God in the bush that made it still visible to Moses across the eventful interval. He saw that bush when all the other bushes of Egypt had faded out of sight, because that bush was on fire with God.
And as Christianity is the most vivid of all religions, with its personally manifested God, there is a more perfect unity in a Christian life than in any other. It keeps all its parts, and from its consummations looks back with gratitude and love to its beginnings. The crown that it casts before the throne at last is the same that it felt trembling on its brow in the first ecstatic sense of Christ's forgiveness, and that has been steadily glowing into greater clearness as perfecting love has more and more com- pletely cast out fear. The feet that go up to God into the mountain, at the end, are the same that first put off their shoes beside the burning bush. This is why the Christian, more than other men, not merely dares, but loves, to look back and remember.
Let us think, then, of the young Christian and the old Christian — the same man in his first apprehension, and in his ripened knowledge, of Christ. What is the difference between the two ? What is the growth which brings one into the other ? Everybody claims that the Christian experience ripens and deepens. What is there riper and deeper in the full existence that there was not in the incipient life ?
1. As every Christian becomes more and more a Christian, there must be a larger and larger absorption of truth or doctrine into life. We hear all around us nowadays a great impatience with the prominence of dogma — that is, of truth abstractly and definitely stated — in Christianity. And most of those who are thus impatient really mean well. They feel that Christianity, being a thing of personal salvation, ought to show itself in characters and lives. There they are right. But to decry dogma in the interest of character is like despising food as if it inter- fered with health. Food is not health. The human body is built just so as to turn food into health and strength. And truth is not holiness. The human soul is made to turn, by the subtle chemistry of its digestive experience, truth into goodness. And this is just what the Christian, as he goes on, finds himself
46 THE GOOD WILL OF A LIFETIME
doing under God's grace. Before the young Christian lie the doctrines of his faith — God's being, God's care, Christ's incarna- tion, Christ's atonement, immortality. What has the old Christian, with his long experience, done with them ? He holds them no longer crudely, as things to be believed merely. He has taken them home into his nature. He has transmuted them into forms of life. God's being appears now filling his life with reverence. God's care clothes every act and thought of his with gratitude. Christ's incarnation is the inspiration of his new, dear love of all humanity. The atonement is the power of his all-pervading and deep-rooted faith. And immortality ! He no longer regards as a doctrine that which has become a great constant flood of life, ever resting over and illuminating the far- off hill-tops — now grown so near, so real — of the eternal life. The young dogmatist boasts of his dogmas. The old saint lives his life. Both are natural in their places and times, as are the unripe and the ripened fruit.
Her prayer-book had repose,
One word her heart sufficed, Scent of a hidden rose: " Christ ! "
To creeds her soul was shut,
For her confession of The Christian faith was but Love.
2. In the second place, as a consequence of this feature of growth, there will come a growing variety in Christian character as Christians grow older. We should expect a uniformity and resemblance in younger Christians, and a diversity in older ones, because life is more various than doctrine. Each young Christian has his doctrine, crude and dogmatic still. The maturer Christians have not merely worked those doctrines into life, but each has worked them into his own sort of life. The truth is the same for all; the life it makes is infinite. The more deeply it has been digested, the more strongly the individuality comes out.
^ The truth that God gives us is like the wheat that a bounteous country sends into the city. It is all the same wheat ; but men go and buy it and eat it, and this same identical wheat
DEUTERONOMY xxxiii. i6 47
is turned into different sorts of force in different men. It is turned into bartering force in one, and thinking force in another, and singing force in another, and governing force in another. It is manifold as soon as it passes into men.
^ Gladstone, Newman, and Eainy — perhaps the three most remarkable men of their day of those who really applied their minds to the matters of Christian faith — were all in agree- ment not only as to personal experience of religion, but also — if we except certain matters about the Church (and these are not in the Creed) — as to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. But the intellectual attitude of each of these minds to these doctrines was distinct. Gladstone's mind was essentially and constitutionally orthodox, and he was never critical regarding ecclesiastical dogma. Newman's was essentially and constitu- tionally sceptical, and the Church's authoritative system was to him less the native home of his mind than its only refuge. Eainy's mind was well content to lodge in Catholic forms of doctrine, but he neither denied the element of imperfection and difficulty in such forms nor was disturbed by it, for this only made him more deeply feel " how great a thing it is to believe in God."i