A life that leads melodious days.
Her faith thro' form is pure as thine. Her hands are quicker unto good: Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood
To which she links a truth divine!
See thou, that countest reason ripe
In holding by the law within.
Thou fail not in a world of sin. And ev'n for want of such a type.^
3. In the wider life of the Church we are called upon to face a similar difficulty. The promise of God's Presence is what it has always been, " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of
* Tennyson, In Memoriam,.
EXODUS xxxiii. 14 315
the world." But it is impossible to shut our eyes to the fact that the life of the Church is entering on a new phase. The old days of protection are going, if not gone, and men in their little faith chink that religion is going too. A great wave of secularism seems to be passing over our land and beating against the temporal bulwarks of our national Christianity. And men, good men and true in their personal relations with God, men who have learned to see His Presence and His Hand in all the changes of their own lives, are getting anxious and doubtful or desponding as if God's promise to His Church had failed. But in the con- troversies of the Church in every age, as in the struggles of our own individual lives, it is impatience that leads men from the truth. We are tempted to a reckless abandonment of eternal principles because in their traditional setting they do not fit the present need. But you cannot make a new rehgion. It is not by abandoning the Christian faith, but by being true to the faith we hold, that we shall reach the religion of the future. Amidst all the changes of the sixteenth century, when the Church was driven from the shade of the monastery to the broad daylight of the world, not one article of Christian faith was lost or left behind. And if we are to judge the future by the past, those whom God will choose to guide His Church through the crisis of the present age will be neither men who, panic-struck and despairing, shrink from change, nor those who recklessly abandon the ancient faith for some nineteenth-century nostrum ; but real men, who, not being like children carried away with every " blast of vain doctrine," have the strength to face the problem. It will be those who in all the changes and struggles of their own spiritual lives can trace the guiding hand of God, and therefore in the wider issues of the Church at large are strong enough to rest and wait, ready to face the grey and shivering dawn of a new era, yet true to the ancient Christian faith, and strong in the promised presence of their God.
III.
Eest.
* I wiU give thee rest."
There are two possible sorts of rest. One is rest after toil, the lying down of the weary, at the end of the march, on the
3i6 LIFE IN GOD'S PRESENCE
morrow of the battle, on the summit of the hill. The other is rest in toil, the internal and deep repose and liberty of a spirit which has found a hidden refuge and retreat, where feeling is calm and disengaged, while the march, the battle, the climb, are still in full course. This last was the promise to Moses. Another day, a distant day, was to come when he should taste the endless rest after toil, when he should sink down on Pisgah in the arms of the Lord, and (to quote the beautiful legendary phrase) should die — if death it could be called — by His kiss. But now he was to taste the wonderful rest in toil He was to traverse that last long third of his vast and memorable life, thinking, ruling, guiding, bearing, under the Divine enabling condition of the inward rest of God, passing understanding.
^ Of course, the conscious presence of God with us is possible only on three conditions.
Firstly, we must walk in the light, as He is in the light; for He will have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, or turn aside to go with us on any crooked path of our own choosing.
Secondly, we must recognize that the blood of Jesus Christ His Son constantly cleanseth us from all sin ; not only that which we judge and confess, but that also which is seen only by His pure and holy eyes.
Thirdly, we must claim the gracious aid of the Holy Spirit, to make real that presence, which is too subtle for the eye of man, unless it be specially enlightened.^
1. Best in toil. — The longing of man's spirit amid all the strifes, discords, and confusions of life is for rest. Nothing can eradicate man's conviction that strife and discord have no right in the imiverse ; that they are abnormal ; that the normal con- dition of things and beings is harmony, and that harmony is the music of rest. God must rest — rest even in working; and all that is of God, and from God, has the longing and the tending to rest Perhaps some dull notion that they will have more rest in the life of the world, that they will escape many cares and distractions, and, at any rate, be at peace in sin, lies at the bottom of many a backsliding to Egypt in human hearts. No man at first is content to let the question alone — to leave the riddle of life unread. Hence arises the long discord in him who