the moment, that absorb me in the transient and perishable, and will not my spirit gain at a bound its proper sphere ? But," he answers, " the ties cannot be snapped, and even if they could, the end proposed would not be gained. The violent self-suppression at which the ascetic aims can never be effected ; and if it could, it would be, not the fulfilment, but the extinction, of a moral life. In our self-development the lower natural tendencies have an indispensable part to play. Apart from them, the realization of our ideal nature would be utterly impossible." In the life of our Lord we find no encouragement for this ascetic theory. " The Son of man came eating and drinking." Very precious to Christian hearts are those brief, those thrilling records which make Him like unto us, one with us, in all things : Jesus wept. Jesus was wearied with His journey. Jesus said, I thirst. Jesus was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow. He afterward hungered. The Maker of our bodies never speaks scornfully of their normal, innocent necessities. Human life, in the lowest sphere of its merely animal functions and wants, is invested with a sort of sacredness as the workmanship and husbandry of God.
T[ How utterly opposed to the thought of Jesus Christ is all asceticism, all religious isolation and retreat from the world. Society, not solitude, is the natural home of Christianity. The Christian is not to flee from the contagion of evil, but to meet it with the contact of health and holiness. The Church is not to be built on glass posts for moral insulation, but among the homes of common men for moral transformation. What use is a light under a bushel ? It must shine where there is darkness. The place of need is the field of duty, and though we are not to be of the world, we are to be first and last in the world and for the world.1
^ In a letter to the Kev. W. P. Wood, who was thinking of introducing some criticism of Benthamism into his Oxford Sermons, Dean Hook wrote : " If you have had time to look into Bentham's work you will find that he assumes that there are only three principles of action, (1) asceticism, (2) sympathy, (3) utility. There is a misplaced attempt at facetiousness involving a gross misstatement of the first of these principles at the outset of the book; for it is a bad introduction to a work professing strict philosophy to lay down that the principle of asceticism consists in supposing the ' misery of His creatures to be gratifying to the
1 M. D. Babcock, ThouyhU for Every-Day Living, 42.
58 A QUESTION OF LIFE
Creator.' The principle, though carried to an excess, was in itself good and true, namely, the subduing of sensual appetites as a means of freeing the mind from their bias. Like every other device of man, this principle failed with the monks as it had failed with the Stoics, and I think that on inquiry it would be found the radical vice of the system was its leading men to dwell too exclusively on self, by which in the first place pride, and in the next indifference to the happiness of others, became gradually engendered in the ascetic." l
II.
Life by the Word of God.
When Christ says that men shall live by God's word, He means by " life " far more than the little span of years, with their eating and drinking and pleasure and gain-getting. This utterance of the world's Eedeemer assumes the fact of immortality. If not, the theory of life by God is condemned ; and there is nothing for us but the bread-theory : " Let us eat and drink ; for to-morrow we die." To live by the word of God is to share the eternal life of God. The bread-life is but the prelude and faint type of this.
1. The first point to be attained by man is to rise to the true conception of life. When he does this he has a different standard of value from that of the mere bread standard. The standard of value with him is whatever elevates and perfects his personality ; not what he gets, not what he accumulates, not what feeds only one part of his nature, but what makes him great and good, strong and beautiful, and assimilates him to God and Christ. He values everything that comes from the mouth of God, and lives by it — that is, all things that God gives, not merely to the body, but to the soul.
Every word of God contains a revelation and a command- ment. Whenever God speaks by any of His voices, it is first to tell us some truth which we did not know before, and second to bid us do something which we have not been doing. Every word of God includes these two. Truth and duty are always wedded. There is no truth which has not its corresponding duty. And there is no duty which lias not its corresponding truth. We are
1 W. E. W. Stephens, The Life and Letters of Waller Farquhar Hook, i. 246.
ST. MATTHEW iv. 4 59
always separating them. We are always trying to learn truths, as if there were no duties belonging to them, as if the knowing of them would make no difference in the way we lived. That is the reason why our hold on the truths we learn is so weak. And we are always trying to do duties as if there were no truths behind them ; that is, as if they were mere arbitrary things which rested on no principles and had no intelligible reasons. That is why we do our duties so superficially and unreliably. When every truth is rounded into its duty, and every duty is deepened into its truth, then we shall have a clearness and consistency and permanence of moral life which we hardly dream of now.