Abate — Cardinal — Christ — Maria — God . . . Pompilia ! Will you let them murder me'?
Pompilia, the sweet child, saint, martyr, was, in the man's thought, exalted even above God in the power to save. In all the paths of life, even the highest, the same holds true. The background of death is needed to bring out the full meaning and force of life. The highest we have known may indeed shine upon us through the semi-opaque routine of daily duties. But we feel as if we had never known them when they go to the Father, and the thought clutches the heart that we shall see them no more. One illustration is in every reader's mind. Queen Victoria was loved and reverenced as perhaps no monarch ever \vas before her death, with a love and reverence that grew with time. But how infinitely the devotion of her people was enhanced when she went to the Father and they saw her no more ! In what a new way the nation perceived how she had given them all her strength and tenderness through these long, brave, faithful, constant years ! ^
3. The Spirit convinces the world that only in Christ is righteousness to he found. — There are three requisites which must be fulfilled before man, as a sinner, can feel the possibility of his righteousness. The sins of the past haunt and terrify him ; they bind him with cords of fear and self-condemnation, which prevent his rising; — here, then, the sense of forgiveness is the first requisite. But the sense of sin awakens the sense of immortality, and clothes it with fear. He dare not look onward, for his sin has peopled the worlds of the future with terrors, and for his
* W. Robertsou NicoU, Sunday Evening, 208.
ST. JOHN XVI. 8-1 1 235
justification he needs a Deliverer who shall have explored the future worlds, and illuminated their mystery ; here is the second requisite. But he needs yet more. It is not enough for the past to be forgiven, and the future brightened; he himself must possess the germ of a new, righteous, God-like life ; he must be a new man, rising into that revealed immortality. These three necessities : the assurance of forgiveness of the past ; the removal of the terrors of the future ; the creation of a new manhood in the present, are all met by the truth that Christ has gone to the Father ; and when that is revealed by the Comforter, we have the conviction of righteousness.
^ Newman, in a very remarkable passage, says of the saints that their lingering imperfections surely make us love them more without leading us to reverence them less, and act as a relief to the discouragement and despondency which may come over those who in the midst of error and sin are striving to imitate them. That is to say, if their lives were beautiful before God we do not ask that they should be stainless, for even the stains show us that we, too, though we fall, may rise again. But let us ask how it would have been if any speck had fallen on the life of our Lord Jesus ? How would it have been with us if He had spoken one rash word, if He had cherished in His mind one single unjust thought, if one arrow of the enemy had pierced His armour ? If that had been, the prince of this world would be still in power, and all our hope were dead. But He kept innocency and took heed to the thing that was right from the beginning to the end. Wherefore God hath highly exalted Him and given Him a Name which is above every name, even the saving Name. By His righteousness so dearly wrought out, we too may be made righteous. His righteousness is our beauty, our glorious dress, proof against the fires of the Last Day. We are redeemed by that voluntary substitution of the Innocent for the guilty with which the Father is well pleased.^
(1) " Because I go to my Father." What is the meaning of " because " ? It is this : If He had not been right in the claims He made He could not have gone to the Father when He died. If He went to the Father, if His Spirit convinced men that He was there and was acting from there, then He had been right in the claims He made about His relations to the Father and about His judgment of the world, and especially of Israel's W. Robertson Nicoll, Sunday Evening, 214.
236 THE SPIRIT AND THE WORLD
sin. The apostolic fact of His resurrection was proof that Israel's God confirmed the claim of Christ, and gave judgment for Him against Israel. That was what settled the matter for St. Paul. As soon as He was convinced that God had raised up Christ and set Him at His right hand in glory, the whole fabric of his Judaism gave way. God would not raise a fanatic, impostor, or blasphemer. The Spirit convinced St. Paul that Jesus was the Holy One and the Just — nay, the very Eighteousness of God; that the sin of sins lay with the people who thought themselves the best of the good.