Here, again, let us turn to our New Testament. We get a glimpse there of life's marching orders as they were interpreted by one of its chief characters. Have we grumblers, comfortably housed meanwhile, with families and friends, with incomes, with all our easy securities, ever tried to picture to ourselves the actual state of things which Paul describes as his daily condition ? " In journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen ... in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and
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thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness!" And this career winds up in the Eoman prison, and then, if report speaks truly, as one of Nero's victims, going out as one of those human flambeaux set alight to illuminate his gardens. Plainly not much provision for the human comforts here ! And yet the man was content and joyful. He was a soldier on the march, God's soldier, with God's orders in his mind, and God's comfort in his soul. And these are the marching orders for you and for me. They have been good enough for millions of souls, who have been happy in the possession of them ; happy, not from fancy conjunctions of prosperous circumstances, but because they felt themselves to be here to become what God would have them be, and to accomplish what God would have them do.1
2. Still, we must in this life ever be more closely attached to some particular Christians than to others; and the number of every man's dear and intimate friends must of necessity be small. Yet it is to these that the words of the text especially apply : " They that feared the Lord spake one with another." This should be true of the society of Christians in general : but it is, and ought to be, much more so of those who take sweet counsel together, and are bound to one another by the closest ties of personal friendship. It can hardly be told how great is their loss who know not the comfort of Christian friends : in youth, more particularly, he who is without them loses the most powerful earthly instrument by which he is saved from temptation, and encouraged to good. Parents or teachers can do little in com- parison ; because the difference of age deprives what they say of much of its weight, and destroys at the same time that equality which makes the influence of a friend so much less suspected, and listened to, therefore, so much more readily. Equality of age and similarity in outward circumstances, draw men most closely to one another, and therefore give them additional opportunities for becoming fully acquainted with each other's characters. Friends are sharers together in each other's amusements and pleasures ; they are together in those hours of free and careless mirth which the presence of persons of a different age would instantly check. At such times every one's experience can inform him how easily mirth may be turned into sin; how easily the heart may be hardened, and the conscience dulled by the conversation and
1 J. Brierley, Faith's Certainties (1914), 17.
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example of unchristian associates. "Whereas Christian friends gain strength, and impart it to one another in the very midst of their temptations, and even of their falls. Growth in grace is ever gradual: and Christians in their youth are somewhat like the good men who lived in the earlier ages, or in what may be called the youth of the world : that is, their consciences are less enlightened than they become at a more advanced age ; they are less exalted in their notions of what they should not do, and of what Christ would love to find in them. There is much, there- fore, in their lives that requires amendment: but, if they are Christians in earnest, they gradually lead one another on to higher views ; a knowledge of their mutual faults makes them unreserved to each other ; they are not afraid of saying all that is in their hearts ; they make known to each other their particular difficulties and temptations; they feel that they are engaged in the same struggle ; and each is often able to give assistance to the other on one point, whilst in others he may himself require to be aided in his turn. So they go on from strength to strength, till they come together in maturer years to a more advanced state of Christian obedience : with natural faults repressed or subdued, with more enlarged views of the wisdom o* God in Christ Jesus, and a more enlightened sense of the claims which God has upon the entire devotion of their hearts to His service.
Tf No doubt it requires a very genuine humility for some men to anticipate getting any good from the company of people who have not been blessed with their own educational or social privileges, but it is one of the cases where assuredly God gives grace to the humble. Many a Christian saint can testify that he has received, and, so far as he is able to judge, received far more than he has given, from fellowship with some apparently ex- tremely unlikely person into whose company he has been thrown, and with whom he has talked and prayed about the things of God.1