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we seek, and man finds it in the fulfilment of his life by Jesus Christ.i
2. Garry religion into every part of life. — If we carry the principles of Christ with us into the world, the world will become hallowed by their presence. A Christlike spirit will Christianize everything it touches. A meek heart, in which the altar-fire of love to God is burning, will lay hold of the commonest, rudest things in life, and transmute them, like coarse fuel at the touch of fire, into a pure and holy flame. Eeligion in the soul will make all the work and toil of life — its gains and losses, friend- ships, rivalries, competitions, its manifold incidents and events — the means of religious advancement. Marble or coarse clay, it matters not much with which of these the artist works, the touch of genius transforms the coarser material into beauty, and lends to the finer a value it never had before. Lofty or lowly, rude or refined, as our earthly work may be, it will become to a holy mind only the material for an infinitely nobler work than all the creations of genius — a pure and godlike life. To spiritualize what is material, to Christianize what is secular — this is the noble achievement of Christian principle.
^ " There is one proposition," says Mr. Gladstone, " which the experience of life burns into my soul ; it is this, that a man should beware of letting his religion spoil his morality. In a thousand ways, some great, some small, but all subtle, we are daily tempted to that great sin." What did Gladstone mean by that? He immediately adds, for he was an intensely religious man himself : " To speak of such a thing seems dishonouring to God ; but it is not religion as it comes from Him, it is religion with the strange and evil mixtures which it gathers from dwell- ing in us." 2 And that is the heart of the trouble. A religion which concerns itself chiefly with ritual or creed or form, which separates itself from life by insisting on exclusive privileges for itself and its votaries, which is formal and ofiicial instead of being real and vital, imperils the foundations of common morality. As long as we are content to treat our religion in that way, its place in the practical concerns of life will inevitably be that of an interloper, intruding and interfering where it does not belong. There was, indeed, much truth and homely wisdom in the advice which young David Livingstone received from his grandfather when he left Blantyre for the old College at Glasgow : " Dauvit,
^ P. Brooks, Addresses, 61. ^ Morley, Life of Gladstone, ii. 185.
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Dauvit, make your religion an everyday business of your life, and not a thing of fits and starts." ^
^ Out of the pulpit I would be the same man I was in it, seeing and feeling the realities of the unseen ; and in the pulpit I would be the same man I was out of it, taking facts as they are, and dealing with things as they show themselves in the world.*
(1) It is convenient, no doubt, to distinguish what is commonly described as " secular " from what is commonly described as " religious." We all know what the distinction means. But the distinction must not be understood to imply that in religious work we are doing God's will, and that in secular work we are not doing it. God Himself has done, and is always doing, a great deal of work that we must call secular ; and this throws consider- able light on the laws which should govern our own secular calling. He is the Creator of all things. He made the earth, and He made it broad enough for us to grow corn and grass on it, to build cities on it, with town-halls, courts of justice, houses of parliament, schools, universities, literary institutes, and galleries of art. It is impossible to use it aU for churches and chapels, or for any other "consecrated" purpose. God made a great part of the world for common uses; but since the world, every acre, every square yard of it, belongs to Him, since He is the only Freeholder, we have no right to build anything on it that He does not want to have built. He kindled the fires of the sun, and the sun gives us light, not only on Sundays when we go to church, but on common days, and we have no right to use the sunlight for any purpose for which God does not give it. God made the trees ; but He made too many for the timber to be used only for buildings intended for religious worship. What did He make the rest for ? It is His timber. He never parts with His property in it. When we buy it we do not buy it from God ; we pay Him no money for it. All that we do is to pay money to our fellow-men that we may have the right to use it in God's service.
^ It is as secular a work to create a walnut-tree, and to provide soil and rain and warmth for its growth, as it is to make a walnut-wood table for a drawing-room out of it. It is as * D. S. Mackay, ' George Macdonald.