2. Attachment. — It is a call to our life's work, a call to labour ; but first it is a call to God. It is a common mistake to regard our work as leading us to God, rather than God as leading us to our work. But the latter is the true order of vocation. God calls us to Himself, and then sends us to labour in His vineyard, bids us reap where we have not sown, makes us fishers of men. This distinction, though it may seem subtle, is of great practical importance, for it involves the whole question of the right relation between character and conduct, the spiritual and the moral life. If we sever our moral life from its spiritual root — its root in the Father of Spirits — and confine our thoughts to any kind of merely
^ F. W. Robei-tson, Life and Letters, 184. * J. A. Drumniond, Charles A. Berry, 252.
268 THE CALL OF SAMUEL
moral practice, however noble, we are liable by degrees to be too absorbed in our work, to over-estimate its importance and our own importance as its agents, to be unduly discouraged by failure or sudden avocation, and finally to lapse into the favourite fallacy of a busy but irreligious age — the fallacy that excess of action can atone for defect of characterT"^^ Meanwhile, our work itself will lack the note of perfectness which spirituality alone can give, and be either outwardly ungracious or inwardly unreal. Whereas if we regard morality as a function of the spiritual life, and conduct as the consequence and not the cause of character, the natural and necessary outcome and expression of the inner man, all things will fall into their proper place.
^ What, indeed, is the life spiritual, but that detached life of thought that brings with it increasing comprehension of the
One life within us and abroad Which meets all motion and becomes its soul.
In its highest sense, it is the one means whereby we may come at some revelation of the true significance and mystery of the Christian dogma of the Incarnation and behold the triumph of the spirit over the flesh : that sovereign triumph not to be won without pain and sorrow and much labour, yet surely to be won by all those who will obey the commandment which Chaucer sums for us in the words —
Hold the hye wey, and let thy ghost thee lede.^
V.
The Eesponsibility.
1. God's call may be obeyed or it may be disobeyed. There lies our responsibility. Samuel answered by prompt obedience. Very different in its circumstances was St. Paul's call, but it resembled Samuel's in this respect, that, when God called, he, too, promptly obeyed. When St. Paul heard the voice from heaven, he said at once, trembling and astonished, " Lord, what wilt thou have me to do ? " This same obedient temper of his is stated or implied in the two accounts which he himself gives of his miraculous conversion. In the 22nd chapter of Acts he says, " And I said,
^ Lady Dilke, The Book of the Spiritual Life, 148.
I SAMUEL III. lo 269
What shall I do, Lord ? " And in the 26th, after telling king Agrippa what the Divine speaker said to him, he adds what comes to the same thing, " Whereupon, 0 king Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision." Similarly, we read of the Apostles, that " Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea ; for they were fishers. And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. And they straightway left their nets, and followed him." Again, when He saw James and John with their father Zebedee, " he called them. And they immediately left the ship and their father, and followed him." And so of St. Matthew at the receipt of custom, " he said unto him. Follow me. And he left all, rose up, and followed him."
^ The biographer of the lives of Fran9ois and Christina Coil- lard (" Coillard of the Zambesi "), in describing the departure of Christina Mackintosh to join her intended husband in South Africa, says : " A few weeks' visit to Asni^res followed that she might know his mother, and Christina sailed for South Africa in the John Williams (November 23, 1860). 'Such grief I never saw and can hardly bear to think of now,' said her sister, writing of it forty-five years later. Those who have passed through such experiences know that the sense of vocation in no way lessens the pain of parting, and indeed often makes it sharper. The heart which accepts that mysterious thing — the Call of God — suffers in advance the anguish of all experiences to come, and at the moment there seems no joy, no element of compensation, only the conviction that it must be obeyed on peril of the soul. Indeed, the crisis of obedience is like death itself, for it is the step by which the soul passes from one sphere of being to another, and learns for the first time ' to walk by faith and not by sight,' Such is the moment to many when the grating of the gangway pulled ashore sounds the knell of the old life, and the voyage just beginning forms the true parable of the life to come." ^