* R. W. Moss, The Discipline of the Smil, 27.
442 GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD
species than in others, and in some individuals within each species. Weak vitality in animals is marked by dulness of sensation, by a more restricted range of action, by less sensibility to pain, and by the comparative absence of intelligence. A similar diversity obtains among human beings. In many cases delicacy of con- stitution may be the index to a low vitality. We speak, too, of the slow understanding, the cold heart, and the feeble will. What we mean is that in such cases the life-power is scanty. On the other hand, individuals are found who seem to be all force and fire. A robust physique and a vigorous personality are far from being always combined in the same individual ; but where these do combine, we recognize the conditions of exceptional power. When we meet with a man of quick perception and keen feelings, whose sympathies run swiftly in many directions, who is prompt in his decisions and so energetic in action that he can infuse into others a little of his own ardent temperament, then we all acknow- ledge the presence of a strong or exuberant vitality. Of him it may be said that he has abundance of life.
The striking words of the text imply that it is just the same in the higher region of Christian experience. They prepare us to find in the Church, as we do, examples of every degree of spiritual animation. This depends partly on natural capacity, partly on the extent to which the Holy Spirit is suffered to operate and rule within the interior life. There are lukewarm believers, and believers aflame with fervour ; molluscous Christians, torpid or inert, and Christians full of faith and power. If a low type of religious vitality be unhappily prevalent in most Churches, yet we are now and then taught by illustrious exceptions of what consecration and saintHness a man is capable when he not only has in him the life of Christ, but has that life " abundantly."
^ It is deficient vitality more even than ignorance that makes the mischief and misery of the world. " To be weak," a poet has said, " is to be miserable, doing or suffering " ; whereas to be alive is to be strong in faith and hope and love — ^is to be in tune with all holy and beautiful influences that lift up the soul above sordid aims and mean thoughts. To be alive is to be open to sympathy at every pore, to face life's ills in a cheerful and resolute spirit, to be full of the moral energy that throws off the poison of evil, as a perfectly healthy body repels the germs of disease.^
* J. W. Shepard, Light and Life, 250.
ST. JOHN X. lo 443
^ An embankment is to be thrown up, or a cutting to be dug out. You want labourers. Here are your spades, and your picks, and your wheelbarrows, but the men are required. See, a number of persons offer themselves for hire. They are very thin, they have siugularly bright eyes, sunken cheeks, and hollow church- yard coughs — they are a choice company from the Consumptive Hospital. Will you hire them ? Why do you look so dubious ? These men have life. " Oh, yes," you say, " but I wish they had it more abundantly: they cannot do such work as I have to offer them."i
2. The abundant life is a life of wide interests. — It has come true, even with reference to ordinary secular affairs, that the effect of Christianity has been, not to deaden men to the interests of this life, with its common joys and sorrows, but, on the con- trary, to make their experience larger and more intense. This is not the prevalent opinion. Both the injudicious friends of Christianity and its shrewd opponents have represented it as rendering its disciples " dead to the world," in a quite different sense from that of the New Testament. Perhaps the ancient error of the ascetics is in part responsible for this current view. It is true enough that the gospel does deliver a man from ex- orbitant and unreasonable concern about affairs which are merely private or personal. It rids us — or it ought to rid us — of exces- sive longing after temporal good for its own sake ; and it makes it impossible for us to indulge in extravagant regret when we forfeit temporal advantages. It teaches us to regard this world mainly as a scene of discipline. But it is a mistaken inference from this that secular pleasure and pain, gain and loss, birth and death, and whatever goes to fill up our daily round, must have lost interest or meaning for the true Christian. On the contrary, everything which happens gains in meaning and in interest by being brought, as the Gospel brings it, into relationship with God and with eternity. This world itself is become a graver and a vaster place to Christians since Jesus Christ died for it. Each trifling incident — say when a sparrow falls — is seen now to be linked to the will of our Heavenly Father and woven into a plan which has man's spiritual good for its issue. Homes with their births and death-beds, their daily tables and nurseries for Christ's