T| As the wine standing on its dregs or lees contracts a taste from the lees, and must therefore be decanted or drawn off, so as to have no contact longer with their vile sedimentary matter, so we, in like manner, need to be separated from everything pertaining to the former life, to be broken up in our expectations, and loosened from the affinities of our former habit. In our conversion to God we pass a crisis that, like fermentation, clears our transparency and makes us apparently new ; we are called new men in Christ Jesus ; still the old man is not wholly removed. It settles like dregs at the bottom, so to speak, of our character, where it is, for the present, unseen. One might imagine, for the time, that it is wholly taken away; and yet it is there, and is only the more likely to infect us that it is not sufficiently mixed with our life to cloud our present transparency. Our sanctification is not to be completed save by separation from it. And therefore God,
JEREMIAH xlviii. n 153
who is faithful to us, continues to sever us, as completely as possible, from all association with the old life and condition; breaks up our plans, compels a readjustment of our objects, empties us about from vessel to vessel, that our taste may not remain.1
(3) It is in the changes and surprises through which we are continually passing that we are prepared for the gracious and refining work of the Spirit in us. When we are allowed to stand still, and are agitated by no changes, we become incrusted, as it were, under our remaining faults or evils, and shut up in them as wine in the vat where it is kept. And the Spirit of God is shut away, in this manner, by the imperviousness of our settled habit. But when great changes or calamities come, our crust is broken up, and the freshening breath of the Spirit fans the open chamber of the soul, to purify it. Now the prayer, " Cleanse thou me from secret faults," finds an answer which before was impossible. Providence, in this view, is an agitating Power to break the incrustations of evil, and let the gales of the Spirit blow where they list in us. Under some great calamity or sorrow, the loss of a child, the visitations of bodily pain, a failure in business, the slanders of an enemy, a persecution for the truth or for righteous- ness' sake, how tender and open to God does the soul become ! " Search me, 0 God, and try me, and see if there be any wicked way in me," is now the ingenuous prayer, and the Spirit of God comes in to work the answer, finding everything ready for an effectual and thorough purgation. And so, by a double process, Providence and the Spirit both in unity (for God is always one with Himself), we are perfected in holiness and finished in the complete beauty of Christ.
T| " Joy is a duty " was her inspiring motto. And the following quotation admirably expresses what she had dis- covered, both for herself and others, of the blessing concealed in suffering : —
" Often when I am carving a block of marble," said a sculptor one day, " and when I see the chips flying in all directions, I feel a kind of compassion for the stone, and I try to comfort it by saying, 'Yes, I am wounding and hurting you now, but my purpose is to fashion you into a thing of eternal beauty.' There is One who is a greater Sculptor than I, greater than Michael
1 H. Bushnell, The New Life, 298.
154 THE DISCIPLINE OF CHANGE
Angelo, or Phidias — God. Humanity is His marble . . . pain is His chisel . . . and when I pass through suffering, and see the way in which sorrow shatters my most lovely dreams, I softly murmur, ' God Himself is at work in my soul, and in His infinite mercy He is about to enrich and deepen my life far beyond my own imaginings ! I thank Thee, my God I'"1
(4) These frequent unsettlements have a tendency to keep us from being wedded to the world, or from thinking of rooting ourselves permanently here. Johnson was not wrong when he said, " Whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present exalts us in the dignity of think- ing beings." That is precisely what frequent unsettlements in the present life, taken in connexion with his belief in the revelation of heaven's blessedness, do tend to in the Christian. Therefore, they cannot but have a holy power on the character of the man who views them in that connexion. The more attractive heaven becomes to us the more shall we seek in the present to cultivate the heavenly spirit. To be weaned from earth is one of the means of making us seek our spiritual food from heaven ; and the trials of earth, transplanting us from place to place and from plan to plan, tend to prepare us for the great transplanting which is to take us from this world altogether, and root us in the garden of the Lord above.
Tj Some years ago, while I was rambling with a friend in the neighbourhood of the English Windermere, we came upon a house which was surrounded by the most beautiful shrubs I ever saw, and I was naturally led to make some inquiry concerning them. My companion, who lived in the locality, informed me that, by a judicious system of transplanting, constantly pursued, the pro- prietor was able to bring them to the highest perfection. I am not horticulturist enough to know whether that would produce such a result or not, but when I heard the statement I thought at once of the manner in which God, by continuous transplanting, keeps His people fresh and beautiful, and prevents them from becoming too closely attached to the world. Its possessions are taken from them. Its friends prove faithless to them. Its relationships are broken for them. Its joys give way in their experience to sorrows. And all this is to keep them from becoming wedded to the present life.2