3. Yet how much spiritual trimming and dressing, how much hewing and squaring does he need to fashion him aright for the position which the Divine Architect intends he shall occupy here- after ! There are sharp angles of character to be rounded off; unsightly protuberances of conduct to be chipped away; many roughnesses of temper to be smoothed down; many flaws and cracks of mind and heart to be chiselled out; and then, when the general form of the stone is prepared, how much severe
* H. D. Rawnsley.
I KINGS VI. 7 385
friction is required to give it the right polish, and bring out all its beauties, so that its smooth surface may fling back the rays of the Sun of righteousness !
^ One would think, from such words as those of the text, that there was no room for struggle in the religious life, or in the conversion into that life. The whole building grows up softly, silently, almost mystically, and we are tempted to feel as if there were no sympathy in that temple with the wrestling of our hearts. Nay, but hast thou forgotten that the struggle was all past ere ever the building was begun? Forgotten that the stone was " made ready before it was brought thither " ? What a world of meaning lies unspoken in that little clause ! Before these stones came into unity they all existed in individual separation, in isolation, in solitude. Before they passed into the stage of silent building they had each to go through a process of noise and conflict, had each to be hewn into symmetry with its place in the coming temple. There is a great unrecorded battle of the spiritual life hinted at in this " making ready" ; it is but a flash of thought, but it is a flash that lights up our whole experience and reveals us to ourselves. It tells us that the silence is not the first but the last thing, that there is a making ready for the symmetry ere the symmetry is reached. It tells us that Saul of Tarsus has his struggle ere the light from heaven breaks upon his view — that conflict where he finds it so hard to kick against the goads. It tells us that Nicodemus has his solitary walk by night ere he can take up the dead Christ from the shadow of the cross — that solitary walk wherein he feels deserted by the old and not yet convinced by the new.^
4. The greater part of the preparation to which we are subjected as professing Christians is of a disciplinary character, and hence is fitly represented by the axe, the hammer, and the tool of iron. Prosperity not only is the destruction of fools, but in the great majority of cases it hardens the heart of the nominal Christian, so that Christ Himself is forced to say, " How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God ! " And for many hundreds of years, God by the voice of Jeremiah has complained, " I spake unto thee in thy prosperity ; but thou saidst, I will not hear. This hath been thy manner from thy youth, that thou obeyedst not my voice." Afflictions come more immediately to the heart, and operate with a more searching
^ G. Matheson. DKUT.-ESTH. — 25
386 HEWING AND BUILDING
and purifying influence upon the life. They show a man his weakness and sinfulness; lay open the moral anatomy of his nature ; subject to severest test his principles of action, and cause him to retire into the chambers of his soul and learn there, in the light of the Bible and the light of conscience, his relations and duties to God and man. Now the axe seems driven into the root of his happiness; now he is broken as a block of granite under the blows of the hammer of God's word ; and now the iron of a sore adversity has entered into his soul, and he feels himself stricken, smitten, and afflicted. In these dispensa- tions, however severe, he is being fitted by the hand of God Himself for a place in glory.
^ Marvellously comforting is this message to many a struggling soul. Art thou perplexed by thine inward disquietude? Art thou tossed upon a sea of doubt and wrapt in a mist of uncer- tainty ? Art thou experiencing the accusations of a conscience that speaks louder and louder every day? Say not that, therefore, thelre is no place for thee within the silence of the mystic temple ; it is just therefore that there is a place for thee. TMs struggle of thine is thy making ready. This loudness of thy conscience is the hewing of thy hardness into symmetry — the symmetry that will fit thee to be a stone in the temple of Christ. Thy solitude is not the neglect of thee, thy struggle is not the absence of thy God from thee; it is the eye of thy God upon thee. He has taken thee up to the wilderness that He may make thee ready. All the pain 'He sends thee is the sign of His interest in thee, the proof that He is preparing thee for the symmetry of the temple of peace. Thy wilderness is the vestibule into thy heaven. Bless the Lord, 0 my soul.^