^ The great work is done by men who have in them a Divine dissatisfaction ; who are ever striving for something higher, who have not attained, but who press on toward the mark. The decline of this spirit is the beginning of the end. It is told of Thorwaldsen, the great Danish sculptor, that, feeling his freshness of conception decaying, he said to a friend, " My power is on the decline." Asked what he meant, he pointed to a statue of Christ. " That," said he, " is the first piece of work I have ever been satisfied with. Till now my idea has always been far beyond my power to reach it. But it is no longer so. I shall never have a great idea again." In the spiritual life there can be no self- satisfaction. " Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."
" An ingenious artist of our time," says Hazlitt, in his Table-talk, ^ Sir James Affleck, in Dr. M Larcn of Manchester, 263.
202 THE FOUR ACTS OF RELIGION
" has been heard to declare, that if ever the Devil got him into his clutches he would set him to copy his own pictures." By doing this, he would encourage a self-complacency and satisfaction with what had already been attained, which would render all further advance impossible. " Thus," says Hazlitt, " the secure, self- complacent retrospect to what is done is nothing; while the anxious, uneasy looking forward to what is to come is everything. We are afraid to dwell upon the past, lest it should retard our future progress ; the indulgence of ease is fatal to excellence." ^
(5) Once more, our self-communings should lead us up to Christ ; to Him who never bends over us with such deep com- passion as when we are humbled with the sense and conscious- ness of sin. For the duty enjoined on us in the text is not an end, but a means. It is the instrument of godliness, not godliness itself — one of the workman's tools and implements with which the goodly fabric is built up. The end of it is Christ : Christ in whom alone " the sacrifice of righteousness," wdiich the next verse tells of, is offered up, and through whom alone the believer builds up his trust in God. The whole purpose and object of self- communion is to take away our trust in self, and place it unre- servedly on Him ; to make us feel our need of pardon, and to tell us where and for what we need it ; to impress on us the sense of our own hearts' weakness and deceitfulness, that we may go to Him for light and strength. It is to make us, in short, better Christians, and more self-denying and self- watchful men.
^ To be with God, there is no need to be continually in church. Of our heart we may make an Oratory, wherein to retire from time to time, and with Him hold meek, humble, loving converse. Every one can converse closely with God, some more, others less : He knows what we can do. Let us begin then; perhaps He is just waiting for one generous resolution on our part ; let us be jjrave. So little time remains for us to live. Let us live and die with God : sufferings will be ever sweet and pleasant to us, while we abide with Him ; and without Him, the greatest pleasures will be but cruel anguish. May He be blessed for all ! Amen.^
6. " Commune with thine own heart upon thy bed, and he still." This brings us to the centre of our subject. We need quiet hours. We are too much in society — much more, from the necessities of
^ J. Burns, Illustrations from Art (1912), 88.
2 Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, 41.
PSALM IV. 4, 5 203
our age partly, than our fathers were. We are too gregarious. We do not listen enough for the quiet tones of truth, as it speaks directly to the soul ; but we look for the responsive verdict and the answering nod of our fellow-men. In all right growth there is quietness. The flowers unobserved expand their buds, and with a like noiseless progress the cornfields whiten with the grain of autumn. It is even so in the spiritual world. The heart that communes with itself and with its God makes no display, but steadily and surely the blessed results appear, in its growing resemblance to the Man Christ Jesus.
^ Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of Solitude, and the Society of thyself, nor be only content, but delight to be alone and single with Omnipresency. He who is thus prepared, the Day is not uneasy nor the Night black unto him. Darkness may bound his Eyes, not his Imagination. In his Bed he may lie, like Pompey and his Sons, in all quarters of the Earth, may speculate the Universe, and enjoy the whole World in the Hermitage of himself. Thus the old ascetick Christians found a paradise in a Desert, and with little converse on Earth held a conversation in Heaven ; thus they astronomized in Caves, and, though they beheld not the Stars, had the Glory of Heaven before them.^