1 Church Pulpit Year Book, 1909, p. 21.
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represented, is seen from what follows. Addressing Joshua, the Lord says, "Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee" — I have taken it away and delivered thee from it — "and I will clothe thee with change of raiment " (festive garments, or rich dress). The Targum explains this as meaning, " I have clothed thee with thy righteousness " ; and such seems to be substantially the meaning.
One thing alone remained, and Joshua's restoration to favour was complete. " And I said " — why the prophet should have said it does not appear, but he seems to have been so overwhelmed with the interest of the vision as to have been carried out of him- self— " And I said, Let them set a fair mitre upon his head. So they set a fair mitre upon his head, and clothed him with garments and the angel of the Lord stood by." The mitre was the sign and token of high priestly service, and Joshua knew, as it was placed upon his head, that he was once more " a priest in function," and that he was free to serve.
Seldom, if ever, do we find in Scripture the entire plan of God's salvation shadowed forth in any one individual ; but here we have it all. The man is brought before our view as a sinner and as a saint, and in this little picture we have all the successive stages by which he passes from the one state to the other. We see the man brought step by step from a condition of defilement, shame, and ignominy — a position in which Satan himself, the accuser of the brethren, points at him and laughs him to scorn — and accepted before God and made splendid in beauty; and the work is not finished until — wonder of wonders — a mitre is put upon his head, and he is qualified for priestly work ; and all the while this miracle of grace is being wrought the Angel of the Lord stands by.
% Sainthood is the concrete presentation of the spiritual element in humanity. It is the incarnation in human person- alities of that Infinite Holy which is eternally seeking to make us share in its blessedness. But here arises a question. How far do the saints of the past stand for the true expression of the idea ? Does sainthood, in the conception which is to rule the future, consist necessarily, as they imagined, in a withdrawal from the world's activities, in celibacy, in semi-starvation, in maiming and torturing the body, in a denial of the human joy of living ? Are saints only of one type, the Church type ? Are the men of affairs, the inventors, the captains of industry, the artists,
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the musicians, to be by the nature of their calling excluded from the category ? Are their products to be classed as non-sacred ? Is sainthood of the cloister only, and never of the market-place ?
That is a swiftly-dying, if not already an actually dead, idea. It is one which shuts God into one corner of His world. In its place has dawned a conception which is destined to remain. It is that which regards holiness as essentially a wholeness, which sees the saint as the complete man, and everything which tends to his completion as a holy ministration. Not in the torture of his body — as though God loved cruelty ! — but in the development of its highest power ; not in the restriction of his vision, but in such broadening as helps it to take in the whole of things ; not in meaningless austerities, but in a joyous helping of one's fellows ; not in the selection of one class of duties as specially consecrate, but in the pious dedication of our common work as a service of God: it is on these broader bases that the modern world will build its saintliness. . . . The saints are the men and women in whom the Divine Spirit works, and who in their day and genera- tion listen to its voice and obey its call.1
Tf Thomas Olivers was one of the trophies of Whitefield's preaching. His conversion was almost a moral miracle. He was a Welshman, born at Tregaron in 1725. Being left an orphan at the age of five he early became bold in sin, and mastered the whole of the blasphemer's language, and was familiar with the dialect of hell, in fact, being considered the most wicked boy throughout the region where he lived. At eighteen he went as an apprentice to shoe-making, but never learned half his trade. He plunged into the grossest vices, and his sins were of the deepest dye. With another young man, wicked as himself, he " committed a most notorious and shameful act of arch villainy," which caused them suddenly to leave their neighbourhood. They went to Bristol, where Whitefield was then preaching. Young Olivers, while walking out one evening, saw a great number of people all pressing in one direction, and ascertained that they were going to hear Whitefield.
Say 8 Olivers : " As I had often heard of Whitefield, and had sung songs about him, I said to myself, ' I will go and hear what he has to say/ " He arrived too late, but on the next evening he was some three hours ahead of time. He heard the great " son of thunder," who thundered conviction into his inmost soul, striking him with the hammer of God's word, and breaking a heart of stone. Whitefield's text was, " Is not this a brand plucked from the burning ? " Olivers says : " When the sermon began I was