Tf Do not try to live neither for sin nor for God. Engage at once in the spiritual and heavenly life, the life that is for God. To be dead is to be miserable, nay, it is worse, it is on the road to
ROMANS vi. n 333
dissolution, and the reason why Christian society is so unattractive, so feeble, so disappointing, is that so many of us are content to be dead to the old sins, but without any activities that make room for themselves in the world around us, and carry a blessing with them. Take note that if you do not fill your life with Christian activities, and your heart with Christian joys, they will soon be filled and flooded with the old life ; commit yourself quickly to the new life, making its joys, its hopes, its privileges, its views, its ways yours ; give yourself fairly, speedily, and in very truth to the risen life, to that life that is in thorough sympathy with Christ. Be strenuous and abundant in expressions of this risen and heavenly life, or there is small hope for you. Do not make it needful that men should feel your pulse, or hold a mirror to your mouth to see if you be really alive; but let it be seen by the brightness of your vision, by the activity of your step, by the force and helpfulness of your hand, that you have a more abundant life.1
2. "When is a man alive to God ?
(1) When he fully recognizes the signs of the presence of God. That man is " alive to God " who habitually realizes the divine presence, to whom God is not a theory by which he can con- veniently account for the universe, or a name for certain human conceptions of nature and its working, or a principle which deserves investigation when life's hard work is over, or an in- vention of priestcraft to terrify and scare the soul, or a philosophic concept, the presence or absence of which has little to do with life or happiness, but the great and only reality, the prime and principal element of all his thoughts. He has learned from nobler sources than the pure reason, or the trembling conscience, or the widespread activities of power, his estimate of the character of God. He has been to the Cross of Christ and there compre- hended the righteousness and the love of God, and he has gone back into the great region of conscience, of reason, and of nature, with the lesson he has learned there, and can compel the cold impassive laws to murmur to him of pity, and teach conscience to be at peace with ?, higher revelation than that of law : and while his reason exults in God, who is one and not two, he spreads out the ineffable love over the universal wisdom ; he feels that the justice and the mercy of God are two manifestations of the same
1 Marcus Dods.
334 A GOOD RECKONING
God ; he adores the compassion and exults in the grace of God, while he bows before His unsullied and eternal Majesty.
(2) Again, a man is alive to God when the sense of the divine presence awakens all his energies and engages all his faculties. Conscious of the divine presence, he renders to Him into whose presence he is brought the appropriate homage of his entire being. Then every place is a temple, every act is a sacrifice, every sin the pollution of a sacred place, the defilement of a holy day. No praise that he can render can ever equal the demand of conscience, nor will his actual obedience ever realise the ideal he has formed of consecration to Him. It is morally impossible for one who is alive unto God to imagine that he is doing too much to express his sense of reverence, gratitude, or obligation. He can hold back no faculty, no affection, no treasure, saying, "This is mine and may be appropriated to my own ends." The " faculty " is God's own gift — nay, rather, God's own power working through the human will ; the " affection " is a divine incentive meant to reveal the God of love, and must not be made a rival to Him who gave the power to love and the object to be loved ; while on every one of his " treasures " he has learned to write, " Holiness unto the Lord " — " bought with a price." In one word, self is subdued to Him, and human will is lost in God's.
(3) If a man is alive unto God, he will not only realize the divine presence, and feel the claim made by the divine Being upon every faculty of his nature, but he will find his highest desires gratified. "In thy presence is fulness of joy." If we are alive unto God, we shall find that we are following the bent of our true nature. We shall fear an inward contradiction and antagonism of our nature to God far more than the crucifixion of our passions. He that drinketh of the water given him by Christ shall never thirst after those draughts of carnal pleasure to be found in the broken cisterns of human invention, and it shall be in him a well of water springing up to everlasting life.