the Apostle's noble faith, " He is able to keep," we are without any " persuasion " at all ; and instead of a ringing certainty, we have only a ghastly fear or, at best, a tremulous hope.
T[ You have seen the little engraving that adorns the title-page of Dora Greenwell's beautiful books : a hand grasping a cross, and about it this motto, Et teneo et teneor, " I both hold and am held." Alas ! that so many of us have rent the motto in twain. We remember that we must hold, but we forget that we are also held, held of God. Let us speak no more as if ours were a religion without God ; let us remember that when we have not strength even to cling, He still holds us ; let us dare to believe that Jesus meant what He said when of His sheep He declared, " No one shall snatch them out of my hand."
1 C E. Walters,
356 THE WAGES AND THE GIFT
Let me no more my comfort draw
From my frail hold of Thee, In this alone rejoice with awe
Thy mighty grasp of me.1
May nevermore a selfish wish of mine Grow to a deed, unless a greater care For others' welfare in the incitement share. O Nature, let my purposes combine, Henceforth, in conscious unison with thine, — To spread abroad God's gladness, and declare In living form what is for ever fair — Meekly to labour in thy great design, Oh, let my little life be given whole! If so, by action or by suffering, Joy to my fellow-creatures I may bring, Or, in the lowly likeness of my soul, To beautiful creation's countless store One form of beauty may be added more.2
(2) Another advantage is that it opens the way to Progress. Why is it, again, that we make so little progress in the Christian life? Why is our love, our trust, so dwarfed and stunted? Again, is not the answer the same ? Self is at the centre where only God should be. But the soul never grows by the contempla- tion of itself. Love cannot be forced like some hot-house plant. It must be set in the light and sunshine of love ; then it springs up of itself. Trust grows in the presence of the wholly trustworthy. Therefore, " Look unto me, and be ye saved," must be the law of all our life.
Lord of the howling wastes of life,
Where evils watch for prey, And many a sacred gleam of good
In shadow dies away, Borne on by Thee in paths unknown, Well may we trust Thy hand alone, And suffer angels of Thy own
To shield us as they may.
Eevealer of a heaven encamped Where'er Thy servants go, By ministries of love to each,
That none beside may know, — 1 Q. Jackson. 2 George M 'Knight.
ROMANS vi. 23 357
By wings at many a pass outspread, By winning joy and warning dread, We learn the word which Thou hast said, The truth which Thou wilt show.1
ii. God.
1. How un-Jewish it is to say that the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus ! The characteristic of the God of Judaism was the fact that He was incommunicable. He was self-existent, self-contained, absolutely self-sufficient. He dwelt in a region apart. His deepest nature had never been revealed to mortal eye ; no man could see Him and live. The essential feature of His relation to humanity was the vastness of His distance from it. He could speak to man only through the medium of impera- tive command ; and His communications required to be conveyed through the agency of intermediate intelligences. Such a view of God left no room for a conception which implied the communica- tion of the Divine to the human. It would have repudiated the Pauline idea that God could present a gift of Himself, could make His own creatures the sharers in His essential life. Such a thought was the very antithesis of Judaism ; yet it is the leading thought of the passage before us.
2. If eternal life is a gift of God it is not a work of man. According to St. Paul, eternal life is not a refinement; it is a renaissance. It is not the product of discipline, but the issue of birth. It is not an upper standard, but a regenerated order. Nowhere can you find a suggestion of a gradient leading by per- ceptible stages from the human to the Divine. There is no sloping stair, whose topmost step brings us to " the shining table- land, to which our God Himself is moon and sun." The man who has eternal life, and the man who has it not, occupy two different planes, and the passage from one to the other is by a process not of gradual consummation, but of immediate re-creation.
^[That we can be schooled and cultured into eternal life is certainly the basis and trend of many men's reasoning. Life to them, in all its human range, would be imaged in a column of Aberdeen granite which stands in the museum of the University of Edinburgh. The column is of one unbroken piece, but it is
1 A. L. Waring.
358 THE WAGES AND THE GIFT