278 ENVIRONMENT AND CHARACTER
And wear warm clothes, and even beasts have stalls,
T, 'tween the spring and downfall of the light,
Bow down one thousand and two hundred times,
To Christ, the Virgin Mother, and the saints ;
Or in the night, after a little sleep,
I wake : the chill stars sparkle ; I am wet
With drenching dews, or stiff with crackling frost,
I wear an undress'd goatskin on ray back ;
A grazing iron collar grinds my neck ;
And in my weak, lean arms I lift the cross,
And strive and wrestle with Thee till I die :
0 mercy, mercy ! wash away my sin.^
(1) We are in the world for our own sake. We are placed here to be trained for another and a higher life. A certain time and certain trials upon this earth are necessary to develop us into the likeness of God's character.
^ The aloe takes a hundred years to make a flower, the primrose a few spring days ; some trees reach maturity in half a century, others weave their strength of folded fibres out of the rain, and wind, and sunshine of a thousand years. Each has its own period. It is so, also, with us, the planting of the Lord. A few trials, a few years, and some of us flower into all the perfection we can attain on earth. Many long years' bitter and protracted trials are the lot of others, before a single blossom can spring upon their lives ; but — and it is a law which ought to console us — in proportion to the length of time and the greatness of the trial is the fitness of the character for work, and the greatness also of the work that it has to do. The primrose is beautiful and cheers the heart of the passing traveller, and rejoices the Maying children who weave it in a wreath for their queen — and that is useful and lovely work and has its place. But the oak shelters a thousand herds, and plants a forest; and builds the bulwark of the coast, and the fleets that unite the nations. We have no right to be impatient if God is making us into the heart of oak, which will, when the woodman, death, has felled us, give shelter and bring blessing to thousands in the other world. Not an hour of the time, not a single agony of the trial is lost ; everything that we suffer here is transmuted other- where into strength and usefulness, into greatness and beauty of character.^
» C. Jerdan, Fw the Lambs of the Flock, 122. ' S. A. lirooko, The Shij) of ilie Soul, 48.
ST. JOHN XVII. 15 279
(2) It is Christ's mind that His people should abide for a season in the world for the sake of others. He has purposes to accomplish in His people, and by them, which render it necessary that they should, in all ordinary cases, pass a time of sojourn amid the cares and temptations of the world. We are not left in doubt as to the reason of our Lord's declining to pray that His saints should be taken out of the world. He explains it Himself in verse 18 : " As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world." We know what Christ was sent into the world to do. It was that He might save it. " As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." In like manner Christ's people are sent into the world for the world's good. In the humbler fashion, which alone is competent to men, Christ's people are like Christ Himself, the light of the world. Christ's plan is to do the work of His Kingdom on the earth by means of His own people. He does not send angels from heaven to preach the Gospel, or to minister food and raiment to the poor, or to comfort mourners, or to put evildoers to shame by their holy life. These honourable functions it is His will and pleasure that His own people should discharge. When the world shall have been converted to Christ, it will be found that the instruments employed have been men of like passions with others. And this being so, it is easy enough to understand why Christ does not desire that His people should be at once taken out of the world. The world needs their example, their prayers, their good deeds, their instructions ; and, for the world's sake, they must abide here for a season, and not only abide on the earth, but throw themselves heartily into the throng and turmoil of life in the world, according as God may call them.
*|[ For thousands of years there lay before man all the possi- bilities of insulating an electric current, and so of confining it within certain bounds, and of directing its energy into a definite channel, and yet the thing never dawned upon his mind until the time of Stephen Gray. And since his day the development of electrical science has been proportionate to the progress made in the knowledge of insulation. In all the advance made in the arts and sciences by the nations of antiquity, we have no evidence that any one of them ever discovered that a wire could be so covered that it would be insulated, and so retain and transmit a current ; and without this knowledge of insulation no progress in electricity