handful; does not depend upon special powers or gifts,
+which in the nature of things can only belong to a few. The
+spiritual aristocracy of God's Church is not the distinction of
+the law-giver, the priest or the prophet. There is none of us so
+weak, so low, so ignorant, so compassed about with sin, but that
+upon our happy faces that light may rest, and into our darkened
+hearts that sunshine may steal.
+
+In that Old Dispensation, the light that broke through clouds was
+but that of the rising morning. It touched the mountain tops of
+the loftiest spirits: a Moses, a David, an Elijah caught the early
+gleams; while all the valleys slept in the pale shadow, and the
+mist clung in white folds to the plains. But the noon has come,
+and, from its steadfast throne in the very zenith, the sun, which
+never sets, pours down its rays into the deep recesses of the
+narrowest gorge, and every little daisy and hidden flower catches
+its brightness, and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. We
+have no privileged class or caste now; no fences to keep out the
+mob from the place of vision, while lawgiver and priest gaze upon
+God. Christ reveals Himself to all His servants in the measure of
+their desire after Him. Whatsoever special gifts may belong to a
+few in His Church, the greatest gift belongs to all. The servants
+and the handmaidens have the Spirit, the children prophesy, the
+youths see visions, the old men dream dreams. `The mobs,' `the
+masses,' `the plebs,' or whatever other contemptuous name the
+heathen aristocratic spirit has for the bulk of men, makes good
+its standing within the Church, as possessor of Christ's chiefest
+gifts. Redeemed by Him, it can behold His face and be glorified
+into His likeness. Not as Judaism with its ignorant mass, and its
+enlightened and inspired few---we \textit{all} behold the glory of
+the Lord.
+
+Again, this contemplation involves reflection, or giving forth the
+light which we behold.
+
+They who behold Christ have Christ formed in them, as will appear
+in my subsequent remarks. But apart from such considerations,
+which belong rather to the next part of this sermon, I touch on
+this thought here for one purpose---to bring out this idea---that
+what we \textit{see} we shall certainly \textit{show}. That will
+be the inevitable result of all true possession of the glory of
+Christ. The necessary accompaniment of vision is reflecting the
+thing beheld. Why, if you look closely enough into a man's eye,
+you will see in it little pictures of what he beholds at the
+moment; and if our hearts are beholding Christ, Christ will be
+mirrored and manifested on our hearts. Our characters will show
+what we are looking at, and ought, in the case of Christian
+people, to bear His image so plainly, that men cannot but take
+knowledge of us that we have been with Jesus.
+
+This ought to lead all of us who say that we have seen the Lord,
+to serious self-questioning. Do beholding and reflecting go
+together in our cases? Are our characters like those transparent
+clocks, where you can see not only the figures and hands, but the
+wheels and works? Remember that, consciously and unconsciously, by
+direct efforts and by insensible influences on our lives, the true
+secret of our being ought to come, and will come, forth to light.
+The convictions which we hold, the emotions that are dominant in
+our hearts, will mould and shape our lives. If we have any deep,
+living perception of Christ, bystanders looking into our faces
+will be able to tell what it is up yonder that is making them like
+the faces of the angels---even vision of the opened heavens and of
+the exalted Lord. These two things are inseparable---the one
+describes the attitude and action of the Christian man towards
+Christ; the other the very same attitude and action in relation to
+men. And you may be quite sure that, if little light comes from a
+Christian character, little light comes into it; and if it be
+swathed in thick veils from men, there must be no less thick veils
+between it and God.
+
+Nor is it only that our fellowship with Christ will, as a matter
+of course, show itself in our characters, and beauty born of that
+communion `shall pass into our face,' but we are also called on,
+as Paul puts it here, to make direct conscious efforts for the
+communication of the light which we behold. As the context has it,
+God hath shined in our hearts, that we might give the light of the
+knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus. Away
+with all veils! No reserve, no fear of the consequences of plain
+speaking, no diplomatic prudence regulating our frank utterance,
+no secret doctrines for the initiated! We are to `renounce the
+hidden things of dishonesty.' Our power and our duty lie in the
+full exhibition of the truth. We are only clear from the blood of
+men when we, for our parts, make sure that if any light be hid, it
+is hid not by reason of obscurity or silence on our parts, but
+only by reason of the blind eyes, before which the full-orbed
+radiance gleams in vain. All this is as true for every one
+possessing that universal prerogative of seeing the glory of
+Christ, as it is for an Apostle. The business of all such is to
+make known the name of Jesus, and if from idleness, or
+carelessness, or selfishness, they shirk that plain duty, they are
+counteracting God's very purpose in shining on their hearts, and
+going far to quench the light which they darken.
+
+Take this, then, Christian men and women, as a plain practical
+lesson from this text. You are bound to manifest what you believe,
+and to make the secret of your lives, in so far as possible, an
+open secret. Not that you are to drag into light before men the
+sacred depths of your own soul's experience. Let these lie hid.
+The world will be none the better for your confessions, but it
+needs your Lord. Show Him forth, not your own emotions about Him.
+What does the Apostle say close by my text? `We preach not
+ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord.' Self-respect and reverence
+for the sanctities of our deepest emotions forbid our proclaiming
+these from the house-tops. Let these be curtained, if you will,
+from all eyes but God's, but let no folds hang before the picture
+of your Saviour that is drawn on your heart. See to it that you
+have the unveiled face turned towards Christ to be irradiated by
+His brightness, and the unveiled face turned towards men, from
+which shall shine every beam of the light which you have caught
+from your Lord. `Arise! shine, for thy light is come, and the
+glory of the Lord is risen upon thee!'
+
+II. Notice, secondly, that this life of contemplation is therefore
+a life of gradual transformation.
+
+The brightness on the face of Moses was only skin-deep. It faded
+away, and left no trace. It effaced none of the marks of sorrow
+and care, and changed none of the lines of that strong, stern
+face. But, says Paul, the glory which we behold sinks inward, and
+changes us as we look, into its own image. Thus the superficial
+lustre, that had neither permanence nor transforming power,
+becomes an illustration of the powerlessness of law to change the
+moral character into the likeness of the fair ideal which it sets
+forth. And, in opposition to its weakness, the Apostle proclaims
+the great principle of Christian progress, that the beholding of
+Christ leads to the assimilation to Him.
+
+The metaphor of a mirror does not wholly serve us here. When the
+sunbeams fall upon it, it flashes in the light, just because they
+do not enter its cold surface. It is a mirror, because it does not
+drink them up, but flings them back. The contrary is the case with
+these sentient mirrors of our spirits. In them the light must
+first sink in before it can ray out. They must first be filled
+with the glory, before the glory can stream forth. They are not so
+much like a reflecting surface as like a bar of iron, which needs
+to be heated right down to its obstinate black core, before its
+outer skin glows with the whiteness of a heat that is too hot to
+sparkle. The sunshine must fall on us, not as it does on some
+lonely hill-side, lighting up the grey stones with a passing gleam
+that changes nothing, and fades away, leaving the solitude to its
+sadness; but as it does on some cloud cradled near its setting,
+which it drenches and saturates with fire till its cold heart
+burns, and all its wreaths of vapour are brightness palpable,
+glorified by the light which lives amidst its mists. So must we
+have the glory sink into us before it can be reflected from us. In
+deep inward beholding we must have Christ in our hearts, that He
+may shine forth from our lives.
+
+And this contemplation will be gradual transformation. There is
+the great principle of Christian morals. `We all beholding ... are
+changed.' The power to which is committed the perfecting of our
+characters lies in looking upon Jesus. It is not the mere
+beholding, but the gaze of love and trust that moulds us by silent
+sympathy into the likeness of His wondrous beauty, who is fairer
+than the children of men. It was a deep, true thought which the
+old painters had, when they drew John as likest to his Lord. Love
+makes us like. We learn \textit{that} even in our earthly
+relationships, where habitual familiarity with parents and dear
+ones stamps some tone of voice or look, or little peculiarity of
+gesture, on a whole house. And when the infinite reverence and
+aspiration which the Christian soul cherishes to its Lord are
+superadded, the transforming power of loving contemplation of Him
+becomes mighty beyond all analogies in human friendship, though
+one in principle with these. What a marvellous thing that a block
+of rude sandstone, laid down before a perfect marble, should
+become a copy of its serene loveliness just by lying there! Lay
+your hearts down before Christ. Contemplate Him. Love Him. Think
+about Him. Let that pure face shine upon heart and spirit, and as
+the sun photographs itself on the sensitive plate exposed to its
+light, and you get a likeness of the sun by simply laying the
+thing in the sun, so He will `be formed in, you.' Iron near a
+magnet becomes magnetic. Spirits that dwell with Christ become
+Christ-like. The Roman Catholic legends put this truth in a coarse
+way, when they tell of saints who have gazed on some ghastly
+crucifix till they have received, in their tortured flesh, the
+copy of the wounds of Jesus, and have thus borne in their body the
+marks of the Lord. The story is hideous and gross, the idea
+beneath is ever true. Set your faces towards the Cross with
+loving, reverent gaze, and you will `be conformed unto His death,'
+that in due time you may `be also in the likeness of His
+Resurrection.'
+
+Dear friends, surely this message---`Behold and be like'---ought
+to be very joyful and enlightening to many of us, who are wearied
+with painful struggles after isolated pieces of goodness, that
+elude our grasp. You have been trying, and trying, and trying half
+your lifetime to cure faults and make yourselves better and
+stronger. Try this other plan. Let love draw you, instead of duty
+driving you. Let fellowship with Christ elevate you, instead of
+seeking to struggle up the steeps on hands and knees. Live in
+sight of your Lord, and catch His Spirit. The man who travels with
+his face northwards has it grey and cold. Let him turn to the warm
+south, where the midday sun dwells, and his face will glow with
+the brightness that he sees. `Looking unto Jesus' is the sovereign
+cure for all our ills and sins. It is the one condition of running
+with patience `the race that is set before us.' Efforts after
+self-improvement which do not rest on it will not go deep enough,
+nor end in victory. But from that gaze will flow into our lives a
+power which will at once reveal the true goal, and brace every
+sinew for the struggle to reach it. Therefore, let us cease from
+self, and fix our eyes on our Saviour till His image imprints
+itself on our whole nature.
+
+Such transformation, it must be remembered, comes gradually. The
+language of the text regards it as a lifelong process. `We
+\textit{are} changed'; that is a continuous operation. `From glory
+to glory'; that is a course which has well-marked transitions and
+degrees. Be not impatient if it be slow. It will take a lifetime.
+Do not fancy that it is finished with you. Life is not long enough
+for it. Do not be complacent over the partial transformation which
+you have felt. There is but a fragment of the great image yet
+reproduced in your soul, a faint outline dimly traced, with many a
+feature wrongly drawn, with many a line still needed, before it
+can be called even approximately complete. See to it that you
+neither turn away your gaze, nor relax your efforts till all that
+you have beheld in Him is repeated in you.
+
+Likeness to Christ is the aim of all religion. To it conversion is
+introductory; doctrines, devout emotion, worship and ceremonies,
+churches and organisations are valuable as auxiliary. Let that
+wondrous issue of God's mercy be the purpose of our lives, and the
+end as well as the test of all the things which we call our
+Christianity. Prize and use them as helps towards it, and remember
+that they are helps only in proportion as they show us that
+Saviour, the image of whom is our perfection, the beholding of
+whom is our transformation.
+
+III. Notice, lastly, that the life of contemplation finally
+becomes a life of complete assimilation.
+
+`Changed into the same image, from glory to glory.' The lustrous
+light which falls upon Christian hearts from the face of their
+Lord is permanent, and it is progressive. The likeness extends,
+becomes deeper, truer, every way perfecter, comprehends more and
+more of the faculties of the man; soaks into him, if I may say so,
+until he is saturated with the glory; and in all the extent of his
+being, and in all the depth possible to each part of that whole
+extent, is like his Lord. That is the hope for heaven, towards
+which we may indefinitely approximate here, and at which we shall
+absolutely arrive there. There we expect changes which are
+impossible here, while compassed with this body of sinful flesh.
+We look for the merciful exercise of His mighty working to `change
+the body of our lowliness, that it may be fashioned like unto the
+body of His glory'; and that physical change in the resurrection
+of the just rightly bulks very large in good men's expectations.
+But we are somewhat apt to think of the perfect likeness of Christ
+too much in connection with that transformation that begins only
+after death, and to forget that the main transformation must begin
+here. The glorious, corporeal life like our Lord's, which is
+promised for heaven, is great and wonderful, but it is only the
+issue and last result of the far greater change in the spiritual
+nature, which by faith and love begins here. It is good to be
+clothed with the immortal vesture of the resurrection, and in that
+to be like Christ. It is better to be like Him in our hearts. His
+true image is that we should feel as He does, should think as He
+does, should will as He does; that we should have the same
+sympathies, the same loves, the same attitude towards God, and the
+same attitude towards men. It is that His heart and ours should
+beat in full accord, as with one pulse, and possessing one life.
+Wherever there is the beginning of that oneness and likeness of
+spirit, all the rest will come in due time. As the spirit, so the
+body. The whole nature must be transformed and made like Christ's,
+and the process will not stop till that end be accomplished in all
+who love Him. But the beginning here is the main thing which draws
+all the rest after it as of course. `If the Spirit of Him that
+raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up
+Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies, by His
+Spirit that dwelleth in you.'
+
+And, while this complete assimilation in body and spirit to our
+Lord is the end of the process which begins here by love and
+faith, my text, carefully considered, adds a further very
+remarkable idea. `We are all changed,' says Paul, `into the
+\textit{same} image.' Same as what? Possibly the same as we
+behold; but more probably the phrase, especially `image' in the
+singular, is employed to convey the thought of the blessed
+likeness of all who become perfectly like Him. As if he had said,
+`Various as we are in disposition and character, unlike in the
+histories of our lives, and all the influences that these have had
+upon us, differing in everything but the common relation to Jesus
+Christ, we are all growing like the same image, and we shall come
+to be perfectly like it, and yet each retain his own distinct
+individuality.' `We being many are one, for we are all partakers
+of one.'
+
+Perhaps, too, we may connect with this another idea which occurs
+more than once in Paul's Epistles. In that to the Ephesians, for
+instance, he says that the Christian ministry is to continue, till
+a certain point of progress has been reached, which he describes
+as our \textit{all} coming to `a perfect \textit{man}.' The whole
+of us together make a perfect man---the whole make one image. That
+is to say, perhaps the Apostle's idea is, that it takes the
+aggregated perfectness of the whole Catholic Church, one
+throughout all ages, and containing a multitude that no man can
+number, to set worthily forth anything like a complete image of
+the fulness of Christ. No one man, even raised to the highest
+pitch of perfection, and though his nature be widened out to
+perfect development, can be the full image of that infinite sum of
+all beauty; but the whole of us taken together, with all the
+diversities of natural character retained and consecrated, being
+collectively His body which He vitalises, may, on the whole, be a
+not wholly inadequate representation of our perfect Lord. Just as
+we set round a central light sparkling prisms, each of which
+catches the glow at its own angle, and flashes it back of its own
+colour, while the sovereign completeness of the perfect white
+radiance comes from the blending of all their separate rays, so
+they who stand round about the starry throne receive each the
+light in his own measure and manner, and give forth each a true
+and perfect, and altogether a complete, image of Him who
+enlightens them all, and is above them all.
+
+And whilst thus all bear the same image, there is no monotony; and
+while there is endless diversity, there is no discord. Like the
+serene choirs of angels in the old monk's pictures, each one with
+the same tongue of fire on the brow, with the same robe flowing in
+the same folds to the feet, with the same golden hair, yet each a
+separate self, with his own gladness, and a different instrument
+for praise in his hand, and his own part in that `undisturbed song
+of pure content,' we shall all be changed into the same image, and
+yet each heart shall grow great with its own blessedness, and each
+spirit bright with its own proper lustre of individual and
+characteristic perfection.
+
+The law of the transformation is the same for earth and for
+heaven. Here we see Him in part, and beholding grow like. There we
+shall see Him as He is, and the likeness will be complete. That
+Transfiguration of our Lord (which is described by the same word
+as occurs in this text) may become for us the symbol and the
+prophecy of what we look for. As with Him, so with us; the
+indwelling glory shall come to the surface, and the countenance
+shall shine as the light, and the garments shall be `white as no
+fuller on earth can white them.' Nor shall that be a fading
+splendour, nor shall we fear as we enter into the cloud, nor,
+looking on Him, shall flesh bend beneath the burden, and the eyes
+become drowsy, but we shall be as the Lawgiver and the Prophet who
+stood by Him in the lambent lustre, and shone with a brightness
+above that which had once been veiled on Sinai. We shall never
+vanish from His side, but dwell with Him in the abiding temple
+which He has built, and there, looking upon Him for ever, our
+happy souls shall change as they gaze, and behold Him more
+perfectly as they change, for `we know that when He shall appear
+we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.'
+
+\chapter{Looking at the Unseen}
+\markright{2 CORINTHIANS iv. 18}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things
+which are not seen.'---2 \textsc{Cor.} iv. 18.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+Men may be said to be divided into two classes, materialists and
+idealists, in the widest sense of those two words. The mass care
+for, and are occupied by, and regard as really solid good, those
+goods which can be touched and enjoyed by sense. The
+minority---students, thinkers, men of ideas, moralists, and the
+like---believe in, and care for, impalpable spiritual riches.
+Everybody admits that the latter class is distinctly the higher.
+Now it is from no disregard to the importance and reality of that
+broad distinction that I insist, to begin with, that it is not the
+antithesis which is in the Apostle's mind here. His notion of `the
+things that are seen' and `the things that are not seen' is a much
+grander and wider one than that. By `the things that are seen' he
+means the whole of this visible world, with all its circumstances
+and relations, and by `the things that are not seen' he means the
+realities beyond the stars.
+
+He means the same thing that we mean when we talk in a much less
+true and impressive contrast about the present and the future. To
+him the `things that are not seen' are present instead of being,
+as we weakly and foolishly christen them, `the future state.' And
+it makes all the difference whether we think of that august realm
+as lying far away ahead of us, or whether we feel that it is, as
+it is, in very deed, all round about us, and pressing in upon us,
+only that `the veil'---that is to say, our `flesh'---has come
+between us and it. Do not habitually think of these two sets of
+objects according to that misleading distinction `present' and
+`future,' but think of them rather as `the things that are seen,'
+and `the things that are not seen.'
+
+I. Now, first, I wish to say a word or two about what such a look
+will do for us.
+
+Paul's notion is, as you will see if you look at the context, that
+if we want to understand the visible, or to get the highest good
+out of the things that are seen, we must bring into the field of
+vision `the things that are not seen.' The case with which he is
+dealing is that of a man in trouble. He talks about light
+affliction which is but for a moment, working out a far more
+exceeding and eternal weight of glory, `while we look at the
+things which are not seen.' But the principle on which that
+statement is made, of course, has its widest application to all
+sorts and conditions of human life.
+
+And the thought that emerges from it directly is that only when we
+take the `things that are not seen' into account, and make them
+the standard and the scale by which we judge all things, do we
+understand `the things that are seen.' That triumphant paradox of
+the Apostle's about the heavy burdens that pressed upon him and
+his brethren, lifelong as these burdens were, which yet he calls
+`light' and `but for a moment' is possible only when we open the
+shutter of the dungeon which we fancied was the whole universe,
+and look out on to the fair land that stretches beyond. A man who
+has seen the Himalayas will not be much overwhelmed by the height
+of Helvellyn. They who look out into the eternities have the true
+measuring rod and standard by which to estimate the duration and
+intensity of the things that are present. We are all tempted to do
+as villagers in some little hamlet do---think that their small
+local affairs are the world's affairs, and mighty, until they have
+been up to London and seen the scale of things there. If you and I
+would let the steady light of Eternity, and the sustaining
+pressure of the `exceeding weight of glory' pour into our minds,
+we should carry with us a standard which would bring down the
+greatness, dwindle the duration, lighten the pressure, of the most
+crushing sorrow, and would set in its true dimensions everything
+that is here. It is for want of that that we go on as we do,
+calculating wrongly what are the great things and what are the
+small things. When, like some of those prisoners in the
+Inquisition, the heavy iron weights are laid upon our half-crushed
+hearts, we are tempted to shriek, `Oh, these will be my death!'
+instead of taking in that great vision which, as it makes all
+earthly riches dross, so it makes all crushing burdens and blows
+of sorrow light as a feather.
+
+But, on the other hand, do not let us forget that this same
+standard which thus dwindles, also magnifies the small, and in a
+very solemn sense, makes eternal the else fleeting things of this
+life. For there is nothing that makes this present existence of
+ours so utterly contemptible, insignificant, and transitory, as to
+block out of our sight its connection with Eternity. And there is
+nothing which so lifts the commonplace into the solemn, and
+invests with everlasting and tremendous importance everything that
+a man does here, as to feel that it all tells on his condition
+away beyond there. The shafting is on this side of the wall, but
+the work that it does is through the wall there, in the other
+chamber; and you do not understand the cranks and the wheels here
+unless you know that they go through the partition and are doing
+something there beyond. If you shut out Eternity from our life in
+time, then it is an inexplicable riddle; and I, for my part, would
+venture to say that in that case, the men who answer the question,
+`Is life worth living?' with a distinct negative, are wise. It is
+a tale told by an idiot, `full of sound and fury, signifying
+nothing,' unless the light of `the things not seen' flashes and
+flares in upon it.
+
+Further, this look of which my text speaks is the condition on
+which Time prepares for Eternity.
+
+The Apostle is speaking about the effect of affliction in making
+ready for us an eternal weight of glory, and he says that is done
+while, or on condition that during the suffering, we are looking
+steadfastly towards the `things that are not seen.' But no outward
+circumstances or events can prepare a weight of glory for us
+hereafter, unless they prepare us for the glory. Affliction works
+for us that blessed result, in the measure in which it fits us for
+that result. And so you will find that, only a verse or two after
+my text, Paul, using the same very significant and emphatic verb,
+writes inverting the order of things, and says `He that hath
+wrought \textit{us for} the self-same thing is God.' So that
+working the thing for us, and working us for the thing, are one
+and the same process. Or, to put it into plain English, our
+various duties and circumstances here will prepare the glory of
+Eternity for us if they prepare us for the glory of Eternity. But
+only in the measure in which these outward things do thus shape
+and mould our characters do they work out for us `an exceeding
+weight of glory.'
+
+It is often thought that a man has been so miserable here that God
+is sure to give him future blessedness to recompense him. Well!
+`that depends.' If he has used his miserableness as he will use it
+when he lets the light of `the things not seen' in upon it, then,
+certainly, it will work out for him the blessed results. But if he
+does not, then, as certainly, it will not. Whilst there are many
+ways by which character is hammered and moulded and shaped into
+that which is fit to be clothed upon with the glory that is
+yonder, one of the foremost of these is the passing through things
+temporal with a continual regard to the things that are eternal.
+If you want to understand to-day you must bring Eternity into the
+account, and if you want to use to-day you must use it with the
+light of the eternal world full upon it. The sum of it all is,
+brethren, that the things seen cannot be estimated in their true
+character, unless they are regarded in immediate connection with
+the things that are unseen; and that the things seen will only
+prepare an eternal weight of glory for us when they prepare us for
+an eternal weight of glory.
+
+II. And so, I note that this look at the things not seen is only
+possible through Jesus Christ.
+
+He is the only window which opens out and gives the vision of that
+far-off land. I, for my part, believe that, if I might use such a
+metaphor, He is the Columbus of the New World. Men believed, and
+argued, and doubted about the existence of it across the seas there,
+until a man went, and came back again, and then went to found a new
+city yonder. And men hoped for immortality, and believed after a
+fashion---some of them---in a future life, and dreaded that it might
+be true, and discussed and debated whether it was, but doubt clouded
+all minds, until One, our Brother, went away into the darkness, and
+came back again, in most respects as He had gone, and then departed
+once more to make ready a city in which all who love Him should
+finally dwell, and to which you and I may be sure that we shall
+emigrate. It is only in Jesus Christ that the look which my text
+enjoins is possible.
+
+For not only has He given a certitude so that we need now not to say
+`We think, we hope, we fear, we are pretty well sure, that there
+must be a life beyond,' but we can say `We know.' Not only has He
+done this, but also in Him and His life of glory at God's right hand
+in heaven, is summed up all that we really can know about that
+future. We look into the darkness in vain; we look at Him, and, our
+knowledge, though limited, is blessed. All other adumbrations of a
+life beyond must necessarily be cast into the metaphorical forms or
+the negative symbols in which the New Testament abounds. We may
+speak of golden pavements, and thrones, and harps, and the like. We
+may say: `No night there, no sighing, nor weeping, no burdened
+hearts, no toil, no pain, for the former things are passed away.'
+But a future life which is all described in metaphors, and a future
+life of which we know only that it is the negation of the
+disagreeables and limitations of the present, is but a poor affair.
+Here is the positive truth, `To him that overcometh will I grant to
+sit with Me on My throne.' `We shall be like Him, for we shall see
+Him as He is.' And beyond that nearness to Christ, blessed communion
+with Christ, likeness to Christ, royalty derived from Christ, I
+think we neither know nor need to know anything about that life.
+
+Not only is He our sole medium of knowledge and Himself the
+revelation of our heaven, but it is only by Him that man's
+thoughts and desires are drawn to, and find themselves at home in,
+that tremendous thought of immortality. I know not how it may be
+with you, but I am not ashamed to confess that to me the idea of
+eternal continuance of my conscious being is an awful thought,
+rather depressing and bewildering than delighting and attractive.
+I, for my part, do not believe that men generally do grapple to
+their hearts, with any gratitude or joy, that solemn belief of
+immortal life unless they feel that it is life with, and in, and
+like, Jesus Christ. `To depart' is dreary, and it is only when we
+can say `and to be with Christ' that it becomes distinctly `far
+better.' He is, if I may so say, at once telescope and star. By
+Him we see Him; we see, seeing Him, that the things that are
+unseen all cluster round Himself and become blessed.
+
+III. And now, lastly, this look should be habitual with all
+Christian people.
+
+Paul takes it for granted that every Christian man is, as the
+habitual direction of his thoughts, looking towards those `things
+that are not seen.' The original shows that even more distinctly
+than our translation, but our translation shows it plainly enough.
+He does not say `works for us an exceeding weight of glory
+\textit{for},' but \textit{`while'} we look, as if it were a
+matter of course. He took it for granted as to these Corinthians.
+I wonder if he would be warranted in taking it for granted about
+us?
+
+Note what sort of a look it is which produces these blessed
+effects. The word which the Apostle employs here is a more pointed
+one than the ordinary one for `seeing.' It is translated in other
+places in the New Testament, \textit{`Mark'} them which walk so as
+ye have us for an ensample, and the like. And it implies a
+concentrated, protracted effort and interested gaze. A man,
+standing on the deck of a ship, casts a languid eye for a moment
+out on to the horizon, and sees nothing. A keen-eyed sailor by his
+side shades his eyes with his hand, and shuts out cross-lights,
+and looks, and peers, and keeps his eyes steady, and he sees the
+filmy outline of the mountain land. If you look for a minute, not
+much caring whether you see anything or not, and then turn away,
+and get your eye dazzled with all those vulgar, crude, high
+colours round about you here on earth, it is very little that you
+will see of `the things that are not seen.' Concentrated
+attention, and a steadfast look, are wanted to make the invisible
+visible. You have to alter the focus of your eye if you are to see
+the thing that is afar off.
+
+There has to be a positive shutting out of all other things, as is
+emphatically taught in the text by putting first the not looking
+at `the things that are seen.' Here they are pressing in upon our
+eyeballs, all round us, insisting on being looked at, and unless
+we resolutely avert our eyes, we shall not see anything else. They
+monopolise us unless we resist the intrusive appeals that they
+make to us. We are like men down in some fertile valley,
+surrounded by rich vegetation, but seeing nothing beyond the green
+sides of the glen. We have to go up to the hill-top if we are to
+look out over the flashing ocean, and behold afar off the towers
+of the mother city across the restless waves. Brethren, unless you
+shut out the world you will never see the things that are not
+seen.
+
+Now, as I have said, the Apostle regards this conscious effort at
+bringing ourselves into touch, in mind and heart and faith, with
+`the things that are not seen' as being a habitual characteristic
+of Christian men. I am very much afraid that the present
+generation of Christian people do not, in anything like the degree
+in which they should, recreate and strengthen themselves with the
+contemplation which he here recommends. It seems to me, for
+instance, that we do not hear nearly as much in pulpits about the
+life beyond the grave as we used to do when I was a boy. And,
+though I confess I speak from limited knowledge, it seems to me
+that these great motives which lie in the thought of Eternity and
+our place there, are by no means as prominent in the minds of the
+Christian people of this generation as they used to be. Partly, I
+suppose, that arises from the wholesome emphasis which has been
+given of late years to the present day, and this-side-the grave
+effects of Christianity, upon character and life. Partly it
+arises, I think, from the half-consciousness of being surrounded
+by an atmosphere of scepticism and unbelief as to a future life,
+and from the most unwise, inexpedient, and cowardly yielding to
+the temptation to say very little about the distinctive features
+of Christianity, and to dwell rather upon those which are sure to
+be recognised by even unbelieving people. And it comes, too, from
+the lack of faith, which, again, it tends mightily to increase.
+
+Oh, dear brethren! our consciences tell us what different people
+we should be if habitually there shone before us that great,
+solemn issue to which we are all tending. Variations in the
+atmosphere there will always be, and sometimes the distant
+outlines will be clearer and sharper than at others, and the
+colours will shine out more distinctly. But surely it should not
+be that our vision of the Eternal should be like the vision that
+dwellers amongst the mountains have of the summits. They say that
+some of the great peaks of the world are swathed in mist all day
+long, and that only for a few moments in the morning, or for a
+brief space in the evening, does the solemn summit gleam rosy in
+the light. And that, I am afraid, is very much like the degree in
+which most of us look at `the things that are not seen' and so we
+are feeble, and we do not understand `the things that are not
+seen'; and we do not get the good out of them.
+
+Dear brethren, let us turn away our eyes from the gauds that we
+can see, and open the eyes of our spirits on the things that are,
+the things where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God.
+Surely, surely, it is madness that when two sets of objects are
+before us, the one lasting for a moment, and then dying down into
+black nothingness, and the other shining on for ever; and when our
+`look' settles whether we shall share the fate of the one or of
+the other, we should choose to gaze with all our eyes and hearts
+at the perishable and turn away from the permanent. Surely, if it
+is true that the things which are seen are temporal, common-sense,
+and a reasonable regard for our own well-being, bid us look at the
+eternal `things which are not seen,' since only so can the light
+and the momentary afflictions, joys, sorrows, or circumstances,
+work out for us, and work us for `a far more exceeding and eternal
+weight of glory.'
+
+\chapter{Tent and Building}
+\markright{2 CORINTHIANS v. 1}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle be
+dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with
+hands, eternal in the heavens.'---2 \textsc{Cor.}v. 1.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+Knowledge and ignorance, doubt and certitude, are remarkably
+blended in these words. The Apostle knows what many men are not
+certain of; the Apostle doubts as to what all men now are certain
+of. `\textit{If} our earthly house of this tabernacle be
+dissolved'---there is surely no if about that. But we must
+remember that the first Christians, and the Apostles with them,
+did not know whether they might not survive till the coming of
+Christ; and so not die, but `be changed.' And this possibility, as
+appears from the context, is clearly before the Apostle's mind.
+Such a limitation of his knowledge is in entire accordance with
+our Lord's own words, `It is not for you to know the times and the
+seasons,' and does not in the smallest degree derogate from his
+authority as an inspired teacher. But his certitude is as
+remarkable as his hesitation. He knows---and he modestly and
+calmly affirms the confidence, as possessed by all
+believers---that, in the event of death coming to him or them, he
+and they have a mansion waiting for their entrance; a body of
+glory like to that which Jesus already wears.
+
+I. So my text mainly sets before us very strikingly the Christian
+certitude as to the final future.
+
+I need not dwell, I suppose, upon that familiar metaphor by which
+the relation of man to his bodily environment is described as that
+of a man to his dwelling-place. Only I would desire, in a word, to
+emphasise this as being the first of the elements of the blessed
+certitude in which Christian people may expatiate---the clear,
+broad distinction between me and my physical frame. There is no
+more connection, says Paul, between us and the organisation in
+which we at present dwell than there is between a man and the
+house that he inhabits. `The foolish senses crown' Death and call
+him lord; but the Christian's certitude firmly draws the line, and
+declares that the man, the whole personality, is undisturbed by
+anything that befalls his residence; and that he may pass
+unimpaired from one house to another, being in both the self-same
+person. And that is something to keep firm hold of in these days
+when we are being told that life and consciousness are but a
+function of organisation, and that if the one be annihilated the
+other cannot persist. No; though all illustrations and metaphors
+must necessarily fail, the two which lie side by side here in my
+text and its context are far truer than that
+pseudo-science---which is not science at all, but only inference
+from science---which denies that the man is one thing and his
+house altogether another.
+
+Then again, note, as part of the elements of this Christian
+certitude, the blessed thought that a body is part of the
+perfection of manhood. No mere dim, ghostly future, where
+consciousness somehow persists, without environment or tools to
+act upon an outer world, completes the idea of God in reference to
+man. But the old trinity is the eternal trinity for humanity,
+body, soul, and spirit. Corporeity, with all that it means of
+definiteness, with all that it means of relation to an external
+universe, is the perfection of manhood. To dwell naked, as the
+Apostle says in the context, is a thing from which man
+shudderingly recoils; and it is not to be his final fate. Let us
+take this as no small gain in reference to our conceptions of a
+future---the emphatic drawing into light of that thought that for
+his perfection man requires body, soul, and spirit.
+
+And now, if we turn for a moment to the characteristics of the two
+conditions with which my text deals, we get some familiar enough
+but yet great and strengthening thoughts. The `earthly house of
+this tabernacle is dissolved,' or, more correctly, retaining the
+metaphor of the house, is to be pulled down---and in its place
+there comes a building of God, a `house not made with hands,
+eternal in the heavens.'
+
+Now the contrast that is drawn here, whilst it would run out into
+a great many other particulars, about which we know nothing, and
+therefore had better say nothing, revolves in the Apostle's mind
+mainly round these two `earthly' as contrasted with `in the
+heavens'; and `tabernacle,' or tent, as contrasted, first of all
+with a `building,' and then with the predicate `eternal.'
+
+That is to say, the first outstanding difference which arises
+before the Apostle as blessed and glorious, is the contrast
+between the fragile dwelling-place, with its thin canvas, its
+bending poles, its certain removal some day, and the permanence of
+that which is not a `tent,' but a `building' which is `eternal.'
+Involved in that is the thought that all the limitations and
+weaknesses which are necessarily associated with the
+perishableness of the present abode are at an end for ever. No
+more fatigue, no more working beyond the measure of power, no more
+need for recuperation and repose; no more dread of sickness and
+weakness; no more possibility of decay, `It is sown in corruption;
+it is raised in incorruption'---neither `\textit{can} they die any
+more.' Whether that be by reason of any inherent immortality, or
+by reason of the uninterrupted flow into the creature of the
+immortal life of Christ, to whom he is joined, is a question that
+need not trouble us now. Enough for us that the contrast between
+the Bedouin tent---which is folded up and carried away, and
+nothing left but the black circle where the cheerful hearth once
+glinted amidst the sands of the desert---and the stately mansion
+reared for eternity, is the contrast between the organ of the
+spirit in which we now dwell and that which shall be ours.
+
+And the other contrast is no less glorious and wonderful. `The
+\textit{earthly} house of this tent' does not merely define the
+composition, but also the whole relations and capacities of that
+to which it refers. The `tent' is `earthly', not merely because,
+to use a kindred metaphor, it is a `building of clay,' but
+because, by all its capacities, it belongs to, corresponds with,
+and is fitted only for, this lower order of things, the seen and
+the perishable. And, on the other hand, the `mansion' is in `the
+heavens,' even whilst the future tenant is a nomad in his tent.
+That is so, because the power which can create that future abode
+is `in the heavens.' It is so called in order to express the
+security in which it is kept for those who shall one day enter
+upon it. And it is so, further, to express the order of things
+with which it brings its dwellers into contact. `Flesh and blood
+cannot inherit the Kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit
+incorruption.' That future home of the spirit will be congruous
+with the region in which it dwells; fitted for the heavens in
+which it is now preserved. And thus the two contrasts---adapted to
+the perishable, and itself perishable, belonging to the eternal
+and itself incorruptible---are the two which loom largest before
+the Apostle's mind.
+
+Let no man say that such ideas of a possible future bodily frame
+are altogether inconsistent with all that we know of the
+limitations and characteristics of what we call matter. `There is
+one flesh of beasts and another of birds,' says Paul; `there is
+one glory of the sun and another of the moon.' And his
+old-fashioned argument is perfectly sound to-day.
+
+Do you know so fully all the possibilities of creation as that you
+are warranted in asserting that such a thing as a body which is
+the fit organ of the spirit, and is incorruptible like the heavens
+in which it dwells, is an impossibility? Surely the forms of
+matter are sufficiently varied to make us chary in asserting that
+other forms are impossible, to which there may belong, as
+characteristics, even these glorious ones of my text. The old
+story of the king in the tropics, who laughed to scorn some one
+who told him that water could be turned into a solid, may well be
+quoted in this connection. Let us be less confident that we know
+all that is to be known in regard to the sweep of God's creative
+power; and let us thankfully accept the teaching by which we, too,
+in all our ignorance, may be able to say, `We know that ... we
+have a building of God ... eternal in the heavens.'
+
+Now there is only one more remark that I wish to make about this
+part of my subject; and it is this, that the teaching of my text
+and its context casts great light---and I think by many people
+much-needed light---on what the resurrection of the dead means.
+That doctrine has been weighted with a great many incredibilities
+and I venture to say absurdities, by well-meaning misconceptions
+and exaggerations. We have heard grand platitudes about `the
+scattered dust being gathered from the four winds of heaven,' and
+so on, but the teaching of my text is that the contrast between
+the present physical frame and the future bodily environment is
+utter and complete; and that resurrection does not mean the
+assuming again of the body that is left behind and done with, but
+the reinvestiture of the man with another body. And so the
+Scriptural phrase is, not `the resurrection of the body,' but `the
+resurrection of the dead.' It is a house `in the heavens.' It
+comes `from heaven.'
+
+We leave the tent. Life and thought
+
+\begin{verse}
+\ \ ... have gone away, side by side, \\
+Leaving doors and windows wide; \\
+Careless tenants they!
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent And they may well be careless, because in the heavens
+they have another mansion, incorruptible and glorious.
+
+We leave the `tent'; we enter the `building.' There is nothing
+here of some germ of immortality being somehow extricated from the
+ruins, and fostered into glorious growth. Or, to take another
+metaphor of the context, we strip off the garment and are naked;
+and then we are clothed with another garment and are not found
+naked. The resurrection of the dead is the clothing of the spirit
+with the house which is from heaven. And there is as much
+difference between the two habitations as there is between the
+grim, solid architecture of northern peoples, amidst snow and ice,
+needed to resist the blasts, and to keep the life within in an
+ungenial climate, and the light, graceful dwellings of those who
+walk in an atmosphere of perpetual sunshine in the tropics, as
+there is between the close-knit and narrow-windowed and
+narrow-doored abode in which we now have to pass our days, and
+that large house, with broad windows that take in a mightier sweep
+and new senses that have relation with new qualities in the world
+then around us. Therefore let us, whilst we grope in the dark
+here, and live in a narrow hovel in a back street, look forward to
+the time when we shall dwell on the sunny heights in the great
+pavilion which God prepares for them that love Him.
+
+II. And now note, again, how we come to this certitude.
+
+My text is very significantly followed by a `for,' which gives the
+reason of the knowledge in a very remarkable manner. `We know, ...
+for in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with
+our house, which is from heaven.' Now that singular collocation of
+ideas may be set forth thus---whatever longing there is in a
+Christian, God-inspired soul, that longing is a prophecy of its
+own fulfilment. We know that there is a house, because of the
+yearning, which is deepest and strongest when we are nearest God,
+and likest what He would have us to be---the yearning to be
+`clothed upon with our house which is from heaven.' That is a
+truth that goes a long way; though to enlarge on it is irrelevant
+to our present purpose. It has its limitations, as is obvious from
+the context, in which are human elements which are not destined to
+be gratified, mingled with the yearning, which is of God, and
+which is destined to be satisfied. But this at least we may firmly
+hold by, that just because God will not put men to confusion
+intellectually, and does not let them entertain
+uncherished---still less Himself foster and excite---longings
+which He does not mean to gratify, a Christian yearning for
+immortality is, to the man who feels it, a declaration that
+immortality is sure for him. `Delight thyself in the Lord, and He
+shall give thee the desires of thine heart.' Whatsoever, in
+touching Him, we do deeply long for may have blended with it human
+elements, which will be dispersed unsatisfied, but the substance
+of it is a prophecy of its own fulfilment. And as surely as the
+stork in the heavens, flying southward, will reach the sunny lands
+which draw it from the grim northern winter, so surely may a man
+say, `I know that I have a house in heaven, because I long for it,
+and shrink from being found naked.'
+
+Of course such longing, such aspiration and revulsion are no
+proofs of a fact except there be some fact which changes them,
+from mere vague desires, and makes these solid certainties. And
+such a fact we have in that which is the only proof that the world
+has received, of the persistence of life through death and the
+continuance of personal identity unchanged by the grave, and that
+is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Our faith in
+immortality does not depend merely on our own subjective desires
+and longings, but these desires and longings are quickened,
+confirmed, and certified by this great fact that Jesus Christ has
+risen from the dead; and therefore we know that the yearnings in
+us are not in vain. So we come to this certitude, first, by reason
+of his experience; and, second, by reason of the longings which
+that experience fosters if it does not kindle, within our hearts.
+
+And let no man take exception to the Apostle's word here, `we know,'
+or tell us that `Knowledge is of the things we see.' That is true,
+and not true. It is true in regard to what arrogates to itself the
+name of science. And we are willing to admit the limitation if the
+men who insist upon it will, on their sides, admit that there are
+other sources of certitude than so-called `facts,' by which they
+mean merely material facts. If it is meant to assert that we are
+less sure of the love of God, of immortality, than we are of the
+existence of this piece of wood, or that flame of gas; then I humbly
+venture to say that there is another region of facts than those
+which are appreciable by sense; that the evidence upon which we rest
+our certitude of immortal blessedness is quite as valid, quite as
+true, quite as able to bear the weight of a leaning heart as
+anything that can be produced, in the nature of evidence, for the
+things round us. It is not, `We fancy, we believe, we hope, we are
+pretty nearly sure,' but it is `We \textit{know} ... that we have a
+building of God.'
+
+III. Lastly, note what this certitude does.
+
+The Apostle tells us by the `for' which lies at the beginning of
+my text, and makes it a reason for something that has preceded,
+and what has preceded is this, `We look not at the things which
+are seen, but at the things which are not seen.'
+
+That is to say, such a joyous, calm certitude draws men's thoughts
+away from this shabby and transitory present, and fixes them on
+the solemn majesties of that eternal future. Yes! and nothing else
+will. Take away the idea of resurrection, and the remaining idea
+of immortality is a poor, shadowy, impotent thing. There is no
+force in it; there is no blessedness in it; there is nothing in it
+for a man to lay hold of. And, as a matter of fact, there is no
+vivid faith in a future life without belief in the resurrection
+and bodily existence of the perfected dead.
+
+And we shall not let our thoughts willingly go out thither unless
+our own personal wellbeing there is very sure to us. When we know
+that for us individually there is that house waiting for us to
+enter into it, when the Lord comes, then we shall not be unwilling
+to turn our hearts and our desires thither. We look at the things
+which are not seen, for we know that we have a house eternal.
+
+And such a certitude will also make a man willing to accept the
+else unwelcome necessity of leaving the tent, and for a while
+doing without the mansion. It is that which the Apostle is
+speaking of in subsequent verses, on which I cannot enter now. He
+says---and therein speaks a universal experience---that men recoil
+from the idea of having to lay aside this earthly body and be
+`naked.' But we know that we have that glorious mansion waiting
+for us, and that till the day comes when we enter upon it we may
+be lapt in Christ instead, and, in that so-called intermediate
+state, may have Him to surround us, Him to be to us the medium by
+which we come into connection with anything external, and so can
+contentedly go away from our home in the body; and go to our home
+in Christ. `Wherefore, we are always confident, and willing rather
+to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord.'
+
+Oh, brethren! do we think of our future thus? If we do, then let
+us lay to heart the final words of our teacher in this part of his
+letter: `Wherefore we make it our aim, whether at home or absent,
+to be well-pleasing unto Him.'
+
+\chapter{The Patient Workman}
+\markright{2 CORINTHIANS v. 5}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Now He that hath wrought us for the self-same thing is God.'---2
+\textsc{Cor.} v. 5.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+These words penetrate deep into the secrets of God. They assume to
+have read the riddle of life. To Paul everything which we
+experience, outwardly or inwardly, is from the divine working.
+Life is to him no mere blind whirl, or unintelligent play of
+accidental forces, nor is it the unguided result of our own or of
+others' wills, but is the slow operation of the great Workman.
+Paul assumes to know the meaning of this protracted process, that
+it all has one design which we may know and grasp and further. And
+he believes that the clear perception of the divine purpose, and
+the habit of looking at everything as contributing thereto, will
+be a magic charm against all sorrow, doubt, despondency, or fear,
+for he adds, `Therefore we are always confident.' So let us try to
+follow the course of thought which issues in such a blessed gift
+as that of a continual, courageous outlook, and buoyant though
+grave lightheartedness, because we discern what He means `Who
+worketh all things according to the counsel of His own will.'
+
+I. The first thought here is, God's purpose in all His working;
+`He that hath wrought us for the self-same thing is God.'
+
+What is that `self-same thing'? To understand it we must look back
+for a moment to the previous context. The Apostle has been
+speaking about the instinctive reluctance which even good men feel
+at prospect of dying and `putting off the earthly house of this
+tabernacle.' He distinguishes between three different conditions
+in which the human spirit may be---dwelling in the earthly body,
+stripped of that, and `clothed with the house which is from
+Heaven,' and to this last and highest state he sees that for him
+and for his brethren there were two possible roads. They might
+reach it either through losing the present body, in the act of
+death, and passing through a period of what he calls nakedness; or
+they might attain it by being `superinvested,' as it were, with
+the glorious body which was to come to saints with Christ when He
+came; and so slip on, as it were, the wedding garment over their
+old clothes, without having to denude themselves of these. And he
+says that deep in the Christian heart there lay reluctance to take
+the former road and the preference for the latter. His longing was
+that that which is mortal might be `swallowed up of life,' as some
+sand-bank in the tide-way may be gradually covered and absorbed by
+the rejoicing waters. And then he says, `Now He that hath wrought
+us for this very thing, is God.'
+
+Of course it is impossible that he can mean by this `very thing'
+the second of the roads by which it was possible to reach the
+ultimate issue, because he did not know whether his brethren and
+he were to die or to be changed. He speaks in the context about
+death as a possible contingency for himself and for
+them,---`\textit{If} our earthly house of this tabernacle were
+dissolved,' and so on. Therefore we must suppose that `the
+self-same thing' of which he is thinking as the divine purpose in
+all His dealings with us, is not the manner in which we may attain
+that ultimate condition, but the condition itself which, by one
+road or another, God's children shall attain. Or, in other words,
+the highest aim of the divine love in all its dealings with us
+Christian men, is not merely a blessed spiritual life, but the
+completion of our humanity in a perfect spirit dwelling in a
+glorified body. Corporeity---the dwelling in a body by which the
+pure spirit moves amidst pure universes---is the highest end of
+God's will concerning us.
+
+That glorified body is described in our context in wonderful
+words, which it would take me far too long to do more than just
+touch upon. Here we dwell in a tent, there we shall dwell in a
+building. Here in a house made with hands, a corporeal frame
+derived from parents by material transmission and intervention;
+there we shall dwell in a building of which God is the maker. Here
+we dwell in a crumbling clay tenement, which rains dissolve, which
+lightning strikes, and winds overthrow, and which finally lies on
+the ground a heap of tumbled ruin. There we dwell in a building,
+God's direct work, eternal, and knowing no corruption nor change.
+Here we dwell in a body congruous with, and part of, the
+perishable earthly world in which it abides, and with which it
+stands in relation; there we dwell in a house partaking of the
+nature of the heavens in which it moves, a body that is the fit
+organ of a perfect spirit.
+
+And so, says Paul, the end of what God means with us is not stated
+in all its wonderfulness, when we speak of spirits imbued with His
+wisdom and surcharged with His light and perfectness, but when we
+add to that the thought of a fitting organ in which these spirits
+dwell, whereby they can come into contact with an external
+universe, incorruptible, and so reach the summit of their destined
+completeness. `The house not made with hands,' eternal, the
+building of God in the Heavens, is the end that God has in view
+for all His children.
+
+II. So, then, secondly, note the slow process of the Divine
+Workman.
+
+The Apostle employs here a very emphatic compound term for `hath
+wrought.' It conveys not only the idea of operation, but the idea
+of continuous and somewhat toilsome and effortful work, as if
+against the resistance of something that did not yield itself
+naturally to the impulse that He would bestow. Like some sculptor
+with a hard bit of marble, or some metallurgist who has to work
+the rough ore till it becomes tractable, so the loving, patient,
+Divine Artificer is here represented as labouring long and
+earnestly with a somewhat obstinate material which can and does
+resist His loving touch, and yet going on with imperturbable and
+patient hope, by manifold touches, here a little and there a
+little, all through life preparing a man for His purpose. The
+great Artificer toils at His task, `rising early' and working
+long, and not discouraged when He comes upon a black vein in the
+white marble, nor when the hard stone turns the edge of His
+chisels.
+
+Now I would have you notice that there lies in this conception a
+very important thought, viz. God cannot make you fit for heaven
+all at a jump, or by a simple act of will. That is not His way of
+working. He can make a world so, He cannot make a saint so. He can
+speak and it is done when it is only a universe that has to be
+brought into being; or He can say, `Let there be light,' and light
+springs at His word. But He cannot say, and He does not say, Let
+there be holiness, and it comes. Not so can God make man meet for
+the `inheritance of the saints in light.' And it takes Him all His
+energies, for all a lifetime, to prepare His child for what He
+wants to make of him.
+
+There is another thought here, which I can only touch, and that is
+that God cannot give a man that glorified body of which I have
+been speaking, unless the man's spirit is Christlike. He cannot
+raise a bad man at the resurrection with the body of His glory. By
+the necessities of the case it is confined to the purified,
+because it corresponds to their inward spiritual being. It is only
+a perfect spirit that can dwell in a perfect body. You could not
+put a bad man, Godless and Christless, into the body which will be
+fit for them whom Christ has changed first of all in heart and
+spirit into His own likeness. He would be like those hermit crabs
+that you see on the beach who run into any kind of a shell,
+whether it fits them or not, in order to get a house.
+
+There are two principles at work in the resurrection of the dead.
+The glorified body is not the physical outcome of the material
+body here, but is the issue and manifestation, in visible form, of
+the perfect and Christlike spirit. Some shall rise to glory and
+immortality, some to shame and everlasting contempt. If we are to
+stand at the last with the body of our humiliation changed into a
+body of glory, we must begin by being changed in the spirit of our
+mind. As the mind is, so will the body be one day. But, passing
+from such thoughts as these, and remembering that the Apostle here
+is speaking only about Christian people, and the divine operations
+upon them, we may still extend the meaning of this significant
+word `wrought' somewhat further, and ask you just to consider, and
+that very briefly, the three-fold processes which, in the divine
+working, terminate in, and contemplate, this great issue.
+
+God has wrought us for it in the very act of making us what we
+are. Human nature is an insoluble enigma, if this world is its
+only field. Amidst all the waste, the mysterious waste, of
+creation, there is no more profligate expenditure of powers than
+that which is involved in giving a man such faculties and
+capacities, if this be the only field on which they are to be
+exercised. If you think of what most of us do in this world, and
+of what it is in us to be, and to do, it is almost ludicrous to
+consider the disproportion. All other creatures fit their
+circumstances; nothing in them is bigger than their environment.
+They find in life a field for every power. You and I do not. `The
+foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have roosting-places.'
+They all correspond to their circumstances, but we have an
+infinitude of faculty lying half dormant in each of us, which
+finds no work at all in this present world. And so, looking at men
+as they are with eternity in their hearts, with natures that go
+reaching out towards infinity, the question comes up: `Wherefore
+hast Thou made all men in vain? What is the use of us, and why
+should we be what we are, if there is nothing for us except this
+poor present?' God, or whoever made us, has made a mistake; and
+strangely enough, if we were not made, but evolved, evolution has
+worked out faculties which have no correspondence with the things
+around them.
+
+Life and man are an insoluble enigma except on one hypothesis, and
+that is that this is a nursery-ground, and that the plants will be
+pricked out some day, and planted where they are meant to grow.
+The hearts that feel after absolute and perfect love, the spirits
+that can conceive the idea of an infinite goodness, the dumb
+desires, the blank misgivings that wander homeless amidst the
+narrowness of this poor earth, all these things proclaim that
+there is a region where they will find their nutriment and
+expatiate, and when we look at a man we can only say, He that hath
+wrought him for an infinite world, and an endless communion with a
+perfect good, is God.
+
+Still further, another field of the divine operation to this end
+is in what we roughly call `providences.' What is the meaning of
+all this discipline through which we are passed, if there is
+nothing to be disciplined for? What is the good of an
+apprenticeship if there is no journeyman's life to come after it,
+where the powers that have been slowly acquired shall be nobly
+exercised upon broader fields? Why should men be taken, as it
+were, and, like the rough iron from the ground,
+
+\begin{verse}
+`Be heated hot with hopes and fears, \\
+ And plunged in baths of hissing tears, \\
+ And battered with the shocks of doom,'
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent if, after all the process, the polished shaft is to be
+broken in two, and tossed away as rubbish? If death ends faculty, it
+is a pity that the faculty was so patiently developed. If God is
+educating us all in His school, and then means that, like some
+wastrel boys, we should lose all our education as soon as we leave
+its benches, there is little use in the rod, and little meaning in
+the training. Brethren! life is an insoluble riddle unless the
+purpose of it lie yonder, and unless all this patient training of
+our sorrows and our gladnesses, the warmth that expands and the cold
+that contracts the heart, the light that gladdens and the darkness
+that saddens the eye and the spirit, are equally meant for training
+us for the perfect life of a perfect soul moving a perfect body in a
+perfect universe. Here is a pillar in some ancient hall that has
+fallen into poor hands, and has had a low roof thrown across the
+centre of the chamber at half its height. In the lower half there is
+part of a pillar that means nothing; ugly, bare, evidently climbing,
+and passing through the aperture, and away above yonder is the
+carved capital and the great entablature that it carries. Who could
+understand the shaft unless he could look up through the aperture,
+and see the summit? And who can think of life as anything but a
+wretched fragment unless he knows that all which begins here runs
+upwards into the room above, and there finds its explanation and its
+completion?
+
+But there is the third sphere of the divine operation. As in
+creation and in providence, so in all the work and mystery of our
+redemption, this is the goal that God has in view. It was not
+worth Christ's while to come and die, if nothing more was to come
+of it than the imperfect reception of His blessings and gifts
+which the noblest Christian life in this world presents. The
+meaning and purpose of the Cross, the meaning and purpose of all
+the patient dealings of His whispering Spirit, are that we shall
+be like our Divine Lord in spirit first, and in body afterwards.
+
+And everything about the experiences of a true Christian spirit is
+charged with a prophecy of immortality. I have not time to dwell
+upon one point gathered from the context, that I intended to have
+insisted upon, viz. that the very desires which God's good Spirit
+works in a believing soul are themselves confirmations of their
+own fulfilment. But if you notice at your leisure the verses that
+precede my text, you will find that the Apostle adduces the
+groanings of `earnest desire to be clothed with our house which is
+from Heaven,' as a proof that we \textit{have} `a building of God,
+a house not made with hands.' That is to say, every longing in a
+Christian heart when it is most filled with that Spirit, and most
+in contact with God, and which is the answer of that heart to a
+promise of Christ---every such longing carries with it the
+assurance of its own fulfilment. He that hath wrought it has
+wrought it in order that the desire may fit us for its answer, and
+that the open mouth may be ready for the abundant filling which
+His grace designs. He works upon us, therefore, by making us
+desire a gift, and then He gives that which He desires. So let us
+cherish these longings, not for the accident of escaping death,
+nor as choosing the path by which we shall reach the blessed
+issue, but longing for that great issue itself; and try to keep
+more distinct and clear before all our minds this thought, `God
+means for me the participation in Christ's glorified Manhood, and
+my attaining of that Manhood is the end that He has in view in all
+that He does with me.'
+
+III. So I must say one word about the last thought that is here,
+and that is the certainty and the confidence. `Therefore we are
+always confident,' says the Apostle.
+
+`He that hath wrought us for the self-same thing is God.' Then we
+may be sure that as far as He is concerned, the work will not be
+suspended nor vain. \textit{This} man does not begin to build and
+is unable to finish. This workman has infinite resources, an
+unchanging purpose, and infinite long-suffering. He will complete
+His task.
+
+In the quarries of Egypt you will find gigantic stones,
+half-dressed, and intended to have been transported to some great
+temple. But there they lie, the work incomplete, and they never
+carried to their place. There are no half-polished stones in God's
+quarries. They are all finished where they lie, and then borne
+across the sea, like Hiram's from Lebanon, to the Temple on the
+hill. It is a certainty that God will finish His work; and since
+`He that hath wrought us is God,' we may be sure that He will not
+stop till He has done.
+
+But it is a certainty that you can thwart. It is an operation that
+you can counterwork. The potter in Jeremiah's parable was making a
+vessel upon his wheel, and the vessel was marred in his hand, and
+did not turn out what he wanted it. The meaning of the metaphor,
+which has often been twisted to express the very opposite, is that
+the potter's work may fail, that the artificer may be balked, that
+you can counterwork the divine dealing, and that all His purpose
+in your creation, in His providence and in His gift of His Son for
+your redemption, may come to nought as far as you are concerned.
+`I beseech you that ye receive not the grace of God in vain.' `In
+vain have I smitten your children,' wailed the Divine Love; `they
+have received no correction.' In vain God lavishes upon some of us
+His mercies, in vain for some of us has Christ toiled and suffered
+and died. Oh, brother! do not let all God's work on you come to
+nought, but yield yourselves to it. Rejoice in the confidence that
+He is moulding your character, cheerfully welcome and accept the
+providences, painful as they may be, by which He prepares you for
+heaven. The chisel is sharp that strikes off the superfluous
+pieces of marble, and when the chisel cuts, not into marble, but
+into a heart, there is a pang. Bear it, bear it! and understand
+the meaning of the blow of the sculptor's mallet, and see in all
+life the divine hand working towards the accomplishment of His own
+loving purpose. Then if we turn to Him, amid the pains of His
+discipline and the joys of His gifts of grace, with recognition
+and acceptance of His meaning in them all, and cry to Him, `Thy
+mercy, O Lord, endureth for ever, forsake not the work of Thine
+own hands,' we may be always confident, as knowing that `the Lord
+will perfect that which concerneth us.'
+
+\chapter{The Old House and the New}
+\markright{2 CORINTHIANS v. 8}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the
+body, and to be present with the Lord.'---2 \textsc{Cor.} v. 8.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+There lie in the words of my text simply these two things; the
+Christian view of what death is, and the Christian temper in which
+to anticipate it.
+
+I. First, the Christian view of what death is.
+
+Now it is to be observed that, properly speaking, the Apostle is
+not here referring to the state of the dead, but to the act of
+dying. The language would more literally and accurately be
+rendered `willing to \textit{go from} home, from the body, and to
+\textit{go} home, to the Lord.' The moment of transition of course
+leads to a permanent state, but it is the moment of transition
+which is in view in the words. I need not remind you, I suppose,
+that the metaphor of the home is one which has already been dwelt
+upon in the early part of the chapter, where the contrast is drawn
+between the transitory house of `this tent,' and the `building of
+God,' the body of incorruption and glory which the saints at the
+Resurrection day shall receive. So, then, the Christian view of
+the act of death is that it is simply a change of abode.
+
+Very clearly and firmly does Paul draw the line between the man
+and his dwelling-place. Life is more than a result of
+organisation. Consciousness, thought, feeling, are more than
+functions of matter. No materialist philosopher has ever been, or
+ever will be, able to explain within the limits of his system the
+strange difference between the cause and the effect; how it comes
+to pass that at the one end of the chain there is an impression
+upon a nerve, and at the other there is pain; how at the one end
+there is the throb of an inch of matter in a man's skull, and at
+the other end there are thoughts that breathe and words that burn,
+and that live for ever. That brings us up to the edge of a gulf
+over which no materialist philosopher has ever been able to cast a
+bridge. The scalpel cannot cut deep enough to solve this mystery.
+Conscience as well as instinct cry out against the theory that the
+worker and the tools are inseparable. For such a theory reduces
+human actions to mechanical results, and shatters all
+responsibility. Man is more than his dwelling-place. You crush a
+shell on the beach with your heel, and you slay its tiny
+inhabitant. But you can pull down the tent, and pluck up its pegs,
+and roll up its canvas, and put it away in a dark corner, and the
+tenant is untouched. The foolish senses crown Death as last, and
+lord of all. But wisdom says, `Life and thought have gone away
+side by side, leaving doors and windows wide,' and that is all
+that has happened.
+
+Still further, my text suggests that to the Christian soul the
+departure from the one house is the entrance into the other. The
+home has been the body; the home is now to be Jesus Christ. And
+very beautiful and significant with meanings, which only
+experience will fully unfold, is the representation that the Lord
+Christ Himself assumes the place which the bodily environment has
+hitherto held.
+
+That teaches us, at all events, that there is a new depth and
+closeness of union with Jesus waiting the Christian soul, when it
+lays aside the separating film of flesh. Here the bodily
+organisation, with its limitations, necessarily shuts us off from
+the closeness of intercourse which is possible for a naked soul.
+We know not how much separation may depend upon the immersing of
+the spirit in the fleshly tabernacle, but this we know, that,
+though here and now, by faith which dominates sense, souls can
+live in Christ even whilst they live in the body; yet there shall
+come a form of union so much more close, intimate, all-pervading,
+and all-encircling, as that the present union with Him by faith,
+precious as it is, shall be, as the Apostle calls it in our
+context, `absence from the Lord.' `We have to be discharged,' says
+an old thinker, `of a great deal of what we call body, and then we
+shall be more truly ourselves,' and more truly united to Him who,
+if we are Christian people at all, is the self of ourselves and
+the life of our lives. No man knows how close he can nestle to the
+bosom of Christ when the film of flesh is rent away. Just as when
+in some crowded street of a great city some grimy building is
+pulled down, a sudden daylight fills the vacant space, and all the
+site that had been shut out from the sky for many years is
+drenched in sunshine, so when `the earthly house of this
+tabernacle' is ruinated and falls, the light will flood the place
+where it stood, and to be `absent from the body' shall be to be
+`present with the Lord.'
+
+May we go a step further and suggest that, perhaps, in the bold
+metaphor of my text, there is an answer to the questions which so
+often rack loving and parted hearts? `Do the dead know aught of
+what affects us here? and can they do aught but gaze on Him, and
+love, and rest?' If it be that there is any such analogy as seems
+to be dimly shadowed in my text, between the relation of the body
+on earth to the spirit that inhabits it, and that of Jesus Christ
+to him who dwells in Him, and is clothed by Him, then it may be
+that, as the flesh, so the Christ transmits to the spirit that has
+Him for its home impressions from the outside world, and affords a
+means of action upon that world. Christ may be, if I might so say,
+the sensorium of the disembodied spirit; and Christ may be the
+hand of the man who hath no other instrument by which to express
+himself. But all that is fancy perhaps, speculation certainly; and
+yet there seems to be a shadow of a foundation for at least
+entertaining the possibility of such a thought as that Jesus is
+the means of knowing and the means of acting to those who rest
+from their labours in Him, and dwell in peace in His arms. But be
+that as it may, the reality of a close communion and encircling by
+the felt presence of Jesus Christ, which, in its blessed
+closeness, will make the closest communion here seem to be
+obscure, is certainly declared in the words before us.
+
+Then this transition is regarded in my text as being the work of a
+moment. It is not a long journey of which the beginning is `to go
+\textit{from} home, from the body,' and the end is `to \textit{go}
+home, to the Lord.' But it is one and the same motion which,
+looked at from the one side, is departure, and looked at from the
+other is arrival. The old saying has it, `there is but a step
+between me and death.' The truth is, there is but a step between
+me and \textit{life}. The mighty angel in the Apocalypse, that
+stood with one foot on the firm land and the other on the
+boundless ocean, is but the type of the spirit in the brief moment
+of transition, when the consciousness of two worlds blends, and it
+is clothed upon with the house which is from heaven, in the very
+act of stripping off the earthly house of this tabernacle.
+
+Nor need I remind you, I suppose, in more than a sentence, that
+this transition obviously leads into a state of conscious
+communion with Jesus Christ. The dreary figment of an unconscious
+interval for the disembodied spirit has no foundation, either in
+what we know of spirit, or in what is revealed to us in Scripture.
+For the one thing that seems to make it probable---the use of that
+metaphor of `sleeping in Jesus'---is quite sufficiently accounted
+for by the notions of repose, and cessation of outward activity,
+and withdrawal of capacity of being influenced by the so-called
+realities of this lower world, without dragging in the unfounded
+notion of unconsciousness. My text is incompatible with it, for it
+is absurd to say of an unconscious spirit, clear of a bodily
+environment, that it is anywhere; and there is no intelligible
+sense in which the condition of such a spirit can be called being
+`with the Lord.'
+
+So, then, I think a momentary transition, with uninterrupted
+consciousness, which leads to a far deeper and more wonderful and
+blessed sense of unity with Jesus Christ than is possible here on
+earth, is the true shape in which the act of death presents itself
+to the Christian thinker.
+
+And remember, dear brethren, that is all we know. Nothing else is
+certain---nothing but this, `with the Lord,' and the resulting
+certainty that therefore it is well with them. It is enough for
+our faith, for our comfort, for our patient waiting. They live in
+Christ, `and there we find them worthier to be loved,' and
+certainly lapped in a deeper rest. `Blessed are the dead that die
+in the Lord.'
+
+II. In the next place, note the Christian temper in which to
+anticipate the transition.
+
+`We are always courageous, and willing rather to leave our home in
+the body, and to go home to the Lord.' Now I must briefly remind
+you of how the Apostle comes to this state of feeling. He has been
+speaking about the natural shrinking, which belongs to all
+humanity, from the act of dissolution, considered as being the
+stripping off of the garment of the flesh. And he has declared, on
+behalf of himself and the early Christian Church, his own and
+their personal desire that they might escape from that trial by
+the path which seemed possible to the early Christians---viz. that
+of surviving until the return of Jesus Christ from Heaven, when
+they would be `clothed upon with the house which is from Heaven,'
+without the necessity of stripping off that with which at present
+they are invested. Then he says---and this is a very remarkable
+thought---that just because this instinctive shrinking from death
+and yearning for the glorified body is so strong in the Christian
+heart, that is a sign that there is such a glorified body waiting
+for us. He says, `we know that if our house ... were dissolved, we
+have a building of God.' And his reason for knowing it is this,
+`\textit{for} in this we groan.' That is a bold position to say
+that a yearning in the Christian consciousness prophesies its own
+fulfilment. Our desires are the prophecies of His gifts. Then, on
+this certainty---which he deduces from the fact of the longing for
+it---on this certainty of the glorious, ultimate body of the
+Resurrection he bases his willingness expressed in the text, to go
+through the unwelcome process of leaving the old house, although
+he shrinks from it.
+
+So, then, Christian faith does not destroy the natural reluctance
+to put aside the old companion of our lives. The old house, though
+it be smoky, dimly lighted, and, by our own careless keeping,
+sluttish and grimy in many a corner, yet is the only house we have
+ever known, and to be absent from it is untried and strange. There
+is nothing wrong in saying `we would not be unclothed but clothed
+upon.' Nature speaks there. We may reverently entertain the same
+feelings which our Pattern acknowledged, when He said, `I have a
+baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened until it be
+accomplished.' And there would be nothing sinful in repeating His
+prayer with His conditions, `If it be possible, let this cup pass
+from Me.'
+
+But then the text suggests to us the large Christian possessions
+and hope which counterwork this reluctance, in the measure in
+which we live lives of faith. There is the assurance of that
+ultimate home in which all the transiency of the present material
+organisation is exchanged for the enduring permanence which knows
+no corruption. The `tent' is swept away to make room for the
+`building.' The earthly house is dissolved in order that there may
+be reared round the homeless tenant the house eternal, `not made
+with hands,' God's own work, which is waiting in the heavens;
+because the power that shall frame it is there. Not only that
+great hope of the `body of His glory,' with which at the last all
+true souls shall be invested, but furthermore, `the earnest of the
+spirit,' and the blessed experiences therefrom, resulting even
+here, ought to make the unwelcome necessity less unwelcome. If the
+firstfruits be righteousness and peace and joy of the Holy Ghost,
+what shall the harvest be? If the `earnest,' the shilling given in
+advance, be so precious, what will the whole wealth of the
+inheritance which it heralds be when it is received?
+
+For such reasons the transitory passage becomes less painful and
+unwelcome. Who is there that would hesitate to dip his foot into
+the ice-cold brook if he knew that it would not reach above his
+ankles, and that a step would land him in blessedness unimagined
+till experienced?
+
+Therefore the Christian temper is that of quiet willingness and
+constant courage. There is nothing hysterical here, nothing
+morbid, nothing overstrained, nothing artificial. The Apostle
+says: `I would rather not. I should like if I could escape it. It
+is an unwelcome necessity; but when I see what I do see beyond,' I
+am ready. Since so it must be, I will go, not reluctantly, nor
+dragged away from life, nor clinging desperately to it as it slips
+from my hands, nor dreading anything that may happen beyond; but
+always courageous, and prepared to go whithersoever the path may
+take me, since I am sure that it ends in His bosom. He is willing
+to go from the home of the body, because to do that is to go home
+to Christ.
+
+There are other references of our Apostle's, substantially of the
+same tone as that of my text, but with very beautiful and
+encouraging differences. When he was nearer his end, when it
+seemed to him as if the headsman's block was not very far off, his
+\textit{willingness} had intensified into `having a
+\textit{desire} to depart and to be with Christ, which is far
+better.' And when the end was all but reached, and he knew that
+death was waiting just round the next turn in the road, he said,
+with the confidence that in the midst of the struggle would have
+been vainglory, but at the end of it was a foretaste of the calm
+of Heaven, `I have finished my course, I have kept the faith;
+henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.' That
+is our model, dear brethren,---`always courageous,' afraid of
+nothing in life, in death, or beyond, and therefore willing to go
+from home from the body and to go home to the Lord.
+
+Think of this man thus fronting the inevitable, with no excitement
+and with no delusions. Remember what Paul believed about death,
+about sin, about his own sin, about judgment, about hell. And then
+think of how to him death had made its darkness beautiful with the
+light of Christ's face, and all the terror was gone out of it. Do
+you think so about death? Do you shrink from it? Why? Why do you
+not take Paul's cure for the shrinking? If you can say, `To me to
+live is Christ,' you will have no difficulty in saying, `and to
+die is gain.' That is the only way by which you can come to such a
+temper, and then you will be willing to move from the cottage to
+the palace, and to wait in peace till you are shifted again into
+`the building of God, the house not made with hands, eternal in
+the heavens.'
+
+\chapter{Pleasing Christ}
+\markright{2 CORINTHIANS v. 2}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`We labour that whether present or absent we may be accepted of
+Him.'---2 \textsc{Cor.} v. 2.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+We do not usually care very much for, or very much trust, a man's
+own statement of the motives of his life, especially if in the
+statement he takes credit for lofty and noble ones. And it would
+be rather a dangerous experiment for the ordinary run of so-called
+Christian people to stand up and say what Paul says here, that the
+supreme design and aim towards which all their lives are directed
+is to please Jesus Christ. In his case the tree was known by its
+fruits. Certainly there never was a life of more noble
+self-abnegation, of more continuous heroism, of loftier aspiration
+and lowlier service than the life of which we see the very pulse
+in these words.
+
+But Paul is not only professing his own faith, he is speaking in
+the name of all his brethren. `We,' ought to include every man and
+woman who calls himself or herself a Christian. It is this setting
+of the will of Jesus Christ high up above all other commandments,
+and proposing to one's self as the aim that swallows up all other
+aims, that I may please Him---it is this, and not creeds, forms,
+opinions, professions, or even a faith that simply trusts in Him
+for salvation, that makes a true Christian. You are a Christian in
+the precise measure in which Christ's will is uppermost and
+exclusive in your life, and for all your professions and your
+orthodoxy and your worship and your faith, not one hair's-breadth
+further. Here is the signature and the common characteristic of
+all real Christians, `We labour that whether present or absent we
+may be well-pleasing to Him.'
+
+So then in looking together at these words now, I take three
+points, the supreme aim of the Christian life; the concentration
+of effort which that aim demands; and the insignificance to which
+it reduces all external things.
+
+I. First, then, let me deal with that supreme aim of the Christian
+life.
+
+The word which is, correctly enough, rendered `accepted,' may more
+literally, and perhaps with a closer correspondence to the
+Apostle's meaning, be translated `well-pleasing,' and the aim is
+this, not merely that we may be accepted, but that we may bring a
+smile into His face, and some joy and complacent delight in us
+into His heart, when He looks upon our doings. That pleasure of
+Jesus Christ in them that `fear Him, and in them that hope in His
+mercy' and do His will is a present emotion that fills His heart
+in looking upon His followers, and it will be especially declared
+in the solemn, final judgment. We must keep in view both of these
+periods, if we would rightly understand the sweep of the aim which
+ought to be uppermost in all Christian people. Here and now in our
+present acts, we should so live as to occasion a present sentiment
+of complacent delight in us, in the heart of the Christ who sees
+us here and now and always. We should so live as that at that
+far-off future day when we shall `all be manifested before the
+Judgment-seat of Christ,' the Judge may bend from His tribunal,
+and welcome us into His presence with a word of congratulation and
+an outstretched hand of loving reception. Set that two-fold aim
+before you, Christian men and women, else you will fail to
+experience the full stimulus of this thought.
+
+Now such an aim as this implies a very wonderful conception of
+Jesus Christ's present relations to us. It is a truth that we may
+minister to His joy. It is a truth that just as really as you
+mothers are glad when you hear from a far-off land that your boy
+is doing well, and getting on, so Jesus Christ's heart fills with
+gladness when He sees you and me walking in the paths in which He
+would have us go. We often think about our dear dead that they
+cannot know of us and our doings here, because the sorrow that
+would sometimes come from the contemplation of our evil, or of our
+misfortunes, would trouble them in their serene rest. We know not
+how that may be, but this at least we do know, that the Man Jesus
+Christ, who, like those dear ones, `was dead, and is alive for
+evermore,' in His human nature has knowledge of all His children's
+failures, as well as successes, and is affected with some shadow
+of regret, or with some reality of delight, according as they
+follow or stray from the paths in which He would have them walk.
+If it be so with Him it may be so with them; and though it be not
+so with them it must be so with Him. So this strange, sweet,
+tender, and powerful thought is a piece of plain prose, that
+Christ is glad when you and I are good.
+
+Does it need any word to emphasise the force of that motive to a
+Christian heart that loves the Master? Surely this is the great
+and blessed peculiarity of all the morality of Christianity that
+it has all a personal bearing and aspect, and that just as the sum
+of all our duty is gathered up in the one command, `Imitate
+Christ,' so the motive for all our duty lies in `If you love Me,
+keep My commandments,' and the reward which ought to stimulate
+more than anything besides is the one thought, not, of what I
+shall get because I am good, but of what I shall give Him by my
+obedience, a joy in the heart that was stabbed through and through
+by sorrow for my sake. That we may please Him `who pleased not
+Himself,' is surely the grandest motive on which the pursuit of
+holiness, and the imitation of Jesus Christ can ever be made to
+rest. Oh! how different, and how much more blessed such a motive
+and aim is than all the lower reasons for which men are sometimes
+exhorted and encouraged to be good! What a difference it is when
+we say, `Do that thing because it is right,' and when we say, `Do
+that thing because you will be happier if you do,' or when we say,
+`Do it because He would like you to do it.' The one is all cold
+and abstract. To stand before a man and simply say: `Now go and do
+your duty,' is a poor way of setting his feet upon a rock and
+establishing his goings. Duty is not a word that stirs men's
+hearts, however it may awe their consciences. It rises up before
+us like some goddess statuesque and serene, with purity, indeed,
+in her deep and solemn eyes, but with nothing appealing to our
+affections in her stern lineaments. But when the thought of `You
+ought' melts into `For my sake,' and through the dissolving face
+of the cold marble goddess there shine the beloved lineaments of
+Him who `wears the Godhead's most benignant grace,' the smile upon
+His face becomes a motive that touches all hearts. Transmute
+obligation into gratitude, and in front of duty and appeals to
+self put Christ, and all the harshness and difficulty and burden
+and self-sacrifice of obedience becomes easy and a joy.
+
+Then let me remind you that this one supreme aim of pleasing Jesus
+Christ can be carried on through all life in every varying form,
+great or small. A blessed unity is given to our whole being when
+the little things and the big things, the easy things and the hard
+things, deeds which are conspicuous and deeds which no eye sees,
+are all brought under the influence of the one motive and made
+co-operant to the one end. Drive that one steadfast aim through
+your lives like a bar of iron, and it will give the lives strength
+and consistency---not rigidity, because they may still be
+flexible. Nothing will be too small to be consecrated by that
+motive; nothing too great to own its power. You can please Him
+everywhere and always. The only thing that is inconsistent with
+pleasing Him is the thing which, alas! we do at all times and
+should do at no time, and that is to sin against Him. If we bear
+with us this as a conscious motive in every part of our day's work
+it will give us a quick discernment as to what is evil, which I
+believe nothing else will so surely give. If you desire life to be
+noble, uniform, dignified, great in its minutest acts and solemn
+in its very trifles, and if you would have some continual test and
+standard by which you can detect all spurious, apparent virtues,
+and discover lurking and masked temptations, carry this one aim
+clear and high above all else, and make it the purpose of the
+whole life, to be well-pleasing unto Him.
+
+II. Now, in the next place, notice the concentrated effort which
+this aim requires.
+
+The word rendered in my text `labour' is a peculiar one, very
+seldom employed in Scripture. It means, in its most literal
+signification, to be fond of honour, or to be actuated by a love
+of honour; and hence it comes, by a very natural transition, to
+mean to strive to gain something for the sake of the honour
+connected with it. That is to say, it not only expresses the
+notion of diligent, strenuous effort, but it reveals the reason
+for that diligence and strenuousness in what I may call (for the
+word might almost be so rendered) the \textit{ambition} of being
+honoured by pleasing Christ. So that the `labour' of my text
+covers the whole ground, not only of the act but of its motive.
+The concentration of effort which such an aim requires may be
+enforced by one or two simple exhortations.
+
+First, let me say that we ought, as Christian people, to cultivate
+this noble ambition of pleasing Jesus Christ. Men have all got the
+love of approbation deep in them. God put it there for a good
+purpose, not that we might shape our lives so as to get others to
+pat us on the back, and say, `Well done!' but that, in addition to
+the other solemn and sovereign motives for following the paths of
+righteousness, we might have this highest ambition to impel us on
+the road. And it is the duty of all Christians to see to it that
+they discipline themselves so as, in their own feelings, to put
+high above all the approbation or censure of their fellows the
+approbation or censure of Jesus Christ. That will take some
+cultivation. It is a great deal easier to shape our courses so as
+to get one another's praise. I remember a quaint saying in a
+German book. `An old schoolmaster tried to please this one and
+that one, and it failed. ``Well, then,'' said he, ``I will try to
+please Christ.'' And that succeeded.'
+
+And let me remind you that a second part of the concentration of
+effort which this aim requires is to strive with the utmost energy
+in the accomplishment of it. Paul did not believe that anybody
+could please Jesus Christ without a fight for it. His notion of
+acceptable service was service which a man suppressed much to
+render, and overcame much to bring. And I urge upon you this, dear
+brethren, that with all the mob of faces round about us which shut
+out Christ's face, and with all the temptations to follow other
+aims, and with the weaknesses of our own characters, it never was,
+is not, nor ever will be, an easy thing, or a thing to be done
+without a struggle and a dead lift, to live so as to be
+well-pleasing to Him.
+
+Look at Paul's metaphors with which he sets forth the Christian
+life---a warfare, a race, a struggle, a building up of some great
+temple structure, and the like---all suggesting at the least the
+idea of patient, persistent, continuous toil, and most of them
+suggesting also the idea of struggle with antagonistic forces and
+difficulties, either within or without. So we must set our
+shoulders to the wheel, put our backs into our work. Do not think
+that you are going to be carried into the condition of conformity
+with Jesus Christ in a dream, or that the road to heaven is a
+primrose path, to be trodden in silver slippers. `I will not offer
+unto the Lord that which doth cost me nothing,' and if you do, it
+will be worth exactly what it costs. There must be concentration
+of effort if we are to be well-pleasing to Him.
+
+But then do not forget, on the other hand, that deeper than all
+effort, and the very spring and life of it, there must be the
+opening of our hearts for the entrance of His life and spirit, by
+the presence of which only are we well-pleasing to Christ. That
+which pleases Him in you and me is our likeness to Him. According
+to the old Puritan illustration, the refiner sat by the furnace
+until he could see in the molten metal his own face mirrored, and
+then he knew it was pure. So what pleases Christ in us is the
+reflection of Himself. And how can we get that likeness to Himself
+except by receiving into our hearts the Spirit that was in Christ
+Jesus, and will dwell in us, and will produce in us in our measure
+the same image that it formed in Him? `Work \textit{out} your own
+salvation,' because `it is God that worketh \textit{in} you.'
+Labour, concentrate effort, and above all open the heart to the
+entrance of that transforming power.
+
+III. Lastly, let me suggest the utter insignificance to which this
+aim reduces all externals.
+
+`We labour,' says Paul, `that whether present or absent, we may be
+accepted.' What differences of condition are covered by that
+parenthetical phrase---`present or absent!' He talks about it as
+if it was a very small matter, does he not? And what is included
+in it? Whether a man shall be in the body or out of it; that is to
+say, whether he be alive or dead. Here is an aim then, so great,
+so lofty, so all-comprehensive that it reduces the difference
+between living in the world and being out of it, to a trifle. And
+if we stand so high up that these two varieties of condition
+dwindle into insignificance and seem to have melted into one, do
+you think that there is anything else that will be very big? If
+the difference between life and death is dwindled and dwarfed,
+what else do you suppose will remain? Nothing, I should think.
+
+So if we only, by God's help, which will be given to us if we want
+it, keep this clear before us as the motive of all our life, then
+all the possible alternatives of human condition and circumstance
+will sink into insignificance, and from that lofty summit will
+`show scarce so gross as beetles' in the air beneath our lofty
+station.
+
+Whether we be rich or poor, solitary or beset by friends, happy or
+sad, hopeful or despairing, young or old, wearied or buoyant,
+learned or foolish, it matters not. The one aim lifts itself
+before us, and they in whose eyes shine the light of that great
+issue are careless of the road along which they pass. Do you
+enlist yourselves in the company that fires at the long range, and
+all those that take aim at the shorter ones will seem to be very
+pitifully limiting their powers.
+
+Then remember that this same aim, and this same result may be
+equally pursued and attained whether here or yonder. It is
+something to have a course of life which runs straight along,
+unbent aside, and not cut short off, by the change from earth to
+Heaven. And this felicity he only has who, amidst things temporal
+and insignificant, sees and seeks the eternal smile on the face of
+his unchanging Saviour. On earth, in death, through eternity, such
+a life will be homogeneous and of a piece; and when all other aims
+are hull down below the horizon, forgotten and out of sight, then
+still this will be the purpose, and yonder it will be the
+accomplished purpose, of each, to please the Lord Jesus Christ.
+
+My dear friend, remember that in its full meaning this aim regards
+the future, and points onward to that great judgment-seat where
+you and I will certainly each of us give account of himself. Do
+you think that you will please Christ then? Do you think that when
+that day dawns, a smile of welcome will come into His eyes, and a
+glow of gladness at the meeting into yours? Or have you cause to
+fear that you will `call on the rocks and the hills to cover you
+from the face of Him that sitteth on the Throne?'
+
+We are all close by one another; our voices are very audible to
+each other. Do you learn, Christian people, that the first,---or
+at least a prime---condition of all Christian and Christ-pleasing
+life, is a wholesome disregard of what anybody says but Himself.
+The old Laced\ae{}monians used to stir themselves to heroism by
+the thought: `What will they say of us in Sparta?' The governor of
+some outlying English colony minds very little what the people
+that he is set to rule think about him. He reports to Downing
+Street, and it is the opinion of the Home Government that
+influences him. You report to headquarters. Never mind what
+anybody else thinks of you. Your business is to please Christ, and
+the less you trouble yourselves about pleasing men the more you
+will succeed in doing it. Be deaf to the tittle tattle of your
+fellow soldiers in the ranks. It is your Commander's smile that
+will be your highest reward.
+
+\begin{verse}
+`Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, \\
+ But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes, \\
+ And perfect witness of all-judging Jove; \\
+ As he pronounces lastly on each deed, \\
+ Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed.'
+\end{verse}
+
+\chapter{The Love That Constrains}
+\markright{2 CORINTHIANS v. 14}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`The love of Christ constraineth us.'---2 \textsc{Cor.} v. 14.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+It is a dangerous thing to be unlike other people. It is still
+more dangerous to be better than other people. The world has a
+little heap of depreciatory terms which it flings, age after age,
+at all men who have a higher standard and nobler aims than their
+fellows. A favourite term is `mad.' So, long ago they said, `The
+prophet is a fool; the spiritual man is mad,' and, in His turn,
+Jesus was said to be `beside Himself,' and Festus shouted from the
+judgment-seat to Paul that he was mad. A great many people had
+said the same thing about him before, as the context shows. For
+the verse before my text is: `Whether we be beside ourselves, it
+is to God: or whether we be sober, it is for your cause.' Now the
+former clause can only refer to other people's estimate of the
+Apostle. No doubt there were many things about him that gave
+colour to it. He said that a dead Man had appeared to him and
+spoken with him. He said that he had been carried up into the
+third heaven. He had a very strange creed in the judgment of the
+times. He had abandoned a brilliant career for a very poor one. He
+was obviously utterly indifferent to the ordinary aims of men. He
+had a consuming enthusiasm. And so the world explained him
+satisfactorily to itself by the short and easy method of saying,
+`Insane.' And Paul explained himself by the great word of my text,
+`The love of Christ constraineth us.' Wherever there is a life
+adequately under the influence of Christ's love the results will
+be such as an unsympathising world may call madness, but which are
+the perfection of sober-mindedness. Would there were more such
+madmen! I wish to try to make one or two of them now, by getting
+some of you to take for your motto, `The love of Christ
+constraineth us.'
+
+I. Now the first thing to notice is this constraining love.
+
+I need not spend time in showing that when Paul says here `The
+love of Christ,' he means Christ's love to him, not his to Christ.
+That is in accordance with his continual usage of the expression;
+and it is in accordance with facts. For it is not my love to
+Jesus, but His love to me, that brings the real moulding power
+into my life, and my love to Him is only the condition on which
+the true power acts upon me. To get the fulcrum and the lever
+which will heave a life up to the heights you have to get out of
+yourselves.
+
+Now Paul never saw Jesus Christ in this earthly life. Timothy, who
+is associated with him in this letter, and perhaps is one of the
+`us,' never saw Him either. The Corinthian believers whom he is
+addressing had, of course, never seen Him. And yet the Apostle has
+not the slightest hesitation in taking that great benediction of
+Christ's love and spreading it over them all. That love is
+independent of time and of space; it includes humanity, and is
+co-extensive with it. Unturned away by unworthiness, unrepelled by
+non-responsiveness, undisgusted by any sin, unwearied by any,
+however numerous, foiling of its attempts, the love of Christ,
+like the great heavens that bend above us, wraps us all in its
+sweetness, and showers upon us all its light and its dew.
+
+And yet, brethren, I would have you remember that whilst we thus
+try to paint, in poor, poor words, the universality of that love,
+we have to remember that it does not partake of the weakness that
+infects all human affections, which are only strong when they are
+narrow, and as the river expands it becomes shallow, and loses the
+force in its flow which it had when it was gathered between
+straiter banks, so as that a universal charity is almost akin to a
+universal indifference. But this love that grasps us all, this
+river that `proceedeth from the Throne of God and of the Lamb,'
+flows in its widest reaches as deep and as impetuous in its career
+as if it were held within the narrowest of gorges. For Christ's
+universal love is universal only because it is individualising and
+particular. We love our nation by generalising and losing sight of
+the individuals. Christ loves the world because He loves every man
+and woman in it, and His grace enwraps all because His grace
+hovers over each.
+
+\begin{verse}
+`The sun whose beams most glorious are \\
+ Despiseth no beholder,'
+\end{verse}
+
+\noindent but the rays come straight to each eyeball. Be sure of
+this: that He who, when the multitude thronged Him and pressed
+Him, felt the tremulous, timid, scarcely perceptible touch of one
+woman's wasted finger on the hem of His garment, holds each of us
+in the grasp of His love, which is universal, because it applies
+to each. You and I have each the whole radiance of it pouring down
+on our heads, and none intercepts the beams from any other. So,
+brethren, let us each feel not only the love that grasps the
+world, but the love that empties itself on me.
+
+But there is one more remark that I wish to make in reference to
+this constraining love of Jesus Christ, and that is, that in order
+to see and feel it we must take the point of view that this
+Apostle takes in my text. For hearken how he goes on. `The love of
+Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge, that if one died
+for all, then all died, and that He died for all,' etc. That is to
+say, the death of Christ for all, which is equivalent to the death
+of Christ for each, is the great solvent by which the love of God
+melts men's hearts, and is the great proof that Jesus Christ loves
+me, and thee, and all of us. If you strike out that conception you
+have struck out from your Christianity the vindication of the
+belief that Christ loves the world. What possible meaning is there
+in the expression, `He died for all?' How can the fact of His
+death on a `green hill' outside the gates of a little city in
+Syria have world-wide issues, unless in that death He bore, and
+bore away, the sins of the whole world? I know that there have
+been many---and there are many to-day---who not accepting what
+seems to me to be the very vital heart of Christianity---viz. the
+death of Christ for the world's sin, do yet cherish---as I think
+illogically---yet do cherish a regard for Him, which puts some of
+us who call ourselves `orthodox,' and are tepid, to the blush.
+Thank God! men are often better than their creeds, as well as
+worse than them. But that fact does not affect what I am saying
+now, and what I beg you to take for what you find it to be worth,
+that unless we believe that Jesus Christ died for all, I do not
+know what claim He has on the love of the world. We shall admire
+Him, we shall bow before Him, as the very realised ideal of
+humanity, though how this one Man has managed to escape the taint
+of the all-pervading evil remains, upon that hypothesis, very
+obscure. But love Him? No! Why should I? But if I feel that His
+death had world-wide issues, and that He went down into the
+darkness in order that He might bring the world into the light,
+then---and I am sure, on the wide scale and in the long-run only
+then---will men turn to Him and say, `Thou hast died for me, help
+me to live for Thee.' Brethren, I beseech you, take care of
+emptying the death of Christ of its deepest meaning, lest you
+should thereby rob His character of its chiefest charm, and His
+name of its mightiest soul-melting power. The love that
+constraineth is the love that died, and died for all, because it
+died for each.
+
+II. Now let me ask you to consider the echo of this constraining
+love.
+
+I said a moment or two ago that Christ's love to us is the
+constraining power, and that ours to Him is but the condition on
+which that power works. But between the two there comes something
+which brings that constraining love to bear upon our hearts. And
+so notice what my text goes on to adduce as needful for Christ's
+love to have its effect---namely, `because we thus judge,' etc.
+Then my estimate, my apprehension of the love of Christ must come
+in between its manifestation and its power to grip, to restrain,
+to impel me. If I may use such a figure, He stands, as it were,
+bugle in hand, and blows the sweet strains that are meant to set
+the echoes flying. But the rock must receive the impact of the
+vibrations ere it can throw back the thinned echo of the music.
+Love must be believed and known ere it can be responded to.
+
+Now the only answer and echo that hearts desire is the love of the
+beloved heart. We all know that in our earthly life. Love is as
+much a hunger to be loved as the outgoing of my own affection. The
+two things are inseparable, and there is nothing that repays love
+but love. Jesus Christ wishes each of us to love Him. If it is
+true that He loves me, then, intertwisted with the outgoing of His
+heart towards me is the yearning that my heart may go out towards
+Him. Dear brethren, this is no pulpit rhetoric, it is a plain,
+simple fact, inseparable from the belief in Christ's love---that
+He wishes you and every soul of man to love Him, and that,
+whatever else you bring, lip reverence, orthodox belief, apparent
+surrender, in the assay shop of His great mint all these are
+rejected, and the only metal that passes the fire is the pure gold
+of an answering love. Brethren! is that what you bring to Jesus
+Christ?
+
+Love seeks for love, and our love can only be an echo of His. He
+takes the beginning in everything. If I am to love Him back again,
+I must have faith in His love to me. And if that be so, then the
+true way by which you, imperfect Christian people, can deepen and
+strengthen your love to Jesus Christ is not so much by efforts to
+work up a certain warmth of sentiment and glow of affection, as by
+gazing, with believing eyes of the heart, upon that which kindles
+your love to Him. If you want ice to melt, put it out into the
+sunshine, If you want the mirror to gleam, do not spend all your
+time in polishing it. Carry it where it can catch the ray, and it
+will flash it back in glory. `We love Him because He first loved
+us.' Our love is an echo; be sure that you listen for the parent
+note, and link yourselves by faith with that great love which has
+come down from Heaven for us all.
+
+But how can I speak about echoes and responses when I know that
+there are scores of men and women whom a preacher's words reach
+who would be ashamed of themselves, and rightly, if they exhibited
+the same callousness of heart and selfishness of ingratitude to
+some human, partial benefactor as they are not ashamed to have
+exhibited all their lives to Jesus Christ. Echo? Yes! your
+heartstrings are set vibrating fast enough whenever, in the
+adjoining apartment, an instrument is touched which is tuned to
+the same key as your heart. Pleasures, earthly aims, worldly
+gifts, the sweetnesses of human life, all these things set them
+thrilling, and you can hear the music, but your hearts are not
+tuned to answer to the note that is struck in `He loved me and
+gave Himself for me.' The bugle is blown, and there is silence,
+and no echo, faint and far, comes whispering back. Brethren, we
+use no one else, in whose love we have any belief, a thousandth
+part so ill as we use Jesus Christ.
+
+III. Now, lastly, let me say a word about the constraining
+influence of this echoed love.
+
+Its first effect, if it has any real power in our hearts and
+lives, will be to change their centre, to decentralise. Look what
+the Apostle goes on to say: `We thus judge that He ... died for
+all, that they which live should not live henceforth unto
+themselves.' That is the great transformation. Secure that, and
+all nobleness will follow, and `whatsoever things are lovely and
+of good report' will come, like doves to their windows, flocking
+into the soul that has ceased to find its centre in its poor
+rebellious self. All love derives its power to elevate, refine,
+beautify, ennoble, conquer, from the fact that, in lower degree,
+all love makes the beloved the centre, and not the self. Hence the
+mother's self-sacrifice, hence the sweet reciprocity of wedded
+life, hence everything in humanity that is noble and good. Love is
+the antagonist of selfishness, and the highest type of love should
+be, and in the measure in which we are under the influence of
+Christ's love will be, the self-surrendering life of a Christian
+man. I know that in saying so I am condemning myself and my
+brethren. All the same, it is true. The one power that rescues a
+man from the tyranny of living for self, which is the mother of
+all sin and ignobleness, is when a man can say `Christ is my aim,'
+`Christ is my object.' `The life that I live in the flesh I live
+by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for
+me.' There is no secret of self-annihilation, which is
+self-transfiguration, and, I was going to say, deification, like
+that of loving Christ with all my heart because He has loved me
+so.
+
+Again, let me remind you that, on its lower reaches and levels, we
+find that all true affection has in it a strange power of
+assimilating its objects to one another. Just as a man and woman
+who have lived together for half a century in wedded life come to
+have the same notions, the same prejudices, the same tastes, and
+sometimes you can see their very faces being moulded into
+likeness, so, if I love Jesus Christ, I shall by degrees grow
+liker and liker to Him, and be `changed into the same image, from
+glory to glory.'
+
+Again, the love constrains, and not only constrains but impels,
+because it becomes a joy to divine and to do the will of the
+beloved Christ. `My yoke is easy.' Is it? It is very hard to be a
+Christian. His requirements are a great deal sterner than others.
+His yoke is easy, not because it is a lighter yoke, but because it
+is padded with love. And that makes all service a sacrament, and
+the surrender of my own will, which is the essence of obedience, a
+joy.
+
+So, dear friends, we come here in sight of the unique and blessed
+characteristic of all Christian morality, and of all its practical
+exhortations, and the Gospel stands alone as the mightiest
+moulding power in the world, just because its word is `love, and
+do as thou wilt.' For in the measure of thy love will thy will
+coincide with the will of Christ. There is nothing else that has
+anything like that power. We do not want to be told what is right.
+We know it a great deal better than we practise it. A revelation
+from heaven that simply told me my duty would be surplusage. `If
+there had been a law that could have given life, righteousness had
+been by the law.' We want a life, not a law, and the love of
+Christ brings the life to us.
+
+And so, dear friends, that life, restrained and impelled by the
+love to which it is being assimilated, is a life of liberty and a
+life of blessedness. In the measure in which the love of Christ
+constrains any man, it makes for him difficulties easy, the
+impossible possible, the crooked things straight, and the rough
+places plain. The duty becomes a delight, and self ceases to
+disturb. If the love of God is shed abroad in a heart, and in the
+measure in which it is, that heart will be at rest, and a great
+peace will brood over it. Then the will bows in glad submission,
+and all the powers arise to joyous service. We are lords of the
+world and ourselves when we are Christ's servants for love's sake;
+and earth and its good are never so good as when the power of His
+echoed love rules our lives. Do you know and believe that Christ
+loves you? Do you know and believe that you had a place in His
+heart when He hung on the Cross for the salvation of the world?
+Have you answered that love with yours, kindled by your faith in,
+and experience of, His? Is His love the overmastering impulse
+which urges you to all good, the mighty constraint that keeps you
+back from all evil, the magnet that draws, the anchor that
+steadies, the fortress that defends, the light that illumines, the
+treasure that enriches? Is it the law that commands, and the power
+that enables? Then you are blessed, though people will perhaps say
+that you are mad, whilst here; and you will be blessed for ever
+and ever.
+
+\chapter{The Entreaties of God}
+\markright{2 CORINTHIANS v. 20}
+
+\footnotesize
+\begin{quote}
+`Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech
+... by us: we pray ... in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to
+God.'---2 \textsc{Cor.} v. 20.
+\end{quote}
+\normalsize
+
+These are wonderful and bold words, not so much because of what
+they claim for the servants as because of what they reveal of the
+Lord. That thought, `as though God did beseech,' seems to me to be
+the one deserving of our attention now, far rather than any
+inferences which may be drawn from the words as to the relation of
+preachers of the Gospel to man and to God. I wish, therefore, to
+try to set forth the wonderfulness of this mystery of a beseeching
+God, and to put by the side of it the other wonder and mystery of
+men refusing the divine beseechings.
+
+Before doing so, however, I remark that the supplement which
+stands in our Authorised Version in this text is a misleading and
+unfortunate one. `As though God did beseech \textit{you}' and `we
+pray \textit{you}' unduly narrow the scope of the Apostolic
+message, and confuse the whole course of the Apostolic reasoning
+here. For he has been speaking of a world which is reconciled to
+God, and he finds a consequence of that reconciliation of the
+world in the fact that he and his fellow-preachers are entrusted
+with the word of reconciliation. The scope of their message, then,
+can be no narrower than the scope of the reconciliation; and
+inasmuch as that is world-wide the beseeching must be co-extensive
+therewith, and must cover the whole ground of humanity. It is a
+universal message that is set forth here. The Corinthians, to whom
+Paul was speaking, are, by his hypothesis, already reconciled to
+God, and the message which he has in trust for them is given in
+the subsequent words: `We then, as workers together with God,
+beseech you also that ye receive not the grace of God in vain.'
+But the message, the pleading of the divine heart, `be ye
+reconciled to God,' is a pleading that reaches over the whole
+range of a reconciled world. I take then, just these two thoughts,
+God beseeching man, and man refusing God.
+
+I. God beseeching man.
+
+Now notice how, in my text, there alternates, as if substantially
+the same idea, the thoughts that Christ and that God pray men to
+be reconciled. `We are ambassadors on \textit{Christ's} behalf, as
+though \textit{God} did beseech you by us, we pray on
+\textit{Christ's} behalf.' So you see, first, Christ the Pleader,
+then God beseeching, then Christ again entreating and praying.
+Could any man have so spoken, passing instinctively from the one
+thought to the other, unless he had believed that whatsoever
+things the Father doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise; and
+that Jesus Christ is the Representative of the whole Deity for
+mankind, so as that when He pleads God pleads, and God pleads
+through Him. I do not dwell upon this, but I simply wish to mark
+it in passing as one of the innumerable strong and irrefragable
+testimonies to the familiarity and firmness with which that
+thought of the divinity of Jesus Christ, and the full revelation
+of the Father by Him, was grasped by the Apostle, and was believed
+by the people to whom he spoke. God pleads, therefore Christ
+pleads, Christ pleads, therefore God pleads; and these Two are One
+in their beseechings, and the voice of the Father echoes to us in
+the tenderness of the Son.
+
+So, then, let us think of that pleading. To sue for love, to beg
+that an enemy will put away his enmity is the part of the inferior
+rather than of the superior; is the part of the offender rather
+than of the offended; is the part of the vanquished rather than of
+the victor; is the part surely not of the king but of the rebel.
+And yet here, in the sublime transcending of all human precedent
+and pattern which characterises the divine dealing, we have the
+place of the suppliant and of the supplicated inverted, and Love
+upon the Throne bends down to ask of the rebel that lies powerless
+and sullen at His feet, and yet is not conquered until his heart
+be won, though his limbs be manacled, that he would put away all
+the bitterness out of his heart, and come back to the love and the
+grace which are ready to pour over him. `He that might the
+vengeance best have taken, finds out the remedy.' He against whom
+we have transgressed prays us to be reconciled; and the Infinite
+Love lowers Himself in that lowering which is, in another aspect,
+the climax of His exaltation, to pray the rebels to accept His
+amnesty.
+
+Oh, dear brethren! this is no mere piece of rhetoric. What facts
+in the divine heart does it represent? What facts in the divine
+conduct does it represent? It represents these facts in the divine
+heart, that there is in it an infinite longing for the creature's
+love, an infinite desire for unity between Him and us.
+
+There are wonderful significance and beauty in the language of my
+text which are lost in the Authorised Version; but are preserved
+in the Revised. `We are ambassadors' not only `\textit{for}
+Christ,' but `\textit{on Christ's behalf}.' And the same
+proposition is repeated in the subsequent clause. `We pray you,'
+not merely `in Christ's stead,' though that is much, but
+`\textit{on His account},' which is more---as if it lay very near
+His heart that we should put away our enmity; and as if in some
+transcendent and wonderful manner the all-perfect, self-sufficing
+God was made glad, and the Master, who is His image for us, `saw
+of the travail of His soul, and,' in regard to one man, `was
+satisfied,' when the man lets the warmth of God's love in Christ
+thaw away the coldness out of his heart, and kindle there an
+answering flame. An old divine says, `We cannot do God a greater
+pleasure or more oblige His very heart, than to trust in Him as a
+God of love.' He is ready to stoop to any humiliation to effect
+that purpose. So intense is the divine desire to win the world to
+His love, that He will stoop to sue for it rather than lose it.
+Such is at least part of the fact in the divine heart, which is
+shadowed forth for us by that wonderful thought of the beseeching
+God.
+
+And what facts in the divine conduct does this great word
+represent? A God that beseeches. Well, think of the tears of
+imploring love which fell from Christ's eyes as He looked across
+the valley from Olivet, and saw the Temple glittering in the early
+sunshine. Think of `O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! ... how often would I
+have gathered thy children together ... and ye would not.' And are
+we not to see in the Christ who wept in the earnestness of His
+desire, and in the pain of its disappointment, the very revelation
+of the Father's heart and the very action of the Father's arm?
+`Come unto me, all ye that labour, and are heavy laden, and I will
+give you rest.' That is Christ beseeching and God beseeching in
+Him. Need I quote other words, gentle, winning, loving? Do we not
+feel, when looking upon Christ, as if the secret of His whole life
+was the stretching out imploring and welcoming hands to men, and
+praying them to grasp His hands, and be saved? But, oh, brethren!
+the fact that towers above all others, which explains the whole
+procedure of divinity, and is the keystone of the whole arch of
+revelation; the fact which reveals in one triple beam of light,
+God, man, and sin in the clearest illumination, is the Cross of
+Jesus Christ. And if that be not the very sublime of entreaty; and
+if any voice can be conceived, human or divine, that shall reach
+men's hearts with a more piercing note of pathetic invitation than
+sounds from that Cross, I know not where it is. Christ that dies,
+in His dying breath calls to us, and `the blood of sprinkling
+speaketh better things than that of Abel'; inasmuch as its voice
+is, `Come unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.'
+
+Not only in the divine facts of the life and death of Jesus
+Christ, but in all the appeals of that great revelation which lies
+before us in Scripture; and may I say, in the poor, broken
+utterances of men whose harsh, thin voices try to set themselves,
+in some measure, to the sweetness and the fulness of His
+beseeching tones---does God call upon you to draw close to Him,
+and put away your enmity. And not only by His Word written or
+ministered from human lips, but also by the patient providences of
+His love He calls and prays you to come. A mother will sometimes,
+in foolish fondness, coax her sullen child by injudicious
+kindness, or, in wise patience, will seek to draw the little heart
+away from the faults that she desires not to notice, by redoubled
+ingenuity of tenderness and of care. And so God does with us. When
+you and I, who deserve---oh! so different treatment---get, as we
+do get, daily care and providential blessings from Him, is not
+that His saying to us, `I beseech you to cherish no alienation,
+enmity, indifference, but to come back and live in the love'? When
+He draws near to us in these outward gifts of His mercy, is He not
+doing Himself what He has bid us to do; and what He never could
+have bid us to do, nor our hearts have recognised to be the
+highest strain of human virtue to do, unless He Himself were doing
+it first? `If thine enemy hunger, feed him. If he thirst, give him
+drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his
+head.'
+
+Not only by the great demonstration of His stooping and infinite
+desire for our love which lies in the life and death of Jesus
+Christ, nor only by His outward work, nor by His providence, but by
+many an inward touch on our spirits, by many a prick of conscience,
+by many a strange longing that has swept across our souls, sudden as
+some perfumed air in the scentless atmosphere; by many an inward
+voice, coming we know not whence, that has spoken to us of Him, of
+His love, of our duty; by many a drawing which has brought us nearer
+to the Cross of Jesus Christ, only, alas! in some cases that we
+might recoil further from it,---has He been beseeching, beseeching
+us all.
+
+Brethren! God pleads with you. He pleads with you because there is
+nothing in His heart to any of you but love, and a desire to bless
+you; He pleads with you because, unless you will let Him, He
+cannot lavish upon you His richest gifts and His highest
+blessings. He pleads with you, bowing to the level, and beneath
+the level, of your alienation and reluctance. And the sum and
+substance of all His dealings with every soul is, `My son! give Me
+thy heart.' `Be ye reconciled to God.'
+
+II. And now turn, very briefly, to the next suggestion arising
+from this text, the terrible obverse, so to speak, of the coin:
+Man refusing a beseeching God.
+
+That is the great paradox and mystery. Nobody has ever fathomed
+that yet, and nobody will. How it comes, how it is possible, there
+is no need for us to inquire. It is an awful and a solemn power
+that every poor little speck of humanity has, to lift itself up in
+God's face, and say, in answer to all His pleadings, `I will not!'
+as if the dwellers in some little island, a mere pin-point of
+black, barren rock, jutting up at sea, were to declare war against
+a kingdom that stretched through twenty degrees of longitude on
+the mainland. So we, on our little bit of island, our pin-point of
+rock in the great waste ocean, we can separate ourselves from the
+great Continent; or, rather, God has, in a fashion, made us
+separate in order that we may either unite ourselves with Him, by
+our willing yielding, or wrench ourselves away from Him by our
+antagonism and rebellion. God beseeches because God has so settled
+the relations between Him and us, that that is what He has to do
+in order to get men to love Him. He cannot force them. He cannot
+prise open a man's heart with a crowbar, as it were, and force
+Himself inside. The door opens from within. `Behold! I stand at
+the door and knock.' There is an `if.' `If any man open I will
+come in.' Hence the beseeching, hence the wail of wisdom that
+cries aloud and no man regards it; of love that stands at the
+entering in of the city, and pleads in vain, and says, `I have
+called, and ye have refused.... How often would I have gathered
+... and ye would not.' Oh, brethren! it is an awful
+responsibility, a mysterious prerogative, which each one of us,
+whether consciously or no, has to exercise, to accept or to refuse
+the pleadings of an entreating Christ.
+
+And let me remind you that the act of refusal is a very simple
+one. Not to accept is to reject; not to yield is to rebel. You
+have only to do nothing, to do it all. There are dozens of people
+in our churches and chapels listening with self-satisfied
+unconcern, who have all their lives been refusing a beseeching
+God. And they do not know that they ever did it! They say, `Oh! I
+will be a Christian some time or other.' They cherish vague ideas
+that, somehow or other, they are so already. They have done
+nothing at all, they have simply been absolutely indifferent and
+passive. Some of you have heard sermons like this so often that
+they produce no effect. `It is the right kind of thing to say. It
+is the thing we have heard a hundred times.' Perhaps you wonder
+why I should be so much in earnest about the matter, and then you
+go outside, and discuss me or the weather, and forget all about
+the sermon.
+
+And thus, once more, you reject Christ. It is done without knowing
+it; done simply by doing nothing. My brother! do not stop your
+ears any more against that tender, imploring love.
+
+Then let me remind you that this refusing the beseeching of God is
+the climax of all folly. For consider what it is,---a man refusing
+his highest good and choosing his certain ruin. I am afraid that
+people have been arguing and fighting so much of late years over
+disputable points in reference to the doctrine of future
+retribution that the indisputable fact of such retribution has
+lost much of its solemn power.
+
+I pray you, brethren, to ask yourselves one question: Is there
+anything, in the present or in the future condition of a man that
+is not reconciled to God, which explains God's beseeching urgency?
+Why this energy and intensity of divine desire? Why this which, if
+it were human only, would be called \textit{passionate} entreaty?
+Why was it needful for Jesus Christ to die? Why was it worth His
+while to bear the punishment of man's sin? Why should God and
+Christ, through all the ages, plead with unintermittent voice?
+There must be some explanation of it all, and here is the
+explanation, `They that hate Me love \textit{death}.' `Be ye
+reconciled to God,' for enmity is ruin and destruction.
+
+And finally, dear friends, this turning away from Him that
+speaketh from Heaven, of which some of you have all your lives
+been guilty, is not only supreme folly, but it is the climax of
+all guilt. For there can be nothing worse, darker, arguing a
+nature more averse or indifferent to the highest good, than that
+God should plead, and I should steel my heart and deafen mine ear
+against His voice. The crown of a man's sin, because it is the
+disclosure of the secrets of his deepest heart as loving darkness
+rather than light, is turning away from the divine voice that woos
+us to love and to God.
+
+Oh! there are some of you that have heard that Voice too often to
+be much touched by it. There are some of you too busy to attend to
+it, who hear it not because of the clatter of the streets and the
+whir of the spindles. There are some of you that are seeking to
+drown it in the shouts of mirth and revelry. There are some of you
+to whom it comes muffled in the mists of doubt; but I beseech you
+all, look at the Cross, \textit{look at the Cross!} and hear Him
+that hangs there pleading with you.
+
+Before the battle there comes out the captain of the twenty
+thousand to the King with the ten thousand, who in His loftiness
+is not afraid to stoop to sue for peace from the weaker power. My
+brother! the moment is precious; the white flag may never be waved
+before your eyes again. Do not; do not refuse! or the next instant
+the clarion of the assault may sound, and where will you be then?
+
+It is vain for thee to rush against the thick bosses of the
+Almighty buckler. `We beseech, in Christ's behalf, be ye
+reconciled with God.'
+
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