By Henry Drummond
We All
With unveiled face
Reflecting
As a Mirror
The Glory of the Lord
Are transformed
Into the same image
From Glory to Glory
Even as from the Lord
The Spirit
"I PROTEST that if some
great power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what
is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up
every morning, I should instantly close with the offer."
These are the words of Mr. Huxley. The infinite
desirability, the infinite difficulty of being good--the theme is as old
as humanity. The man does not live from whose deeper being the same confession
has not risen, or who would not give his all tomorrow, if he could "close
with the offer" of becoming a better man.
I propose to make that offer now. In all
seriousness, without being "turned into a sort of clock," the
end can be attained. Under the right conditions it is as natural for character
to become beautiful as for a flower; and if on God's earth, there is not
some machinery for effecting it, the supreme gift to the world has been
forgotten. This is simply what man was made for. With Browning: "I
say that Man was made to grow, not stop." Or in the deeper words of
an older Book: "Whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate . .
. to be conformed to the Image of his Son."
Let me begin by naming, and in part discarding,
some processes in vogue already, for producing better lives. These processes
are far from wrong; in their place they may even be essential. One ventures
to disparage them only because they do not turn out the most perfect possible
work.
The first imperfect method is to rely on
Resolution. In will-power, in mere spasms of earnestness there is no salvation.
Struggle, effort, even agony, have their place in Christianity as we shall
see; but this is not where they come in. In mid-Atlantic the other day,
the Etruria in which I was sailing, suddenly stopped. Something had gone
wrong with the engines. There were five hundred able-bodied men on board
the ship. Do you think if we had gathered together and pushed against the
masts we could have pushed it on? When one attempts to sanctify himself
by effort, he is trying to make his boat go by pushing against the mast.
He is like a drowning man trying to lift himself out of the water by pulling
at the hair of his own head. Christ held up this method almost to ridicule
when He said, "Which of you by taking thought can add a cubit to his
stature?" The one redeeming feature of the self-sufficient method
is this--that those who try it find out almost at once that it will not
gain the goal.
Another experimenter says:--"But that
is not my method. I have seen the folly of a mere wild struggle in the
dark. I work on a principle. My plan is not to waste power on random effort,
but to concentrate on a single sin. By taking one at a time and crucifying
it steadily, I hope in the end to extirpate all." To this, unfortunately,
there are four objections. For one thing life is too short; the name of
sin is Legion. For another thing, to deal with individual sins is to leave
the rest of the nature for the time untouched. In the third place, a single
combat with a special sin does not affect the root and spring of the disease.
If one only of the channels of sin be obstructed, experience points to
an almost certain overflow through some other part of the nature. Partial
conversion is almost always accompanied by such moral leakage, for the
pent-up energies accumulate to the bursting point, and the last state of
that soul may be worse than the first. In the last place, religion does
not consist in negatives, in stopping this sin and stopping that. The perfect
character can never be produced with a pruning knife.
But a Third protests:-- "So be it I
make no attempt to stop sins one by one. My method is just the opposite.
I copy the virtues one by one." The difficulty about the copying method
is that it is apt to be mechanical. One can always tell an engraving from
a picture, an artificial flower from a real flower. To copy virtues one
by one has somewhat the same effect as eradicating the vices one by one;
the temporary result is an overbalanced and incongruous character. Someone
defines a prig as "a creature that is over-fed for its size."
One sometimes finds Christians of this species-- over-fed on one side of
their nature, but dismally thin and starved-looking on the other. The result,
for instance, of copying Humility, and adding it on to an otherwise worldly
life, is simply grotesque. A rabid Temperance advocate, for the same reason,
is often the poorest of creatures, flourishing on a single virtue, and
quite oblivious that his Temperance is making a worse man of him and not
a better. These are examples of fine virtues spoiled by association
with mean companions. Character is a unity, and all the virtues must advance
together to make the perfect man. This method of sanctification, nevertheless,
is in the true direction. It is only in the details of execution that it
fails.
A fourth method I need scarcely mention,
for it is a variation on those already named. It is the very young man's
method; and the pure earnestness of it makes it almost desecration to touch
it. It is to keep a private note-book with columns for the days of the
week, and a list of virtues with spaces against each for marks. This, with
many stern rules for preface, is stored away in a secret place, and from
time to time, at nightfall, the soul is arraigned before it as before a
private judgment bar. This living by code was Franklin's method; and I
suppose thousands more could tell how they had hung up in their bed-rooms,
or hid in lock-fast drawers, the rules which one solemn day they drew up
to shape their lives. This method is not erroneous, only somehow its success
is poor. You bear me witness that it fails? And it fails generally for
very matter-of-fact reasons--most likely because one day we forget the
rules.
All these methods that have been named --the
self-sufficient method, the self-crucifixion method, the mimetic method,
and the diary method--are perfectly human, perfectly natural, perfectly
ignorant, and, as they stand, perfectly inadequate. It is not argued, I
repeat, that they must be abandoned. Their harm is rather that they distract
attention from the true working method, and secure a fair result at the
expense of the perfect one. What that perfect method is we shall now go
on to ask.
A FORMULA, a receipt, for Sanctification--
can one seriously speak of this mighty change as if the process were as
definite as for the production of so many volts of electricity? It is impossible
to doubt it. Shall a mechanical experiment succeed infallibly, and the
one vital experiment of humanity remain a chance? Is corn to grow by method,
and character by caprice? If we cannot calculate to a certainty that the
forces of religion will do their work, then is religion vain. And if we
cannot express the law of these forces in simple words, then is Christianity
not the world's religion but the world's conundrum.
Where, then, shall one look for such a formula?
Where one would look for any formula--among the text books. And if we turn
to the text books of Christianity we shall find a formula for this problem
as clear and precise as any in the mechanical sciences. If this simple
rule, moreover, be but followed fearlessly, it will yield the result of
a perfect character as surely as any result that is guaranteed by the laws
of nature. The finest expression of this rule in Scripture, or indeed in
any literature, is probably one drawn up and condensed into a single verse
by Paul. You will find it in a letter--the second to the Corinthians--written
by him to some Christian people who, in a city which was a byword for depravity
and licentiousness, were seeking the higher life. To see the point of
the words we must take them from the immensely improved rendering of the
Revised translation, for the older Version in this case greatly obscures
the sense. They are these: "We all, with unveiled face reflecting
as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image
from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit."
Now observe at the outset the entire contradiction
of all our previous efforts, in the simple passive "we are transformed."
We are changed, as the Old Version has it--we do not change ourselves.
No man can change himself. Throughout the New Testament you will find that
wherever these moral and spiritual transformations are described the verbs
are in the passive. Presently it will be pointed out that there is a
rationale in this; but meantime do not toss these words aside as if
this passivity denied all human effort or ignored intelligible law. What
is implied for the soul here is no more than is everywhere claimed for
the body. In physiology the verbs describing the processes of growth are
in the passive. Growth is not voluntary; it takes place, it happens, it
is wrought upon matter. So here. "Ye must be born again" --we
cannot born ourselves. "Be not conformed to this world but
be ye transformed"--we are subjects to a transforming
influence, we do not transform ourselves. Not more certain is it that it
is something outside the thermometer that produces a change in the thermometer,
than it is something outside the soul of man that produces a moral change
upon him. That he must be susceptible to that change, that he must be a
party to it, goes without saying; but that neither his aptitude nor his
will can produce it, is equally certain.
Obvious as it ought to seem, this may be
to some an almost startling revelation. The change we have been striving
after is not to be produced by any more striving after. It is to be wrought
upon us by the moulding of hands beyond our own. As the branch ascends,
and the bud bursts, and the fruit reddens under the co-operation of influences
from the outside air, so man rises to the higher stature under invisible
pressures from without. The radical defect of all our former methods of
sanctification was the attempt to generate from within that which can only
be wrought upon us from without. According to the first Law of Motion:
Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight
line, except in so far as it may be compelled by impressed forces to
change that state. This is also a first law of Christianity. Every man's
character remains as it is, or continues in the direction in which it is
going, until it is compelled by impressed forces to change that
state. Our failure has been the failure to put ourselves in the way of
the impressed forces. There is a clay, and there is a Potter; we have tried
to get the clay to mould the clay.
Whence, then, these pressures, and where
this Potter? The answer of the formula is "By reflecting as a mirror
the glory of the Lord we are changed." But this is not very clear.
What is the "glory" of the Lord, and how can mortal man reflect
it, and how can that act as an "impressed force" in moulding
him to a nobler form? The word "glory" --the word which has to
bear the weight of holding those "impressed forces" --is a stranger
in current speech, and our first duty is to seek out its equivalent in
working English. It suggests at first a radiance of some kind, something
dazzling or glittering, some halo such as the old masters loved to paint
round the heads of their Ecce Homos. But that is paint, mere matter, the
visible symbol of some unseen thing. What is that unseen thing? It is that
of all unseen things, the most radiant, the most beautiful, the most Divine,
and that is Character. On earth, in Heaven, there is nothing so
great, so glorious as this. The word has many meanings; in ethics it can
have but one. Glory is character and nothing less, and it can be nothing
more. The earth is "full of the Glory of the Lord," because it
is full of His character. The "Beauty of the Lord" is character.
"The effulgence of His Glory" is character. "The Glory of
the Only Begotten" is character, the character which is "fulness
of grace and truth." And when God told His people His name He
simply gave them His character, His character which was Himself. "And
the Lord proclaimed the Name of the Lord . . . the Lord, the Lord God,
merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth."
Glory then is not something intangible, or ghostly, or transcendental.
If it were this, how could Paul ask men to reflect it? Stripped of its
physical enswathement it is Beauty, moral and spiritual Beauty, Beauty
infinitely real, infinitely exalted, yet infinitely near and infinitely
communicable.
With this explanation read over the sentence
once more in paraphrase: We all reflecting as a mirror the character of
Christ are transformed into the same Image from character to character--from
a poor character to a better one, from a better one to ane a little better
still, from that to one still more complete, until by slow degrees the
Perfect Image is attained. Here the solution of the problem of sanctification
is compressed into a sentence: Reflect the character of Christ and you
will become like Christ.
All men are mirrors--that is the first law
on which this formula is based. One of the aptest descriptions of a human
being is that he is a mirror. As we sat at table to-night, the world in
which each of us lived and moved throughout this day was focussed in the
room. What we saw as we looked at one another was not one another, but
one mother's world. We were an arrangement of mirrors. The scenes we saw
were all reproduced; the people we met walked to and fro; they spoke, they
bowed, they passed us by, did everything over again as if it had been real.
When we talked, we were but looking at our own mirror and describing what
flitted across it; our listening was not hearing, but seeing--we but looked
on our neighbour's mirror. All human intercourse is a seeing of reflections.
I meet a stranger in a railway carriage. The cadence of his first word
tells me he is English, and comes from Yorkshire. Without knowing it he
has reflected his birthplace, his parents, and the long history of their
race. Even physiologically he is a mirror. His second sentence records
that he is a politician, and a faint inflexion in the way he pronounces
The Times reveals his party. In his next remarks I see reflected
a whole world of experiences. The books he has read, the people he has
met, the influences that have played upon him and made him the man he is--
these are all registered there by a pen which lets nothing pass, and whose
writing can never be blotted out. What I am reading in him meantime he
also is reading in me; and before the journey is over we could half write
each other's lives. Whether we like it or not, we live in glass houses.
The mind, the memory, the soul, is simply a vast chamber panelled with
looking-glass. And upon this miraculous arrangement and endowment depends
the capacity of mortal souls to "reflect the character of the Lord."
But this is not all. If all these varied
reflections from our so-called secret life are patent to the world, how
close the writing, how complete the record, within the soul itself? For
the influences we meet are not simply held for a moment on the polished
surface and thrown off again into space. Each is retained where first it
fell, and stored up in the soul for ever.
This law of Assimilation is the second, and
by far the most impressive truth which underlies the formula of sanctification--the
truth that men are not only mirrors, but that these mirrors so far from
being mere reflectors of the fleeting things they see, transfer into their
own inmost substance, and hold in permanent preservation the things that
they reflect. No one knows how the soul can hold these things. No one knows
how the miracle is done. No phenomenon in nature, no process in chemistry,
no chapter in necromancy can even help us to begin to understand this amazing
operation. For, think of it, the past is not only focussed there, in a
man's soul, it is there. How could it be reflected from there if it were
not there? All things that he has ever seen, known, felt, believed of the
surrounding world are now within him, have become part of him, in part
are him--he has been changed into their image. He may deny it, he may resent
it, but they are there. They do not adhere to him, they are transfused
through him. He cannot alter or rub them out. They are not in his memory,
they are in him. His soul is as they have filled it, made it, left it.
These things, these books, these events, these influences are his makers.
In their hands are life and death, beauty and deformity. When once the
image or likeness of any of these is fairly presented to the soul, no power
on earth can hinder two things happening--it must be absorbed into the
soul, and for ever reflected back again from character.
Upon these astounding yet perfectly obvious
psychological facts, Paul bases his doctrine of sanctification. He sees
that character is a thing built up by slow degrees, that it is hourly changing
for better or for worse according to the images which flit across it. One
step further and the whole length and breadth of the application
of these ideas to the central problem of religion will stand before us.
IF events change men, much
more persons. No man can meet another on the street without making some
mark upon him. We say we exchange words when we meet; what we exchange
is souls. And when intercourse is very close and very frequent, so complete
is this exchange that recognisable bits of the one soul begin to show in
the other's nature, and the second is conscious of a similar and growing
debt to the first. This mysterious approximating of two souls who has not
witnessed? Who has not watched some old couple come down life's pilgrimage
hand in hand with such gentle trust and joy in one another that their very
faces wore the self-same look? These were not two souls; it was a composite
soul. It did not matter to which of the two you spoke, you would have said
the same words to either. It was quite indifferent which replied, each
would have said the same. Half a century's reflecting had told upon
them: they were changed into the same image. It is the Law of Influence
that we become like those whom we habitually admire: these had become
like because they habitually admired. Through all the range of literature,
of history, and biography this law presides. Men are all mosaics of other
men. There was a savour of David about Jonathan and a savour of
Jonathan about David. Jean Valjean, in the masterpiece of Victor Hugo,
is Bishop Bienvenu risen from the dead. Metempsychosis is a fact.
George Eliot's message to the world was that men and women make men and
women. The Family, the cradle of mankind, has no meaning apart from this.
Society itself is nothing but a rallying point for these omnipotent forces
to do their work. On the doctrine of Influence, in short, the whole vast
pyramid of humanity is built.
But it was reserved for Paul to make the
supreme application of the Law of Influence. It was a tremendous inference
to make, but he never hesitated. He himself was a changed man: he knew
exactly what had done it; it was Christ On the Damascus road they met,
and from that hour his life was absorbed in His. The effect could not but
follow--on words, on deeds, on career, on creed. The "impressed forces"
did their vital work. He became like Him whom he habitually loved. "So
we all," he writes, "reflecting as a mirror the glory of Christ
are changed into the same image."
Nothing could be more simple, more intelligible,
more natural, more supernatural. It is an analogy from an everyday fact
Since we are what we are by the impacts of those who surround us, those
who surround themselves with the highest will be those who change into
the highest. There are some men and some women in whose company we are
always at our best. While with them we cannot think mean thoughts or speak
ungenerous words. Their mere presence is elevation, purification, sanctity.
All the best stops in our nature are drawn out by their intercourse, and
we find a music in our souls that was never there before. Suppose even
that influence prolonged through a month, a year, a lifetime, and
what could not life become? Here, even on the common plane of life,
talking our language, walking our streets, working side by side, are sanctifiers
of souls; here, breathing through common play, is Heaven; here, energies
charged even through a temporal medium with a virtue of regeneration. If
to live with men, diluted to the millionth degree with the virtue of the
Highest, can exalt and purify the nature, what bounds can be set to the
influence of Christ? To live with Socrates--with unveiled face--must have
made one wise; with Aristides, just. Francis of Assisi must have made one
gentle; Savonarola, strong. But to have lived with Christ? To have lived
with Christ must have made one like Christ; that is to say, A Christian.
As a matter of fact, to live with Christ
did produce this effect. It produced it in the case of Paul. And during
Christ's lifetime the experiment was tried in an even more startling form.
A few raw, unspiritual, uninspiring men, were admitted to the inner circle
of His friendship. The change began at once. Day by day we can almost see
the first disciples grow. First there steals over them the faintest possible
adumbration of His character, and occasionally, very occasionally, they
do a thing, or say a thing that they could not have done or said had they
not been living there. Slowly the spell of His Life deepens. Reach after
reach of their nature is overtaken, thawed, subjugated, sanctified. Their
manners soften, their words become more gentle, their conduct more unselfish
As swallows who have found a summer, as frozen buds the spring, their starved
humanity bursts into a fuller life. They do not know how it is, but they
are different men. One day they find themselves like their Master, going
about and doing good. To themselves it is unaccountable, but they cannot
do otherwise. They were not told to do it, it came to them to do it. But
the people who watch them know well how to account for it--"They have
been," they whisper, "with Jesus." Already even, the mark
and seal of His character is upon them-- "They have been with Jesus."
Unparalleled phenomenon, that these poor fishermen should remind other
men of Christ! Stupendous victory and mystery of regeneration that mortal
men should suggest to the world, God!
There is something almost melting in
the way His contemporaries, and John especially, speak of the Influence
of Christ. John lived himself in daily wonder at Him; he was overpowered,
overawed, entranced, transfigured. To his mind it was impossible for any
one to come under this influence and ever be the same again. "Whosoever
abideth in Him sinneth not," he said. It was inconceivable that he
should sin, as inconceivable as that ice should live in a burning sun,
or darkness co-exist with noon. If any one did sin, it was to John the
simple proof that he could never have met Christ. "Whosoever sinneth,"
he exclaims, "hath not seen Him, neither known Him."
Sin was abashed in this Presence. Its roots withered. Its sway and
victory were for ever at an end.
But these were His contemporaries. It was
easy for them to be influenced by Him, for they were every day and
all the day together. But how can we mirror that which we have never seen?
How can all this stupendous result be produced by a Memory, by the scantiest
of all Biographies, by One who lived and left this earth eighteen hundred
years ago? How can modern men to-day make Christ, the absent Christ, their
most constant companion still? The answer is that Friendship is a spiritual
thing. It is independent of Matter, or Space, or Time. That which I love
in my friend is not that which I see. What influences me in my friend is
not his body but his spirit. It would have been an ineffable experience
truly to have lived at that time--
"I think
when I read the sweet story of old,
How when Jesus was here among men,
He took little children like lambs to His fold,
I should like to have been with him then.
''I wish that His hand had been laid on my head,
That His arms had been thrown around me,
And that I had seen His kind look when He said,
Let the little ones come unto Me."
And yet, if Christ were to come into the
world again few of us probably would ever have a chance of seeing Him.
Millions of her subjects, in this little country, have never seen their
own Queen. And there would be millions of the subjects of Christ who could
never get within speaking distance of Him if He were here. Our companionship
with Him, like all true companionship, is a spiritual communion. All friendship,
all love, human and Divine, is purely spiritual. It was after He was risen
that He influenced even the disciples most. Hence in reflecting the character
of Christ it is no real obstacle that we may never have been in visible
contact with Himself.
There lived once a young girl whose perfect
grace of character was the wonder of those who knew her. She wore on her
neck a gold locket which no one was ever allowed to open. One day, in a
moment of unusual confidence, one of her companions was allowed to touch
its spring and learn its secret. She saw written these words-- "Whom
having not seen, I love." That was the secret of her beautiful
life. She had been changed into the Same Image.
Now this is not imitation, but a much deeper
thing. Mark this distinction. For the difference in the process, as well
as in the result, may be as great as that between a photograph secured
by the infallible pencil of the sun, and the rude outline from a schoolboy's
chalk. Imitation is mechanical, reflection organic. The one is occasional,
the other habitual. In the one case, man comes to God and imitates Him;
in the other, God comes to man and imprints Himself upon him. It is quite
true that there is an imitation of Christ which amounts to reflection.
But Paul's term includes all that the other holds, and is open to no mistake.
"Make Christ your most constant companion"--this
is what it practically means for us. Be more under His influence than under
any other influence. Ten minutes spent in His society every day, ay, two
minutes if it be face to face, and heart to heart, will make the whole
day different. Every character has an inward spring, let Christ be it.
Every action has a key-note, let Christ set it. Yesterday you got a certain
letter. You sat down and wrote a reply which almost scorched the paper.
You picked the cruellest adjectives you knew and sent it forth, without
a pang, to do its ruthless work. You did that because your life was set
in the wrong key. You began the day with the mirror placed at the wrong
angle. To-morrow, at daybreak, turn it towards Him, and even to your enemy
the fashion of your countenance will be changed. Whatever you then do,
one thing you will find you could not do--you could not write that letter.
Your first impulse may be the same, your judgment may be unchanged, but
if you try it the ink will dry on your pen, and you will rise from your
desk an unavenged but a greater and more Christian man. Throughout the
whole day your actions, down to the last detail, will do homage to that
early vision. Yesterday you thought mostly about yourself. To-day the poor
will meet you, and you will feed them. The helpless, the tempted, the sad,
will throng about you, and each you will befriend. Where were all these
people yesterday? Where they are to-day, but you did not see them. It is
in reflected light that the poor are seen. But your soul to-day is not
at the ordinary angle. "Things which are not seen" are visible.
For a few short hours you live the Eternal Life. The eternal life, the
life of faith, is simply the life of the higher vision. Faith is an attitude--
a mirror set at the right angle.
When to-morrow is over, and in the evening
you review it, you will wonder how you did it. You will not be conscious
that you strove for anything, or imitated anything, or crucified anything.
You will be conscious of Christ; that He was with you, that without compulsion
you were yet compelled, that without force, or noise, or proclamation,
the revolution was accomplished. You do not congratulate yourself as one
who has done a mighty deed, or achieved a personal success, or stored up
a fund of "Christian experience" to ensure the same result again.
What you are conscious of is "the glory of the Lord." And what
the world is conscious of, if the result be a true one, is also "the
glory of the Lord." In looking at a mirror one does not see the mirror,
or think of it, but only of what it reflects. For a mirror never calls
attention to itself except when there are flaws in it.
That this is a real experience and not a
vision, that this life is possible to men, is being lived by men to-day,
is simple biographical fact. From a thousand witnesses I cannot forbear
to summon one. The following are the words of one of the highest intellects
this age has known, a man who shared the burdens of his country as few
have done, and who, not in the shadows of old age, but in the high noon
of his success, gave this confession--I quote it with only a few abridgments--to
the world:--
`I want to speak to-night only a little,
but that little I desire to speak of the sacred name of Christ, who is
my life, my inspiration, my hope, and my surety. I cannot help stopping
and looking back upon the past. And I wish, as if I had never done it before,
to bear witness, not only that it is by the grace of God, but that it is
by the grace of God as manifested in Christ Jesus, that I am what I am.
I recognize the sublimity and grandeur of the revelation of God in His
eternal fatherhood as one that made the heavens, that founded the earth,
and that regards all the tribes of the earth, comprehending them in one
universal mercy; but it is the God that is manifested in Jesus Christ,
revealed by His life, made known by the inflections of His feelings, by
His discourse, and by His deeds--it is that God that I desire to confess
to-night, and of whom I desire to say, "By the love of God in Christ
Jesus I am what I am."
`If you ask me precisely what I mean by that,
I say, frankly, that more than any recognized influence of my father or
my mother upon me; more than the social influence of all the members of
my father's household; more, so far as I can trace it, or so far as I am
made aware of it, than all the social influences of every kind, Christ
has had the formation of my mind and my disposition. My hidden ideals of
what is beautiful I have drawn from Christ. My thoughts of what is manly,
and noble, and pure, have almost all of them arisen from the Lord Jesus
Christ. Many men have educated themselves by reading Plutarch's Lives of
the Ancient Worthies, and setting before themselves one and another of
these that in different ages have achieved celebrity; and they have recognized
the great power of these men on themselves. Now I do not perceive that
poet, or philosopher, or reformer, or general, or any other great man,
ever has dwelt in my imagination and in my thought as the simple Jesus
has. For more than twenty-five years I instinctively have gone to Christ
to draw a measure and a rule for everything. Whenever there has been a
necessity for it, I have sought--and at last almost spontaneously--to throw
myself into the companionship of Christ; and early, by my imagination,
I could see Him standing and looking quietly and lovingly upon me. There
seemed almost to drop from His face an influence upon me that suggested
what was the right thing in the controlling of passion, in the subduing
of pride, in the overcoming of selfishness; and it is from Christ, manifested
to my inward eye, that I have consciously derived more ideals, more models,
more influences, than from any human character whatever.
`That is not all. I feel conscious that I
have derived from the Lord Jesus Christ every thought that makes heaven
a reality to me, and every thought that paves the road that lies between
me and heaven. All my conceptions of the progress of grace in the soul;
all the steps by which divine life is evolved; all the ideals that overhang
the blessed sphere which awaits us beyond this world --these are derived
from the Saviour. The life that I now live in the flesh I live by the faith
of the Son of God.
`That is not all. Much as my future includes
all these elements which go to make the blessed fabric of earthly life,
yet, after all, what the summer is compared with all its earthly products
--flowers, and leaves, and grass--that is Christ compared with all the
products of Christ in my mind and in my soul. All the flowers and leaves
of sympathy; all the twining joys that come from my heart as a Christian--these
I take and hold in the future, but they are to me what the flowers and
leaves of summer are compared with the sun that makes the summer. Christ
is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end of my better life.
`When I read the Bible, I gather a great
deal from the Old Testament, and from the Pauline portions of the New Testament;
but after all, I am conscious that the fruit of the Bible is Christ. That
is what I read it for, and that is what I find that is worth reading. I
have had a hunger to be loved of Christ. You all know, in some relations,
what it is to be hungry for love. Your heart seems unsatisfied till you
can draw something more toward you from those that are dearest to you.
There have been times when I have had an unspeakable heart-hunger for Christ's
love. My sense of sin is never strong when I think of the law; my sense
of sin is strong when I think of love--if there is any difference between
law and love. It is when drawing near the Lord Jesus Christ, and longing
to be loved, that I have the most vivid sense of unsymmetry, of imperfection,
of absolute unworthiness, and of my sinfulness. Character and conduct are
never so vividly set before me as when in silence I bend in the presence
of Christ, revealed not in wrath, but in love to me. I never so much long
to be lovely, that I may be loved, as when I have this revelation of Christ
before my mind.
`In looking back upon my experience, that
part of my life which stands out, and which I remember most vividly, is
just that part that has had some conscious association with Christ. All
the rest is pale, and thin, and lies like clouds on the horizon. Doctrines,
systems, measures, methods-- what may be called the necessary mechanical
and external part of worship; the part which the senses would recognize--this
seems to have withered and fallen off like leaves of last summer; but that
part which has taken hold of Christ abides'
Can anyone hear this life-music, with its
throbbing refrain of Christ, and remain unmoved by envy or desire? Yet
till we have lived like this we have never lived at all.
THEN you reduce religion to
a common Friendship? A common Friendship--Who talks of a common Friendship?
There is no such thing in the world. On earth no word is more sublime.
Friendship is the nearest thing we know to what religion is. God is love.
And to make religion akin to Friendship is simply to give it the highest
expression conceivable by man. But if by demurring to "a common friendship"
is meant a protest against the greatest and the holiest in religion being
spoken of in intelligible terms, then I am afraid the objection is all
too real. Men always look for a mystery when one talks of sanctification;
some mystery apart from that which must ever be mysterious wherever Spirit
works. It is thought some peculiar secret lies behind it, some occult experience
which only the initiated know. Thousands of persons go to church every
Sunday hoping to solve this mystery. At meetings, at conferences, many
a time they have reached what they thought was the very brink of it, but
somehow no further revelation came. Poring over religious books, how often
were they not within a paragraph of it; the next page, the next sentence,
would discover all, and they would be borne on a flowing tide for ever.
But nothing happened. The next sentence and the next page were read, and
still it eluded them; and though the promise of its coming kept faithfully
up to the end, the last chapter found them still pursuing. Why did nothing
happen? Because there was nothing to happen--nothing of the kind they were
looking for. Why did it elude them? Because there was no "it"
When shall we learn that the pursuit of holiness is simply the pursuit
of Christ? When shall we substitute for the "it" of a fictitious
aspiration, the approach to a Living Friend? Sanctity is in character and
not in moods; Divinity in our own plain calm humanity, and in no mystic
rapture of the soul.
And yet there are others who, for exactly
a contrary reason, will find scant satisfaction here. Their complaint is
not that a religion expressed in terms of Friendship is too homely, but
that it is still too mystical. To "abide" in Christ, to "make
Christ our most constant companion" is to them the purest mysticism.
They want something absolutely tangible and absolutely direct. These are
not the poetical souls who seek a sign, a mysticism in excess; but the
prosaic natures whose want is mathematical definition in details. Yet it
is perhaps not possible to reduce this problem to much more rigid elements.
The beauty of Friendship is its infinity, One can never evacuate life of
mysticism. Home is full of it, love is full of it, religion is full of
it. Why stumble at that in the relation of man to Christ which is natural
in the relation of man to man?
If any one cannot conceive or realize a mystical
relation with Christ, perhaps all that can be done is to help him to step
on to it by still plainer analogies from common life. How do I know Shakespeare
or Dante? By communing with their words and thoughts. Many men know Dante
better than their own fathers. He influences them more. As a spiritual
presence he is more near to them, as a spiritual force more real. Is there
any reason why a greater than Shakespeare or Dante, who also walked this
earth, who left great words behind Him, who has great works everywhere
in the world now, should not also instruct, inspire, and mould the characters
of men? I do not limit Christ's influence to this. It is this, and it is
more. But Christ, so far from resenting or discouraging this relation of
Friendship, Himself proposed it. "Abide in Me" was almost His
last word to the world. And He partly met the difficulty of those who feel
its intangibleness by adding the practical clause, "If ye abide in
Me and My words abide in you."
Begin with His words. Words can scarcely
ever be long impersonal. Christ Himself was a Word, a word made Flesh.
Make His words flesh; do them, live them, and you must live Christ. "He
that keepeth My commandments, he it is that loveth Me." Obey Him
and you must love Him. Abide in Him and you must obey Him. Cultivate
His Friendship. Live after Christ, in His Spirit, as in His Presence,
and it is difficult to think what more you can do. Take this at least as
a first lesson, as introduction. If you cannot at once and always feel
the play of His life upon yours, watch for it also indirectly. "The
whole earth is full of the character of the Lord." Christ is the Light
of the world, and much of His Light is reflected from things in the world--even
from clouds. Sunlight is stored in every leaf, from leaf through coal,
and it comforts us thence when days are dark and we cannot see the sun.
Christ shines through men, through books, through history, through nature,
music, art. Look for Him there. "Every day one should either look
at a beautiful picture, or hear beautiful music, or read a beautiful poem."
The real danger of mysticism is not making it broad enough.
Do not think that nothing is happening because
you do not see yourself grow, or hear the whirr of the machinery. All great
things grow noiselessly. You can see a mushroom grow, but never a child.
Mr. Darwin tells us that Evolution proceeds by "numerous, successive,
and slight modifications." Paul knew that, and put it, only in more
beautiful words, into the heart of his formula. He said for the comforting
of all slowly perfecting souls that they grew '"from character to
character." "The inward man" he says elsewhere, "is
renewed from day to day." All thorough work is slow; all true development
by minute slight and insensible metamorphoses. The higher the structure,
moreover, the slower the progress. As the biologist runs his eye over the
long Ascent of Life he sees the lowest forms of animals develop in an hour;
the next above these reach maturity in a day; those higher still
take weeks or months to perfect; but the few at the top demand the long
experiment of years. If a child and an ape are born on the same day the
last will be in full possession of its faculties and doing the active work
of life before the child has left its cradle. Life is the cradle of eternity.
As the man is to the animal in the slowness of his evolution, so is the
spiritual man to the natural man. Foundations which have to bear the weight
of an eternal life must be surely laid. Character is to wear for ever;
who will wonder or grudge that it cannot be developed in a day?
To await the growing of a soul, nevertheless,
is an almost Divine act of faith. How pardonable, surely, the impatience
of deformity with itself, of a consciously despicable character standing
before Christ, wondering, yearning, hungering to be like that? Yet must
one trust the process fearlessly, and without misgiving. "The Lord
the Spirit" will do His part. The tempting expedient is, in haste
for abrupt or visible progress, to try some method less spiritual, or to
defeat the end by watching for effects instead of keeping the eye on the
Cause. A photograph prints from the negative only while exposed to the
sun. While the artist is looking to see how it is getting on he simply
stops the getting on. Whatever of wise supervision the soul may need, it
is certain it can never be over-exposed, or, that, being exposed, anything
else in the world can improve the result or quicken it. The creation of
a new heart, the renewing of a right spirit is an omnipotent work of God.
Leave it to the Creator. "He which hath begun a good work in you will
perfect it unto that day."
No man, nevertheless, who feels the worth
and solemnity of what is at stake will be careless as to his progress.
To become like Christ is the only thing in the world worth caring for,
the thing before which every ambition of man is folly, and all lower achievement
vain. Those only who make this quest the supreme desire and passion of
their lives can even begin to hope to reach it. If, therefore, it has seemed
up to this point as if all depended on passivity, let me now assert, with
conviction more intense, that all depends on activity. A religion of effortless
adoration may be a religion for an angel but never for a man. Not in the
contemplative, but in the active lies true hope; not in rapture, but in
reality lies true life; not in the realm of ideals but among tangible things
is man's sanctification wrought. Resolution, effort, pain, self-crucifixion,
agony--all the things already dismissed as futile in themselves must now
be restored to office, and a tenfold responsibility laid upon them. For
what is their office? Nothing less than to move the vast inertia of the
soul, and place it, and keep it where the spiritual forces will act upon
it. It is to rally the forces of the will, and keep the surface of the
mirror bright, and ever in position. It is to uncover the face which is
to look at Christ, and draw down the veil when unhallowed sights are near.
You have, perhaps, gone with an astronomer to watch him photograph the
spectrum of a star. As you entered the dark vault of the Observatory you
saw him begin by lighting a candle. To see the star with? No; but to see
to adjust the instrument to see the star with. It was the star that was
going to take the photograph; it was, also, the astronomer. For a long
time he worked in the dimness, screwing tubes and polishing lenses and
adjusting reflectors, and only after much labour the finely focussed instrument
was brought to bear. Then he blew out the light, and left the star to do
its work upon the plate alone. The day's task for the Christian is to bring
his instrument to bear. Having done that he may blow out his candle. All
the evidences of Christianity which have brought him there, all aids to
Faith, all acts of Worship, all the leverages of the Church, all Prayer
and Meditation, all girding of the Will--these lesser processes, these
candle-light activities for that supreme hour may be set aside. But, remember,
it is but for an hour. The wise man will be he who quickest lights his
candle; the wisest he who never let it out. To-morrow, the next moment,
he, a poor, darkened, slurred soul, may need it again to focus the Image
better, to take a mote off the ens, to clear the mirror from a breath with
which the world has dulled it.
No re-adjustment is ever required on behalf
of the Star. That is one great fixed point in this shifting universe. But
the world moves. And each day, each hour, demands
a further motion and re-adjustment for the soul. A telescope in an observatory
follows a star by clockwork, but the clockwork of the soul is called the
Will. Hence, while the soul in passivity reflects the Image of the
Lord, the Will in intense activity holds the mirror in position lest the
drifting motion of the world bear it beyond the line of vision. To "follow
Christ" is largely to keep the soul in such position as will allow
for the motion of the earth. And this calculated counteracting of the movements
of a world, this holding of the mirror exactly opposite to the Mirrored,
this steadying of the faculties unerringly, through cloud and earthquake,
fire and sword, is the stupendous co-operating labour of the Will. It is
all man's work. It is all Christ's work. In practice, it is both; in theory
it is both. But the wise man will say in practice, "It depends upon
myself."
In the Galerie des Beaux Arts in Paris there
stands a famous statue. It was the last work of a great genius, who, like
many a genius, was very poor and lived in a garret which served as studio
and sleeping-room alike. When the statue was all but finished, one midnight
a sudden frost fell upon Paris. The sculptor lay awake in the fireless
room and thought of the still moist clay, thought how the water would freeze
in the pores and destroy in an hour the dream of his life. So the old man
rose from his couch and heaped the bed-clothes reverently round
his work. In the morning when the neighbours entered the room the sculptor
was dead. But the statue lived.
The Image of Christ that is forming within
us--that is life's one charge. Let every project stand aside for that "Till
Christ be formed" no man's work is finished, no religion crowned,
no life has fulfilled its end. Is the infinite task begun? When, how, are
we to be different? Time cannot change men. Death cannot change men. Christ
can. Wherefore, put on Christ.