Part 5

But there is a life higher than either of these. The _saintly_ is beyond the heroic mind. To _get_ good, is animal; to _do_ good, is human; to _be_ good is divine. The true use of a man’s possessions is to help his work; and the best end of all his work, is to show us what he is. The noblest workers of our world bequeath us nothing so great as the image of themselves. Their task, be it ever so glorious, is historical and transient; the majesty of their spirit is essential and eternal. When the external conditions which supplied the matter of their work have wholly decayed from the surface of the earth, and become absorbed in its substance, the perennial root of their life remains, bearing a blossom ever fair, and a foliage ever green. And while to some, God gives it to show themselves through their work, to others he assigns it to show themselves without even the opportunity of work. He sends them transparent into this world; and leaves us nothing to gather and infer. Goodness, beauty, truth, acquired by others, are original to them, hiding behind the eye, thinking on the brow, and making music in the voice. The angels appointed to guard the issues of the pure life seem rather to have taken their station at its fountains, and to pour into it a sanctity at first. Such beings live imply _to express themselves_; stand between heaven and earth, and meditate for our dull hearts. With fewer outward objects than others, or at least with a less limited practical mission devoting them to a fixed task, their life is a soliloquy of love and aspiration; the soul not being with them, the servant of action, but action rather the needful articulation of the soul. Not, of course, that they are, in the slightest degree, exempt from the stern and positive obligations of duty, or licensed, any more than others, to dream existence away. If once they fall into this snare, and cease to work, the lineaments of beauty and goodness are exchanged for those of shame and grief. Usually they do not _less_, but rather _more_, than others; only under somewhat sorrowful conditions, having spirits prepared for what is more than human, and being obliged to move within limits that are only human. The worth of such a life depends little on its _quantity_; it is an affair of _quality_ alone. These highest ends of existence have but slight relation to time. Years can not mellow the love already ripe, or purify the perceptions already clear, or lift the aspiration that already enters heaven.

GROWING.

By F. R. HAVERGAL.

Unto him that hath, thou givest Ever “more abundantly.” Lord, I live because thou livest, Therefore give more life to me; Therefore speed me in the race; Therefore let me grow in grace.

Deepen all thy work, O Master, Strengthen every downward root, Only do thou ripen faster, More and more, thy pleasant fruit. Purge me, prune me, self abase, Only let me grow in grace.

Jesus, grace for grace outpouring, Show me ever greater things; Raise me higher, sunward soaring, Mounting as on eagle wings. By the brightness of thy face, Jesus, let me grow in grace.

Let me grow by sun and shower, Every moment water me; Make me really hour by hour More and more conformed to thee, That thy loving eye may trace, Day by day, my growth in grace.

Let me, then, be always growing, Never, never standing still; Listening, learning, better knowing Thee and thy most bless’d will. Till I reach thy holy place, Daily let me grow in grace.

[_December 10._]

THE GOODNESS OF A GOOD MAN.

By ALEXANDER McLAREN, D. D.

“He was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost and of faith.”—Acts xi: 24.

You remember how once a young man came to Jesus, with much beautiful youthful purity in his life and youthful enthusiasm in his heart, and in his eager way, prefaced his question with a lightly-uttered “Good Master.” Christ answered by trying to make him feel how much more the word meant than he had ever seen. “Why callest thou me good?” said he, not thereby rejecting the term for himself, but setting the youth to ponder its deep meaning. And whenever we have learned to feel “how awful goodness is,” we shall be ready to listen to Jesus saying further: “None is good but one, that is God.” By that saying he neither means to deny his own goodness nor that of men who will take up their cross and follow him, but only to remind the light-hearted inquirer, who was so ready with his conventional bestowment of the epithet, and so eager to know what he was to do for eternal life, that there was one source—and only one—-of goodness, and, therefore, that the only way to be good was to have our emptiness replenished by his fullness.

A good man, then, is a man who draws his goodness from God, the source of all goodness. He himself is the type of all perfection, the home of all things fair. Whatsoever things are lovely and whatsoever things are venerable—all that we call virtue, all to which hearts and consciences ascribe praise—dwell in God as in their native home. In the abyss of his being the streams of goodness, which part into many heads to fertilize the wilderness and sweeten the salt marshes of human nature, rest undivided. He is the reality of which all our conceptions of goodness are but the fragmentary representations, the substance of which they are but shadows. Not only so, but as all life is an effluence from him with whom alone is the fountain of life, and as it is his light in which we see light, so all the goodness which is in men is from above, and cometh down from the Father of Light. All light and heat are from the sun, and all goodness is of God. All virtues are radiations from him. “They are but broken lights of thee.” He alone is good of himself and by himself. Drawing his being from none, he owes his character to none, to no outward helps or occasions his actions, to no importation his beauty. Receiving from none, he gives to all, and every deed of fair goodness that man has ever done, at the last analysis, has been to the doer no less than to the beholders or the hearers the gift of God.

He would not be good unless he delighted in bestowing himself. Goodness is communicative, and all love has its chiefest delight in giving away itself. As the sun “rejoices to run his race,” and as it is the very nature and property of light to radiate, and of gases to diffuse themselves, so he can not be stayed nor sealed up, but rejoices to impart. And, certainly, there can be nothing in God which he so much delights to bestow as his goodness, since it is that in which most chiefly do we bear his image, and by which we are most closely knit to him. His highest purpose concerning us all is “that we should be partakers of his holiness.” Happiness, wisdom, life itself, all in some measure and fashion, offshoots from his own, he delights to give; but these are but means to an end, and thus moral likeness to himself is his aim in all his other gifts. God had rather have us good than great, and makes us sometimes glad and sometimes heavy that by both we may be made to desire, and so be able to receive, more resemblance to himself in holiness. This is the meaning of life. This is the dearest desire of our Father for us. This is the gift which he—the infinite love—is ever longing to bestow on us.

This goodness, then, affords a presumption that he will make us good. That is a profound word of the Psalmist’s “Good and upright is the Lord; therefore will he teach sinners in the way.” The more clearly we see the perfect purity and goodness of God, the more conscious shall we certainly be of our own unlikeness to him. But in that discernment of his lustrous perfectness, and penitent recognition of our own sinfulness, there lies hope, not despair. We may be sure that he loves us too well to keep such sovereign completeness to himself and leave his poor children stumbling here in the mud and mire. What he is, he assuredly will desire to make us, so far as it may be. He is the “giving God” and the poorest and most impure of men may be sure that God does desire to give him purity of heart and life, and may lift up the hopeful and bold prayer, “Thy spirit is good, lead me into the land of uprightness.”

Surely, too, it needs but little experience of life to feel that, if we are ever to be made good, a divine power is needed to do it. A very small amount of honest attempt to mend our own characters might teach each of us that the viper has got far too tight a hold on us for us to shake it into the fire, and that its poison is in our blood. If you have ever tried to cure a bad habit, you know how hard it is; and some of us could tell how the sins that we loathe most hold us in a grip none the looser because of our disgust at them and ourselves, and, like a reefer’s knot, their cords are tied the tighter by the pressure of our resistance against them. It is as impossible for a man to make himself good, in the deepest sense of the word, as it is for him to lift himself by his own hand laid on his own collar. There must be some power outside him to raise. God only can strengthen us to cast out sin. God only can enlighten our eyes to see lurking evil; he only can give energy to our wills to root it up, though we drag bleeding fragments of our hearts with it; he only can give the positive goodness which is more than mere freedom from evil, and fill the empty chamber with a guest strong enough to keep out the returning demon and all his crew.

So his Holy Spirit is given to us, if we will, to make us holy. We may, if we will, have that divine guest in our inmost spirit, molding us anew, purging the fountains of our will, enlightening our blindness, fixing our love on all things pure and high, burning up all our evil, with which in our own strength we have vainly fought, and kindling in us a flame of self-forgetting love, in which, as in the central fire of the earth, all the elements of the new nature to be formed within us are molten together, ready to crystallize into beauty like precious gems, or to consolidate into strength like the granite mountains. Any man may, if he will, be “full of the Holy Ghost”—as a vessel is filled with precious elixir poured into it. Any man may, if he will, have his whole nature influenced and inhabited by that mighty spirit of whom we may all be the temples, and which dwells in us not as the image of the god abides in the shrine, but as our spirits animate our bodies, being diffused through all our nature, the eye of our seeing, the heart of our love, the will of our resolve, and in all of us the source of our goodness, and the life of our better life. “If any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his.” Let us remember that this penetration of all our nature with a divine spirit dwelling within us is _the_ promise of Christianity to every man. No mere love of God the Father, even if it were brought to us in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ would be enough without the communion of the Holy Ghost. Calvary and Olivet are not sufficient for our victory over sin without the upper room and the rushing mighty wind. And let us not forget that the spirit thus given to all Christians is the spirit of illumination indeed, the spirit of power, rich in his seven-fold energies, and the source of every endowment of mind and hand and tongue and heart that we possess, but that his highest and most universal office is to make us good, and his best name the Holy Spirit. Let us court earnestly the best gifts, but seek more earnestly still that gift which needs no special capacity to receive nor any special circumstances to exercise, but may be claimed by the poorest, and will ennoble the loftiest. Let others seek for gifts; do you pray for graces. Let who will be great, do you try to submit to the working of the good Spirit who makes you good.

Our text carries the analysis a step farther, and shows us how Barnabas came to be full of the Holy Ghost. It gives us the _condition of goodness_. He was good because he was full of the spirit, and he was full of the spirit because he was full of faith. That is the final explanation of his character.

The spirit of God dwells in a man through his faith. One text speaks of “the Holy Ghost which they that believe on him should receive,” and everywhere similar language is held as to the connection between faith and the dwelling of the spirit of goodness in our hearts. By the act of trust in Christ, the Lord of the Spirit, we open our natures for the entrance of the sanctifier, who ever waits to enter in. A man has to shut his door and pull down his blinds to keep the light out. If we open ever so minute a crevice, a beam will come in, and the wider we open, the broader the stream that pours in. So in our simple faith, we open the door and there pour into our hearts the quickening energies of that good spirit. The amount of our faith measures the amount of our possession of the Spirit who makes us good.

Thus faith becomes the condition of goodness, because it is the condition of the Spirit of God dwelling in us. It brings us into contact with the electric battery, completes the circuit, and as soon as the circuit is completed the spark comes. It is also the condition of goodness, because it implies self-oblivion and self-distrust, and is the opposite of that self-regard which, as we have seen, is the root of all evil. The germ of all holiness is in faith, not only because it brings us under the operation of the divine power which makes holy, but because it is itself the great antagonist of selfishness.

So Christian morality is the very opposite of the practical heathenism which lies at the bottom of so much of the teaching of to-day. Trust thyself, say many voices—it is the beginning of wisdom, strength, freedom. Distrust thyself and trust Christ, says the Gospel—thereby alone wilt thou be made pure and blessed. The Babel builders tried to get up to the heavens by their own building. The Titans tried to storm it by placing mountain on mountain, but “no man hath ascended up to heaven.” Better for us to rise thither by that ladder which now binds together heaven and earth, even Jesus Christ, our brother and our Lord, by whom all bright-winged angels of help and cleansing will come to minister to us purity and joy, and by whom we at last, perfected in goodness, shall pass into that presence, of which the radiant purity would blast all that had one taint of uncleanness.

Learn the conditions, then, on which you can be good. No goodness without God’s Spirit—no Spirit without faith. You can not make yourself better, can not hammer or pare your own nature into purity and loveliness. But you can put your confidence in Jesus Christ, who will take your nature into his hands and mold it into a fairest likeness to himself. You can trust him, who will breathe into you his spirit to make you holy. If my epitaph is ever to be, “He was a good man,” it must first be said, “He was full of the Holy Ghost and of faith.” Let us give up the weary, hopeless work of trying to make ourselves good, and yield ourselves to him that he may make us like himself, and that we may have a mightier power ever working in our natures till they are full of beauty and “holy as God is holy.”

[_December 17._]

THE CONFLICTS OF LIFE.

By BISHOP EDWARD THOMSON, D. D., LL. D.

1. We can not escape difficulty. The air is tainted, the soil churlish, the ocean tempest tossed. Whether we are in the field or in the wilderness, on Persian plains or Alpine heights, amid equatorial heats, or temperate climes, or polar solitudes, we are met by a thousand obstacles. Earth is cursed, and everywhere she puts forth her thorn in obedience to her Maker’s withering word. True, the curse is tempered with the mercy which yields unnumbered blessings to the hand of toil; nevertheless, it cleaves to all earth’s surface, and turns the key upon her hidden treasures. We read of cloudless skies, and sunny climes, and fields which need naught but the sickle; but who finds them? Paradise is always ahead of the emigrant.

Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward; that is, by a general law of nature. Hence we find it in want and abundance, in toil and indolence, in indulgence and restraint, in infancy, in manhood, and in age. It waits on every pleasure, and every path, and every pursuit—it dwells within. We can no more escape it than we can fly existence. Take a few illustrations. A young man resolves to be eminent. Entering the academy, he finds many difficulties in algebra, and becoming discouraged he gives it up; but has he liberated himself? No, he has plunged from great to greater difficulties. How can he unlock the vaults of mathematics without algebra, their only key? Does he abandon mathematics, another difficulty seizes him. How can he become educated without a knowledge of the exact sciences? Does he relinquish his aim at scholarship? How then, can he carry out his resolution to become eminent? Will he rescind his resolution? Then challenge him to tame the restless passions by which it was prompted. Like the fabled ships of the ancients, “_Incidit in Scyllam qui vult vitare Charybdim_”—he who endeavors to avoid Charybdis is drawn into the jaws of Scylla. How many, because of difficulties in their pursuits, become idlers? But who on earth has more trouble than the idler? A man becomes religious, and enters the path of life; but he soon finds that the world opposes, that his passions demur, that his secular plans come in conflict with his religious efforts, that an invisible adversary stands in the path to contend every inch of ground with him. He retreats. But now his difficulties are ten thousand fold greater. He finds that an unseen footstep treads upon his wandering heels, that an All-seeing eye surveys his inmost soul, that an invisible hand writes his guilt in characters indelible on all the objects around him. He must encounter the stings of conscience, the upbraidings of reason, the admonitions of the altar, the prayers of Zion, the cross of his dying Christ, the intercession of his risen Jesus, the moving, mellowing, subduing influences of the divine Spirit, the ten thousand warnings of a merciful Providence, the unnumbered monitions of living, decaying, dying, reviving nature, the very sympathies of heaven, yea, even the moving entreaties of her compassionate king. The apostate deliberately contends with conscience, reason, Providence, truth, Zion, men, angels, God; and in addition to all these the enemies he had before, and without a single auxiliary in earth, hell, or heaven! Verily, he has gained.

2. Difficulties invigorate the soul. I do not mean the difficulties of indolence and disobedience, these are withering curses, but the difficulties of industry, of obedience.

They are conditions essential to strength. What gives power to the arm of the smith? The weight of his hammer. What gives swiftness to the Indian foot? The fleetness of the game. Thus it is with the senses. What confers exquisite sensibility upon the blind man’s ear? The curtain which, by hiding the visible universe from his sight, compels him to give intense regard to the most delicate vibrations that play upon his tympanum. Thus it is with the intellect. Who is the greatest reasoner? He who habitually struggles with the worst difficulties that can be mastered by reason. Some men have fruitless imaginations; but who are they? Those who have never led their fancies out. The genial oak planted in a dismal cellar, shut out from the light and air of heaven, would not grow up and lift its branches to the skies. Plant your imagination in the heavens, and let it be subject to the high and holy influences of its pure ether, and its silent lights, and it shall manifest vitality, and vigor, and upward aspirations.

The memory, too, is strong, if subjected to proper exercise. It will yield no revenue to the soul that does not tax it; and just in proportion as it is taxed, will it be found to have capacity of production. I will add that it is thus with the moral powers. Envy, jealousy, anger, those bitter fountains which so often tincture the streams of private and domestic joy, deepen in proportion to the obstacles through which they flow. Avarice and ambition, those demons that have desolated the globe with war, derive their overwhelming power from the difficulties which impede their progress. The daring lover testifies that love becomes more wild and resistless as great and romantic difficulties rise around him. What makes the good Christian? Perpetual trial. He who has experienced the severest storms, and has most frequently thrown out the Christian anchor, has the strongest hope. Where shall we expect the firmest faith? At the gate of St. Peter’s? or at the martyr’s stake? Who is compared to purified silver or gold? That Christian around whose soul God hath kindled the fires of his furnace, and kept them glowing till it reflected his own image.

Difficulties give a healthy tone and tendency to the powers. As a body in a state of inaction becomes lethargic and diseased, so the intellect, if not kept in vigorous exercise, becomes enfeebled, and gradually sinks under the sway of the passions. Energetic action is indispensable to preserve both the body from disease, and the soul from the dominion of sense.

3. Difficulties develop resources. To prove this it is only necessary to cite the aphorism—necessity is the mother of invention. She levels forests, she rears cities, she builds bridges, she prostrates mountains, she lays her iron pathway from river to river, and from sea to sea, she baffles the raging elements, and extends her dominion from earth to air and ocean, she ascends the heavens, and with fearless foot treads round the zodiac.

4. There is scarce any difficulty that can not be overcome by perseverance. Trace any great mind to its culmination, and you will find that its ascent was slow, and by natural laws, and that its difficulties were such only as ordinary minds can surmount. Great results, whether physical or moral, are not often the offspring of giant powers. Genius is more frequently a curse than a blessing. Its possessor, relying upon his extraordinary gifts, generally falls into habits of indolence, and fails to collect the materials which are requisite to useful and magnificent effort. But there is a something which is sure of success; it is the determination which, having entered upon a career with full conviction that it is right, pursues it in calm defiance of all opposition. With such a feeling a man can not but be mighty. Toil does not weary, pain does not arrest him. Carrying a compass in his heart, which always points to one bright star, he allows no footstep to be taken which does not tend in that direction. Neither the heaving earthquake, nor the yawning gulf, nor the burning mountain can terrify him from his course; and if the heavens should fall, the shattered ruins would strike him on his way to his object. Show me the man who has this principle, and I care not to measure his blood, nor brains. I ask not his name nor his nation—I pronounce that his hand will be felt upon his generation, and his mind enstamped upon succeeding ages.