^ This commonplace world of ours was the beautiful world of Christ. The world in which we are now living was the one in which He lived and worked on through the days of His appointed time. The duties laid upon our hearts are like to those that were measured out to Him.
And so the Word had breath, and wrought With human hands the creed of creeds In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought.
The example set before us for our emulation is that of One who did the humblest of these duties with the same faithfulness and love of service as characterized Him in His higher service as the Word of God and the Saviour of mankind.^
0 Power, more near my life than life itself (Or what seems life to us in sense immured), Even as the roots, shut in the darksome earth, Share in the tree-top's joyance, and conceive Of sunshine and wide air and winged things By sympathy of nature, so do I Have evidence of Thee so far above, Yet in and of me ! Eather Thou the root Invisibly sustaining, hid in light. Not darkness, or in darkness made by us. If sometimes I must hear good men debate Of other witness of Thyself than Thou,
' W. Boyd Carpenter.
« J. B, Maclean, The Secret of the Stream, 48.
JOSHUA V. 12 125
As if there needed any help of ours To nurse Thy flickering life, that else must cease, Blown out, as 'twere a candle, by men's breath, My soul shall not be taken in their snare. To change her inward surety for their doubt Muffled from sight in formal robes of proof: While she can only feel herself through Thee, I fear not Thy withdrawal ; more I fear, Seeing, to know Thee not, hoodwinked with dreams Of signs and wonders, while, unnoticed, Thou, Walking Thy garden still, commun'st with men, Missed in the commonplace of miracle.^
(2) It is a step upwards in our moral education. — Life is not merely made up of the conceptions which we have of God ; these conceptions must issue in our own personal growth. The object which God has in putting us into this little world for the three- score years and ten is not to secure our happiness or to startle us into a kind of hysterical perception of His presence, but to educate us as His children, to bring us after that sort and after that measure that we may enter into His conception of things, that we may be sharers of His character, partakers of His nature, and that we may look at life from His own standpoint. Therefore, when we ask that God should make Himself manifest by these miracles and wonders, we are really making a false conception of our own powers and capabilities in relation to God.
For by what faculty do we perceive God ? Do we expect to apprehend Him by the physical eye ? Do we imagine that we shall apprehend Him by intellectual effort ? Surely those are only conceptions which belong to past ideas, crude notions of God. We cannot perceive God by the physical eye ! God is a spirit ! We cannot perceive God by our intellectual powers, because the world by wisdom knew not God, and if He be God at all to us He is the Incomprehensible One. Then, of course, the miracle and the wonder are outside the case, for the marvellous can only speak on the plane of things physical or appeal to the power of the mind, the intellectual power within us. Those are not the ways by which we apprehend God ; and to imagine that a man would be made to believe in God by a miracle who had no capacity at work that could apprehend God otherwise, is a contradiction in terms.
* James Russell LowelL
126 EXCELLENCE OF THINGS ORDINARY
Our Lord was constantly teaching that. In His parable of Dives and Lazarus He uses the very principle. Here the man in his torment imagines that a wonder will convince his brethren. "Send Lazarus! Let the marvel appear! Let the miracles be sent ! Send Lazarus ! " And the only answer is, " If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead " — in other words, if they have not the moral capacity to follow the teachings of Moses and the prophets, if they have no moral affinity and sympathy with the prophet's teaching, no wonder will give them that capacity.
^ The power which understands and apprehends God is not the physical, not the intellectual, but the moral power within us. The way in which we can understand God is by the exercise of our moral faculties. Jesus Christ was the greatest moral teacher that ever lived, and what is Jesus Christ's emphatic statement concerning this ? He says there are two faculties, two powers by which God can be apprehended, two ways in which we shall be able to ascertain and lay our hand upon our Father in heaven ; one is single-mindedness, the other purity of heart.^
The one condition by which we can understand anything or anybody is that we shall be in some degree a sharer of their nature. We talk of knowing God. How can we know Him if we be not righteous ? How can we understand Him if we be not holy ? How can we enter into His love if no love dwells within our soul? It is the possession of moral faculties that brings power; these make up the fingers of the hand by which alone we can grasp the hand of God, by which He can become a reality to us, entering into our soul and life. Hence, when the message comes to us, " Go forward ! Eest no longer upon the miracle ! Eest now upon the ordinary manifestations ! " it is as if they said, " I make an appeal now to your responsibility ; I want responsiveness on your part." " You must give moral co-operation " — that is the meaning of the message.