^ When we look abroad upon the sea, or the silent hills as they sleep in the tranquil folds of the evening light, and say. How peaceful they are ! we mean not merely that the wind is down or the air is still, but that Nature rests in her inner central depths. It is such an inward reality — quiet within the soul, a restful life beneath all other life — that Christ gives to them that are His. It is something deeper than sense, or intellect, or passion, or all the shows of that life which we can see, or hear,
• J. H. Thorn, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ, 175.
• 0. G. Rossetti, Poems, 123.
• J. Law Wilson, Helpful Words for Daily Life, 62.
ST. JOHN XIV. 27 173
or touch. It is no mere harmony of natural powers — although it is also this; but it is a positive spiritual endowment — a gift from the Divine — something which at once settles and stays the spirit on a foundation that cannot be moved, though the earth be removed, and the waters roar and be troubled.^
2. Christ gives His peace by bringing us to the same source whence He had it Himself — by bringing us to God, by making us one with God, and so bringing us into harmony with the true law of the Spirit's life, which is to live, not by the perishing things of earth, but by the unseen and the eternal. As the physician brings peace to the body by bringing it into harmony with the law of its life, with the conditions of health ; as the teacher gives intellectual peace by revealing to the mind the truth that it seeks after, so that it can apprehend it and rest upon it — so Christ gives us peace of spirit by bringing us into harmony with God's will.
^ We are purposed for union with our Lord. The Scriptures resound with this teaching from end to end. Every call in its pages is a call to a rectified communion with our Maker. That union has been broken, and broken by nothing but sin. And if peace is to be regained, the union must be restored. But that union must not be a mere cuticle relationship ; not one of words or of ritual, or created by the flimsy ligaments of sects. It must be the union of mind with mind, God's thought rising into our thought as the sap of the vine into the receptive branch. It must be the union of conscience with conscience, our moral sense scrupulously reflecting the judgments of the Lord, as a clock in direct connexion with Greenwich registers the royal time. It must be the union of will with will, my will lifted like a sail while the breath of the Lord blows upon it, moving my life in the appointed way. It must be the union of heart with heart, God and man sharing common sorrows and common joys. This is peace: man's life moving in God's life in frictionless communion.2
3. Christ's peace reaches the heart and conscience. There is only one way for a man to be at peace with himself through and through, and that is that he should put the guidance of his life into the hands of Jesus Christ, and let Him do with it as He will.
J. Tulloch, Some Facts of Eeligion and of Life, 56.
J. H. Jowett, in the British Congregationalist, Aug. 6, 1908, p. 122.
174 CHRIST'S GIFT OF PEACE
There is one power, and only one, that can draw after it all the multitudinous heaped waters of the weltering ocean, and that is the quiet, silver moon in the heavens that pulls the tidal wave, into which melt and merge all currents and small breakers, and rolls it round the whole earth. And so Christ, shining down, lambent and gentle, but changeless, from the darkest of our skies, will draw, in one great surge of harmonized motion, all the otherwise contradictory currents of our stormy souls. "My peace I give unto you."
^ The peace of a quiet conscience, as the great dramatist has told us, is far above all earthly dignities. Tor the honours of earth may be thick upon a man, and yet he may never know one hour's happiness. But with the conscience at rest, and its light shining like a very candle of the Lord, the believer's life is well balanced. He knows no fear of God save filial and holy fear, no fear of man, no fear of the future, and no fear of hell. Where it dwells, the peace of God shuts out all fear.^
^ It is told of Dante that after many wanderings he reached a monastery and stood before the door. Thrice they asked him, " What wouldest thou ? " and he broke the silence at last with the one word, " Peaxcy "
^ In the inn of Bethlehem there were many going to and fro, and much hurry and disquietude, while caravans were unlading or making up their complement of passengers, and the divan presented a spectacle of many costumes, and resounded with wrangling, and barter, and merriment. But in a stable hard by there was a tender joy too deep for words, and a stillness of adoration which seemed to shut out the outer world. . . . The soul of man is » noisy hostelry, full of turmoil and disquietude, and giving entertainment to every vain and passing thought which seeks admittance there. But when Christ comes, and takes up His abode in the heart. He reduces it to order and peace ; and though it may move amid the excitements and confusions of life, yet hath it an inner stillness which they cannot disturb or destroy ; for the King of Peace is there, and peace is the purchase of His cross, and the last legacy of His love, and His ancient promise to His people.^