1 Thomas M'Cullagh, by his eldest Son, 81.
2 Jerry McAuley ; An Apostle to the Lost, 75.
EZEKIEL xxxvi. 26 223
fruition " ; where he not only knows, but is, not only is, but acts. " My life," said St. Augustine, looking forward to that existence in God which he recognized as his destiny, " shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee." " The naked will," says Ruysbroeck of that same consummation, " is transformed by the Eternal Love, as fire by fire. The naked spirit stands erect, it feels itself to be wrapped round, affirmed and affixed by the formless immensity of God," since " our being, without losing anything of its personality, is united with the Divine Truth which respects all diversity." Here is the authentic voice of Western mysticism ; and here we indeed recognize spirit pressing forward in a new direction to- wards new conquests, bringing into expression deeper and deeper levels of life.1
II.
A New Spirit.
The gospel claims to make human nature new. This is to recognize what no other religion ever recognized, but what all experience demonstrates — that less than this is not enough. Out of the fact of the Incarnation springs the hope of our renewal. God now is not outside of mankind, but inside. From the inside He can work, and does work, renewingly. The race has within itself a Fountain of renewal, an endless, unfathomable Source of re-creating energy.
1. The text reveals to us how God effects the great change that is promised under the figure of a new heart. " I will put my spirit within you." The new life-principle is the effluence of the Spirit of God. The promise does not offer merely the influence of a Divine spirit, working on men as from without, or coming down upon them as an afflatus, but the actual planting of God's Spirit in the deep places of theirs. We fail to apprehend the most characteristic blessing of the gospel if we do not give full prominence to that great gift of an indwelling Spirit, the life of our lives. Cleansing is much, but it is incomplete without a new life-principle which shall keep us clean ; and that can only be God's Spirit, enshrined and operative within us; for only thus shall we " walk in his statutes, and keep his judgments." When 1 Evelyn Underhill, The Mystic Way, 33.
224 A NEW HEART
the Lawgiver dwells in our hearts, the law will be our delight ; and keeping it will be the natural outcome and expression of our life, which is His life.
^f " Within you ! " This word of our text is one of the key- words of the New Covenant. " I will put my law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it." " I will put my fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from me." God created man's heart for His dwelling. Sin entered, and defiled it. Four thousand years God's Spirit strove and wrought to regain possession. In the Incarnation and Atonement of Christ the Eedemption was accomplished, and the Kingdom of God estab- lished. Jesus could say, "The kingdom of God is come unto you"; "the kingdom of God is within you." It is within we must look for the fulfilment of the New Covenant, the Covenant not of ordinances but of life : in the power of an endless life the law and the fear of God are to be given in our heart, the Spirit of Christ Himself is to be within us as the power of our life. Not only on Calvary, or in the Eesurrection, or on the throne, is the glory of Christ the Conqueror to be seen, — but in our heart : within us, within us is to be the true display of the reality and the glory of His Eedemption.1
2. With a new life, cut off from the dreadful moral continuity with the past, eased of one's inheritance of self-reproach, and made quick within with the seed of a new future, all things seem possible to a man. The whole world changes when we change. Old things pass away ; all things become new. But it is not in an instant that the old things pass away. Even to get a beginning made, and a seed of newness let into the old life through the first coming of the Holy Ghost, may ask long, sore waiting, with many tears and groans over the sins of the past, and an agony of wrestling desire, and a letting go of one's loved things, even of one's loved self, which is like the spasm of dissolution. And when the new heart begins to beat, and the new-won Holy Spirit begins to breathe in us, the young life must be fostered continually, and the Holy Spirit must not be grieved. The process of renewal in Christ Jesus is a work of every day. Every day the old has to become older and more obsolete ; the new, newer and more mighty.
It is here that so many of us blunder. We think of regenera-
1 A. Murray, The Sjririt of Christ, 21.
EZEKIEL xxxvi. 26 225
tion as a fait accompli, a thing past and done ; and we forget that " the inward man " needs to be " renewed day by day." No man can be a new creature except " in Christ " — within the circle of Christ's life and influence. Keep there, in that charmed circle, in personal intimacy with that Living One, and we are in the Life and in the Light ; all is new, all is strength, sunshine, and gladness. Go out of it for an instant, and everything is cold and dark as death. But stay not out of it. At all cost get back to Jesus ; eye to eye with Him, hand in hand, heart to heart. It is from Him the new being streams into us, and everything — yes, everything — must be sacrificed to have that contact maintained. Is it not worth it ? To be one's old self, with one's old bondage, and spiritual in- capacity, and dreary remorse, and vain struggles to be good, is to be dead. He alone lives who lives in Christ ; and for that true Life it is worth while to die to everything beside.