5. Another sign of the growth of Christian character is to be found in what may be called the growing transfiguration of duty. To every young Christian the new service of Christ comes largely with the look of a multitude of commandments. They throng around his life, each one demanding to be obeyed. He welcomes them joyously. He takes up his tasks with glad hands still, because they are his Master's tasks. But as he grows older in grace, is there no difference ? Tell me, you who have been long the servants of our dear and gracious Lord, has there come in your long Christian life no change in the whole aspect of your service ? Has not your more and more intimate sympathy with Him let you in behind many and many a duty which once seemed dark and hard, and allowed you to see the light of His loving intention burning there ? Have you not grown into a clearer and deeper understanding of what Jesus meant by those sweet and wonderful words, " Henceforth I call you not servants ; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth : but I have called you friends ; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you " ? In every opening Christian life there is something Mosaic, something Hebrew. The order of the ^ J. S. Drammond, Charles A. Berry, 164. DEUT.-ESTH. — 4
50 THE GOOD WILL OF A LIFETIME
Testaments is to a certain degree repeated in the experience of every believer. At last, in the fulness of time, the New Testa- ment has perfectly come. The law is given first, and then grace and truth come by Jesus Christ. It is no sudden transformation. It cannot be, because it cannot come otherwise than by the gradual teaching of life. But when it has wholly come, then, full of the complete consciousness of Christ, duty is done not simply because Christ has commanded it and we love Him, but because Christ has filled us with Himself, transformed our standards, and recreated our affections ; and we love the duty too, seeing its essential beauty as He sees it out of whose nature it proceeds.
Duty was renamed
Delight, and love was ready for the winds
Of Liberty that shake the trees upon
The uplands of God's will.^
6. But, after all, the profoundest and most reliable sign of the maturing spiritual life is deepening personal intimacy with Him who is the Christian's life, the Lord Jesus Christ. All comes to that at last. Christianity begins with many motives. It all fastens itself at last upon one motive, which does not exclude, but is large enough to comprehend, all that is good in all the rest. "That I may know him." Those are St. Paul's words. How constantly we come back to his large, rounded life, as the picture of what the Christian is and becomes. Set before you the young man at Damascus and the old man at Kome, and compare the two. " That I may know him." We have all seen, if it has been om' privilege to watch true Christians growing old, the special and absorbing way with which the personal Christ — their know- ledge of Him, and His knowledge of them — comes to be all their religion.
^ Christ, to the Christian growing older, seems to be what the sun is to the developing day, which it lightens from the morning to the evening. When the sun is in the zenith in the broad noon- day, men do their various works by his light ; but they do not 80 often look up to him. It is the sunlight that they glory in, flooding a thousand tasks with clearness, making a million things beautiful. But as the world rolls into the evening, it is the sun * Anna Bunston, The Porch (^ Paradiae, 24.
DEUTERONOMY xxxiii. i6 51
itself at sunset that men gather to look at and admire and love. So to the earlier and middle stages of a Christian life, Christ is the revealer of duty and of truth; and duty and truth become clear and dear in His light. The young Christian glories in the way in which, under his Master's power, he can work for humanity, for truth, for his nation, for society, for his family. But as the Christian life ripens into evening, it is not on these things, though they are not forgotten, that the soul dwells most. It is on the Lord Himself. It is that He is the soul's, and the soul is His. It is His wondrousness, His dearness, and His truth that fill the Hfe as it presses closer to where He stands — as the setting earth rolls on towards the sun.
Now, if the personal presence of Christ becomes clearer to us as we grow riper in the Christian life, there are certain effects which it will produce. They are the noble characteristics of the maturest Christians.
(1) It will make us more unworldly. To be always living with One whose kingdom is not of this world, to be constantly conversant, as we hold intercourse with Him, with the thought that there are other worlds also over which He presides, and with which we have something to do through our union with Him — how this breaks up and scatters the littleness of life, the bondage of the seen. How it lets us out, free to trace the course of every action, the career of every thought, as it seeks vast untold issues in other spheres.