4. People secretly wonder at what seems the extravagance of our Saviour's demand. Yet it is not thought at all extraordinary that passion should do what this man had not heavenly love enough to do. Nature's love and nature's hate will alike empower a man to impoverish himself. And that a man should be able to spend his all for a woman, even for one unworthy of him, and yet be quite unable to spend his all for God and goodness, is wond'irful, though not at all inexplicable.
*[| Must it not be so, that the more we possess, the less we want to part with it ; the more we have got to make us contented here, the less likely we are to be crying, " 0 God, come back in Thy glory ; 0 Father, make me ready for the Kingdom of heaven " ?
Eyes, which the preacher could not school,
By wayside graves are raised; And lips say " God be pitiful,"
Who ne'er said "God be praised."
When we have lost our all, whatever it be, we are driven to God. How difficult for those who have great possessions to enter into the Kingdom of God ! ^
5. There are few, if any, of us that have not known some who have placed this ideal before them, who have tried to live by such a standard. Not one of us but knows one or two human beings who are better, nobler, simpler than we ourselves are, who live, not for this but for the other world ; men in whose presence it is hard to think ignoble thoughts, men who seem to come direct from the immediate presence of God. If Christianity is capable of producing even a very few of these men, it has attained a far greater success than if it had made tens of thousands of moderately religious men. For such men tell us that what they are we too may one day be. Such men raise our whole conception of manhood. Such men bring God down very near to us, within reach of us ; they show us Him in whose image they are made.
'■ Gr. Campbell Brown, China in Legend and Story, 160. ' Bisliop Wilkinson.
ST. MARK 271
^ I know how difficult it is, as I look back over my own ministerial life ; as I think of those who have come to talk with me, when the voice has spoken ; as I think of those servants, feeling that they could not go to Communion and could not get to church in that situation, and therefore must go out from a home of perfect comfort, not knowing whither they were going ; when I think of that poor woman who came to me in Windmill Street, with her little shop that brought in nothing all the week, and on Sunday brought in enough to keep her in comfort, and, without a word from myself on the subject, said, " I feel I ought to go to church and shut up my shop " ; when I remember that man in the prime of life, one of the most popular men that ever came to this church, whom everybody liked, his business was prospering, bringing in three or four thousand a year, and increasing every year, and the voice came to him, and he said, " I feel there is nothing else to be done but to part with all this at once ; leave me three or four hundred a year, and I must go out and work for God where others will not go ; I am free, I must do it, and sell all that I have." Oh, when they came to me, I remember how my heart shrank and sank within me ! I thought what it would be, what it would cost, what a trial — the poor woman without bread, or almost worse, kept by charity — the poor thing ! Yet it was not I who told her, but God. She felt sure the voice was from God, and she said, "I must do it, or I shall go back, back, back in my spiritual life." And all that man's friends saw the influence that he would lose in London ; how, instead of being looked up to as a man whose opinion would be taken in a moment by all the young fellows in London, they would say, " Lost his head ; that St. Peter's ruined him ! " *
Love is a flame; once set it well alight. All but the Beloved vanishes from sight.*
IV
The Heavenly Treasuee is Found in the Following
OF Jesus.
"And come, follow me."
1. There is one element in our hearts always to be reckoned with if we are to understand human nature. That element ia
^ Bishop Wilkinson.
• Jalaluddin Rumi, in Claud Field's A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom.
272 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
the necessity of committal to a cause if we are to have sustained interest in it. Men must be anchored to be held. Human nature is like a boat upon the seas, it will stay only where it is fastened. This is true of men so generally that scarce an excep- tion can be found. When bridges are burned behind soldiers, and they then have no chance of retreat, courage and purpose assert themselves. Many a soul that has been weak and vacillating up to the hour of a great surrender of itself to a cause is from that hour strong and steadfast. The greater the amount involved in a self-surrender, the surer the purpose to stand by the sur- render. The larger the investment made in an enterprise, the more we desire the enterprise to succeed. If we hold stock in a bank, we often think of that bank and we wish it to prosper. When the people of Ephesus brought their books of magic, the value of which counted up to thousands of dollars, and for Christ's sake burned them in the market-place, they took away their chief means of retreat to heathenism. Christ was now their all. Immediately it became easier for them to be devoted to the principles of Christ's Kingdom and to the success of His work.