* Fergut Ferguson,
504 FRUITFULNESS THROUGH DEATH
than these outward effects, men should carry out the idea of the cross, call their trials crosses, take them up in His Spirit, bear them meekly, patiently, as He had borne His.^
III.
Death to Self the Condition of Fruitfulness in the Christian Life.
1. The law of the seed is the law of human life. If we use our life for present and selfish gratification and to satisfy our present cravings, we lose it for ever. If we renounce self, yield ourselves to God, spend our life for the common good, irrespective of recognition or the lack of it, personal pleasure or the absence of it, although our life may thus seem to be lost, it is finding its best and highest development and passes into life eternal. Our life is a seed now, not a developed plant, and it can become a developed plant only by our taking heart to cast it from us and sow it in the fertile soil of other men's needs. This will seem, indeed, to disintegrate it and fritter it away, and leave it a contemptible, obscure, forgotten thing; but it does, in fact, set free the vital forces that are in it, and give it its fit career and maturity.
^ This may be called a dying life, when a man for the love of God refuses to gratify his senses and take his natural pleasure, and follow his own will ; and as many lusts as he dies to, so many deaths does he offer to God, and so many fruits of life will he receive in return. For in what measure a man dies to himself, and grows out of himself, in the same measure does God, who is our Life, enter into him.^
^ One night I got a letter from one of the students of the University of Edinburgh, page after page of agnosticism and atheism. I went over to see him, and spent a whole afternoon with him, and did not make the slightest impression. At Edin- burgh University we have a Students* Evangelistic Meeting on Sunday nights, at which there are eight hundred or one thousand men present. A few nights after this, I saw that man in the meet- ing, and next to him sat another man whom I had seen occasionally at the meetings. I did not know his name, but I wanted to find out more about my sceptic, so when the meeting was over, I went
1 H. W. Burrows. » Tauler.
ST. JOHN XII. 24 505
up to him and said, " Do you happen to know ? " — " Yes," he
replied, "it is he that has brought me to Edinburgh." — "Are you an old friend ? " I asked. — " I am an American, a graduate of an American University," he said. " After I had finished there I wanted to take a post-graduate course, and finally decided to come to Edinburgh. In the dissecting-room I happened to be
placed next to , and I took a singular liking to him. I found
out that he was a man of very remarkable ability, though not a religious man, and I thought I might be able to do something for him. A year passed and he was just where I found him." He certainly was blind enough, because it was only two or three weeks before that that he wrote me that letter. " I think you said," I resumed, " that you only came here to take a year of the post-graduate course." — "Well," he said, "I packed my trunks to go home, and I thought of this friend, and I wondered whether a year of my life would be better spent to go and start in my profession in America, or to stay in Edinburgh and try to win that one man for Christ, and I stayed." — "Well," I said, "my dear fellow, it will pay you; you will get that man." Two or three months passed, and it came to the last night of our meet- ings. We have men in Edinburgh from every part of the world. Every year, five or six hundred of them go out never to meet again, and in our religious work we get very close to one another, and on the last night of the year we sit down together in our common hall to the Lord's Supper. This is entirely a students' meeting. On that night we get in the members of the Theo- logical Faculty, so that things may be done decently and in order. Hundreds of men are there, the cream of the youth of the world, sitting down at the Lord's table. Many of them are not members of the Church, but are there for the first time pledging themselves
to become members of the Kingdom of God. I saw sitting
down and handing the communion cup to his American friend. He had got his man. A week after he was back in his own country. I do not know his name; he made no impression in our country, nobody knew him. He was a subject of Christ's kingdom, doing His work in silence and in humility. A few
weeks passed and came to see me. I said, " What do you
come here for?" — He said, "I want to tell you I am going to be a medical missionary." It was worth a year, was it not ? ^