 File 14 of the LibriVox recording of The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond, Address No. 4, The Changed Life. Section No. 1 The Changed Life 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. 2 Corinthians 3.18 The Changed Life I protest that if some great power would agree to make me think what is true and do what is right on the 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 to-morrow 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 affecting it, the supreme gift to the world has been forgotten. This is simply what men were 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, on 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 aturia 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 mast 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 accomplished by such moral leakage. For the pent-up energies accumulate to the bursting point, and the last date 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 devices one by one. The temporary result is an overbalanced and incongruous character. Someone defines a prick as a creature that is overfed for its size. One sometimes finds Christians of this species overfed 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 rapid 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 at once 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 notebook with columns for the days of the week and a list of virtues with spaces against each for marks. 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 code was Franklin's method, and I suppose thousands more could tell how they had hung up in their bedrooms, or hid in lock-fast drawers the rules which one solemn day they drew up to shape their lives. This method is not erroneous, but 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 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. End of file 14. File 15 of the LibriVox recording of The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond. The Fourth Address, The Changed Life. Section 2, The Formula of Sanctification. 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 bolts 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 should one look for such a formula? Where one would look for any formula among the textbooks? And if we turn to the textbooks 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 is guaranteed by the laws of nature. The finest expression of this rule in scripture, or indeed in any literature, is probably drawn up and condensed in 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 life's sensuousness, 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, you must be born again. We cannot born ourselves. Be not conformed to this world, but be 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 moral change upon him, that he must be susceptible to 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 molding of hands beyond our own. As the branch ascends and the bud bursts and the fruit reddens under the cooperation 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, everybody continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it may be compelled by impressed forces to change that state. This is also the 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 the clay and there is a potter. We have tried to get the clay to mold 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 molding 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 that, first glance, a radiance of some kind, something dazzling or glittering, some halo such as the old master's loved paint round the heads of their eke homos. But that is paint, mere matter, the visible symbol of some unseen thing. What is that unseen thing? It is, of all unseen things, the most radiant, the most beautiful, the most divine, and it 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 the fullness 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 tangible, or ghostly, or transcendental. If it were this, how could Paul ask Min to reflect it? Stripped of its physical enslavement, 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 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 tonight, the world in which each of us lived and moved throughout this day was focused in the room. What we saw as we looked at one another was not one another, but one another'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 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 neighbor's mirror. All human intercourse is a seeing of reflections. I met a stranger in a railway carriage. The cadence of his first word tells me that 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 inflection 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 by a pen which lets nothing pass and whose writing can never be blotted out. What I am reading in him, meantime, he is also 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 paneled 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 need are not simply held for the moment on the polished surface and thrown off again into space. Each is retained where it first fell and stored up in the soul forever. 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 fleeting things they see, transfer into their 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 focused there in a man's soul. It is there. How could it be reflected there if it were not there? All things that he has ever seen, known, felt, believed of the surrounding world, are now within him and 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 from happening. It must be absorbed into the soul and forever 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 blit 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. End of File 15 of The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses. File 16 of the LibriVox recording of The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The fourth address. The Changed Life. Section 3, The Alchemy of Influence. Part 1. 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. But when intercourse is very close and very frequent, so complete is this exchange that recognizable 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, but a composite soul. It did not matter which of the two you spoke to, 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 saver of David about Jonathan and a saver 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 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 of 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, walking side by side are sanctifiers of souls. Here, breathing through common clay, is heaven. Here, energies charged through a temporal median 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. Day by day, we can almost see the first disciples grow. First there steals over them the faintest possible adembration 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, thought, 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 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 anyone to come under this influence and ever be the same again. Whoever abided in him, sineth not, he said. It was inconceivable that he should sin, as inconceivable as that ice should live in a burning sun or darkness coexist with noon. But if anyone did sin, it was to John the simple proof that he could never have met Christ. Whosoever sineth, he exclaims, hath not seen him, neither known him. Sin was abashed in this presence, its roots withered, its sway and victory were forever 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 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 biographies, by one who lived and left this earth 1800 years ago? How can modern men today 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 bold, 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, only a few of us probably would ever have a chance of seeing him. Millions of her subjects in this country have never seen their own queen. There would be millions of the subjects of Christ who would 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 once lived 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. This 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. End of file 16. File 17 of the LibriVox recording of the Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond. The Third Address, The Changed Life. Section three, The Alchemy of Influence. Part two, Make Christ your most constant companion. This is what it practically means for us. Be more under his influence than under any other influence. 10 minutes spent in his society every day. I too, 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 keynote. 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 cruelest 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. Tomorrow at daybreak, turn it towards him and even to your enemy, the fashion of your countenance will be changed. Whatever you do then, 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 and 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. Today the poor will meet you and you will feed them. The helpless, the tempted, the sad will throng about you and each you will be friend. Where were all these people yesterday? Where they are today, but you did not see them. It is in reflected light that the poor are seen. But your soul today 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 tomorrow 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 great 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 God. And what the world is conscious of if the result be a true one is also the glory of God. 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 today, 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 tonight only a little, but that little I desire to speak in 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 the one who made the heavens and 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 tonight and of whom I desire to say by the love of God in Jesus Christ 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 any 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 any 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 or 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 25 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 lives 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 that 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. This thing in the world in other addresses by Henry Drummond, the fourth address the changed life. Section four, the first experiment. 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'm 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 the spirit works. It is thought that 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. Pouring over religious books how often were they not within a paragraph of it? The next paragraph the next sentence would discover all and they would be born on a flowing tide forever. 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 not in moods. Divinity in our own plain 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 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 anyone cannot conceive or realize a mystical relation with Christ, perhaps all that can be done is to help him to step onto it by still planar 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 words everywhere in the world now should not also instruct, inspire, and mold 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 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 belong 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, an 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 whir 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 form 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 forever. 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 one must 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 on 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 overexposed 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 ever 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, 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 unhollowed 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 labor the finely focused instrument was finally 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. Tomorrow, the next moment, he, a poor, dark and slurred soul, may need it again to focus the image better, to take a moat off the lens, to clear the mirror from a breath with which the world has dulled it. No readjustment 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 readjustment 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 a position as will allow for the motion of the earth. And this calculated counteracting of the movements of the world, this holding of the mirror exactly opposite to the mirrored, this steadying of the faculties unerringly, through cloud and earthquakes, fire and sword, is the stupendous cooperating labor 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 Gallerie 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 a 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 neighbors 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. End of File 18 File 19 of the LibriVox recording of The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond. Address number five, Paxfobiscum. Section number one, Paxfobiscum. Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Introductory Heard the other morning a sermon by a distinguished preacher upon rest. It was full of wonderful thoughts, but when I came to ask myself, how does he say, I can yet rest? There was no answer. The sermon was sincerely meant to be practical, yet it contained no experience that seemed to me to be tangible, nor any advice which could help me to find the thing itself as I went about the world that afternoon. Yet this omission of the only important problem was not the fault of the preacher. The whole popular religion is in the twilight here, and when pressed for really working specifics for the experiences with which it deals, it falters and seems to lose itself in mist. This want of connection between the great words of religion and everyday life has bewildered and discouraged all of us. Christianity possesses the noblest words in the language. Its literature overflows with terms expressive of the greatest and happiest moods which can fill the soul of man. Rest, joy, peace, faith, love, light. These words occur with such persistency in hymns and prayers that an observer might think they formed the staple of Christian experience. But on coming to close quarters with the actual life of most of us, how surely he would be disenchanted. I do not think we ourselves are aware how much our religious life is made up of phrases. How much of what we call Christian experience is only a dialect of the churches, a mere religious phraseology with almost nothing behind it in what we really feel and know. For some of us, indeed, the Christian experiences seem further away than when we took the first steps in the Christian life. That life has not opened out as we had hoped. We do not regret our religion, but we are disappointed with it. There are times, perhaps, when wandering notes from divine or music stray into our spirits. But these experiences come at few and fitful moments. We have no sense of possession in them. When they visit us, it is a surprise. When they leave us, it is without explanation. When we wish their return, we do not know how to secure it. All which points to a religion without solid base and a poor and flickering life. It means a great bankruptcy in those experiences which give Christianity its personal solace and make it attractive to the world and a great uncertainty as to any remedy. It is as if we knew everything about health except the way to get it. I am quite sure that the difficulty does not lie in the fact that men are not in earnest. This is simply not the fact. All around us Christians are wearing themselves out trying to be better. The amount of spiritual longing in the world, in the hearts of unnumbered thousands of men and women in whom we would never suspect it, among the wise and thoughtful, among the young and gay who seldom assuage and never betray their thirst. This is one of the most wonderful and touching facts of life. It is not more heat that is needed, but more light, not more force, but more direction given to the very real energies already there. What Christian experience wants is thread, a vertical column, method. It is impossible to believe that there is no remedy for its unevenness and dishevelment or that the remedy is a secret. The idea also that some few men by happy chance or happier temperament have acquired the secret whether there were some sort of knack or trick to it is wholly incredible. Religion must ripen its fruit for men of every temperament, and the way, even to its highest heights, must be by a gateway through which the peoples of the world may pass. I shall try to lead up to this gateway by a very familiar path, but as that path is strangely unfrequented and even unknown where it passes into the religious sphere, I must dwell for a moment on the commonest of common places. End of file 19. File 20 of the LibriVox recording of The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond. Address No. 5 Pax Phobiscum. Section 2. Effects Require Causes. Effects Require Causes. Nothing that happens in the world happens by chance. God is a God of order. Everything is arranged on definite principles and never at random. The world, even the religious world, is governed by law. Character is governed by law. Happiness is governed by law. The Christian experiences are governed by law. Men, forgetting this, expect rest, joy, peace, faith to drop into their souls from the air like snow or rain. But in point of fact, they do not do so. And if they did, they would no less have their origin in previous activities and be controlled by natural laws. Rain and snow do drop from the air, but not without a long previous history. They are the mature effects of former causes. Equally so are rest and peace and joy. They too have each a previous history. Storms and winds and calms are not accidents, but are brought about by antecedent circumstances. Rest and peace are but calms in man's inward nature and arise through causes as definite and as inevitable. Realize it thoroughly. It is a methodical, not an accidental world. If a housewife turns out a good cake, it is the result of a sound receipt, carefully applied. She cannot mix the assigned ingredients and fire them for the appropriate time without producing the result. It is not she who has made the cake. It is nature. She brings related things together, sets causes at work. These causes bring about the result. She is not a creator, but an intermediary. She does not expect random causes to produce specific effects. Random ingredients would only produce random cakes. So it is in the making of Christian experiences. Certain lines are followed. Certain effects are the result. These effects cannot but be the result. But the result can never take place without the previous cause. To expect results without antecedents is to expect cakes without ingredients. That impossibility is precisely the most universal expectation. Now what I mainly wish to do is help you to firmly grasp the simple principle of cause and effect in the spiritual world. And instead of applying the principle generally to each of the Christian experiences in turn, I shall examine its application to one in some little detail. The one I shall select is rest. And I think anyone who follows the application in this single instance will be able to apply it for himself to all the others. Take such a sentence as this. African explorers are subject to fevers which cause restlessness and delirium. Note the expression cause restlessness. Restlessness has a cause. Clearly then, anyone who wished to get rid of restlessness would proceed at once to deal with the cause. And if that were not removed a doctor might prescribe a hundred things and all might be taken in turn without producing the least effect. Things are so arranged in the original planning of the world that certain effects must follow certain causes and certain causes must be abolished before certain effects can be removed. Certain parts of Africa are inseparably linked with the physical experience called fever. This fever is in turn infallibly linked with a mental experience called restlessness and delirium. To abolish the mental experience the radical method would be to abolish the physical experience and the way of abolishing the physical experience would be to abolish Africa or to cease to go there. Now this holds good for all other forms of restlessness. Every other form and kind of restlessness in the world has a definite cause and the particular kind of restlessness can only be removed by removing the allotted cause. All this is also true of rest. Restlessness has a cause. Must not rest have a cause? Necessarily. If it were a chance world we would not expect this but being a methodical world it cannot be otherwise. Rest, physical rest, moral rest, spiritual rest, every kind of rest has a cause as certainly as restlessness. Now causes are discriminating. There is one kind of cause for every particular effect and no other. And if one particular effect is desired a corresponding cause must be set in motion. It is no use proposing finely devised schemes or going through general pious exercises in the hope that somehow rest will come. The Christian life is not casual but causal. All nature is a standing protest against the absurdity expecting to secure spiritual effects or any effects without the employment of appropriate causes. The great teacher dealt what ought to have been the final blow to this infinite irrelevancy by a single question. Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? Why then did the great teacher not educate his followers fully? Why did he not tell us, for example, how such a thing as rest might be obtained? The answer is that he did. But plainly, explicitly, in so many words? Yes, plainly, explicitly, in so many words. He assigned rest to its cause in words with which each of us have been familiar from our earliest childhood. He begins, you remember, for you know at once the passage I refer to, as if rest could be had without any cause. Come unto me, he says, and I will give you rest. Rest, apparently, was a favour to be bestowed. Men had but to come to him and he would give it to every applicant. But the next sentence takes that all back. The qualification, indeed, is added instantaneously for what the first sentence seemed to give was next thing to an impossibility for how, in a literal sense, can rest be given. One could no more give away rest than he could give away laughter. We speak of causing laughter, which we can do, but we cannot give it away. When we speak of giving pain, we know perfectly well that we cannot give pain away. And when we aim at giving pleasure, all that we do is to arrange a set of circumstances in such a way that these shall cause pleasure. Of course there is a sense and a very strong sense in which a great personality breathes upon all who come within its influence an abiding peace and trust. Men can be to other men as the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land. Much more Christ. Much more Christ as perfect man. Much more still as saviour of the world. But it is not this of which I speak. When Christ said he would give men rest, he meant simply that he would put them in the way of it. By no act of conveyance would or could he make over his own rest to them. He would give them his receipt for it. That was all. But he would not make it for them. For one thing it was not in his plan to make it for them. For another thing men are not so planned that it could be made for them. And for yet another thing it was a thousand times better that they should make it for themselves. That this is the meaning becomes obvious from the wording of the second sentence. Learn of me and ye shall find rest. Rest, that is to say, is not a thing that can be given but a thing to be acquired. It comes not by an act but by a process. It is not to be found in a happy hour as one finds the treasure but slowly as one finds knowledge. It could indeed be no more found in a moment than could knowledge. A soil has to be prepared for it. Like a fine fruit it will grow in one climate and not in another at one altitude and not at another. Like all growths it will have an orderly development and mature by slow degrees. The nature of this slow process Christ clearly defines when he says we are to achieve rest by learning. Learn of me, he says and ye shall find rest to your souls. Now consider the extraordinary originality of this utterance. How novel the connection between those two words learn and rest. How few of us have ever associated them ever thought that rest was a thing to be learned, ever laid ourselves out for it as we would to learn a language, ever practiced it as we would practice the violin. Does it not show how entirely new Christ's teaching still is to the world that so old and threadbare and aphorism should be still so little applied? The last thing most of us would have thought of would have been to associate rest with work. What must one work at? What is that which if duly learned will find the soul of man in rest? Christ answers without the least hesitation he specifies two things meekness and lowliness. Learn of me, he says for I am meek and lowly in heart. Now these two things are not chosen at random. To these accomplishments in a special way rest is attached. Learn these in short and you have already found rest. These, as they stand are direct causes of rest. We'll produce it at once, cannot but produce it at once. And if you think for a single moment you will see how this is necessarily so for causes are never arbitrary and the connection between antecedent and consequent here and everywhere lies deep in the nature of things. What is the connection then? I answer by a further question what are the chief causes of unrest? If you know yourself you will answer pride, selfishness, ambition. As you look back upon the past years of your life is it not true that its unhappiness has chiefly come from the succession of personal mortifications and almost trivial disappointments which the intercourse of life has brought you? Great trials come at lengthened intervals and we rise to breast them but it is the petty friction of our everyday life with one another. The jar of business or of work, the discord of the domestic circle, the collapse of our ambition, the crossing of our will, the taking down of our conceit which make inward peace impossible. Wounded vanity then, disappointed hopes, unsatisfied selfishness. These are the old, vulgar, universal sources of man's unrest. Now it is obvious why Christ pointed out as the two chief objects for attainment the exact opposites of these. To meekness and lowliness these things simply do not exist. They cure unrest by making it impossible. These remedies do not trifle with surface symptoms. They strike at once at removing causes. The ceaseless chagrin of a self-centered life can be removed at once by learning meekness and lowliness of heart. He who learns them is forever proof against it. He lives henceforth a charmed life. Christianity is a fine inoculation. A transfusion of healthy blood into an anemic or poisoned soul. No fever can attack a perfectly sound body. No fever of unrest can disturb a soul which has breathed the air or learned the ways of Christ. Men sigh for the wings of a dove that they may fly away and be at rest. But flying away will not help us. The kingdom of God is within you. We aspire to the top to look for rest. It lies at the bottom. Water rests only when it gets to the lowest place. So do men. Hence be lowly. The man who has no opinion of himself at all can never be hurt if others do not acknowledge him. Hence be meek. He who is without expectation cannot fret if nothing comes to him. It is self-evident that these things are so. The lowly man and the meek man are really above all other men, above all other things. They dominate the world because they do not care for it. The miser does not possess gold. Gold possesses him. But the meek possess it. The meek, said Christ, inherit the earth. They do not buy it. They do not conquer it. But they inherit it. There are people who go about the world looking for slights, and they are necessarily miserable, for they find them at every turn, especially the imaginary ones. One has the same pity for such men as for the very poor. They are the morally illiterate. They have had no real education, for they have never learned how to live. Few men know how to live. But at random, carrying into mature life the merely animal methods and motives which we had as little children, and it does not occur to us that all this must be changed, that much of it must be reversed, that life is the finest of fine arts, that it has to be learned with life-long patience, and that the years of our pilgrimage are all too short to master it triumphantly. Yet this is what Christianity is for, to teach men the art of life, and its whole curriculum lies in one word, learn of me. Unlike most education, this is almost purely personal. It is not to be had from books, or lectures, or creeds, or doctrines. It is a study from the life. Christ never said much in mere words about the Christian graces. He lived them. He was them. Yet we do not merely copy him. We learn his art by living with him, like the old apprentices with their masters. Now we understand it all. Christ's invitation to the weary and heavy laden is a call to begin life over again upon a new principle, upon his own principle. Watch my way of doing things, he says. Follow me, take life as I take it. Be meek and lowly, and you will find rest. I do not say remember that the Christian life to every man or to any man can be a bed of roses. No educational process can be this. And perhaps if some men knew how much was involved in the simple learn of Christ, they would not enter his school with so irresponsible a heart. For there is not only much to learn, but much to unlearn. Many men never go to the school at all till their disposition is already half ruined and character has taken on its fatal set. To learn arithmetic is difficult at 50. Much more to learn Christianity. To learn simply what it is to be meek and lowly in the case of one who has had no lessons at in childhood may cost him half of what he values most on earth. Do we realize, for instance, that the way of teaching humility is generally by humiliation? There is probably no other school for it. When a man enters himself as a pupil in such a school, it means a very great thing. There is much rest there, but there is also much work. I should be wrong, even though my theme is the brighter side, to ignore the cross and minimize the cost. Only it gives the cross a more definite meaning and a rarer value to connect it thus directly and causally with the growth of the inner life. Our platitudes about the benefits of affliction are usually about as vague as our theories of Christian experience. Somehow we believe affliction does us good, but it is not a question of somehow. The result is definite, calculable, necessary. It is under the strictest law of cause and effect. The first effect of losing one's fortune, for instance, is humiliation, and the effect of humiliation, as we have just seen, is to make one humble, and the effect of being humble is to produce rest. It is a roundabout way, apparently, of producing rest, but nature generally works by circular processes, and it is not certain that there is any other way of becoming humble or of finding rest. If a man could make himself humble to order, it might simplify matters, but we do not find that this happens. Hence we must all go through the mill. Hence death, death to the lower self, is the nearest gate and the quickest road to life. Yet this is only half the truth. Christ's life outwardly was one of the most troubled lives that was ever lived. Tempest and tumult, tumult and tempest, the waves breaking over it all the time till the worn body was laid in the grave. But the inner life was a sea of glass, the great calm was always there. At any moment you might have gone to him and found rest, and even when the bloodhounds were dogging him in the streets of Jerusalem, he turned to his disciples and offered them as a last legacy, my peace. Nothing ever for a moment broke the serenity of Christ's life on earth. Miss Fortune could not touch him. He had no fortune. Food, raiment, money, fountain heads of half the world's weariness, he simply did not care for. They played no part in his life. He took no thought for them. It was impossible to affect him by lowering his reputation. He had already made himself of no repute. He was dumb before insult. When he was reviled, he reviled not again. In fact, there was nothing that the world could do to him that could ruffle the surface of his spirit. Such living as mere living is altogether unique. It is only when we see what it was in him that we can know what the word rest means. It lies not in emotions nor in the absence of emotions. It is not a hallowed feeling that comes over us in church. It is not something that the preacher has in his voice. It is not in nature, nor in poetry, nor in music, though in all these there is soothing. It is the mind at leisure from itself. It is the perfect poise of the soul. The absolute adjustment of the inward man to the stress of all outward things. The preparedness against every emergency. The stability of assured convictions. The eternal calm of an invulnerable faith. The repose of a heart set deep in God. It is the mood of the man who says with browning, God's in his heaven, all's well with the world. Two painters painted a picture to illustrate his conception of rest. The first chose for his scene a still, lone lake among the far-off mountains. The second threw on his canvas a thundering waterfall with a fragile birch tree bending over the foam. At the fork of a branch almost wet with the cataract spray, a robin sat on its nest. The first was only stagnation. The last was rest. For in rest there are always two elements, tranquility and energy. Silence and turbulence. Creation and destruction. Fearlessness and fearfulness. This it was in Christ. It is quite plain from all of this that whatever else he claimed to be or to do, he at least knew how to live. All this is the perfection of living. Of living in the mere sense of passing through the world in the best way. Hence his anxiety to communicate his idea of life to others. He came, he said, to give men life. True life. A more abundant life than they were living. The life, as the fine phrase of the revised version has it, that is life indeed. This is what he himself possessed and it is this which he offers to all mankind. And hence his direct appeal for all to come to him who had not made much of life, who were weary and heavy laden. These he would teach his secret. They also should know the life that is life indeed. End of file 20.