(4) Then, once more, think of the glowing and beautiful enthusiasm of our social philanthropists. What man has done more for a multitude of souls than John Pounds, the poor Ports- mouth cobbler, who, in the simple enthusiasm of ignorant love for the poor ragged children of the streets, became the ultimate founder of Bagged Schools ! What a light from heaven was shed upon countless wanderers by the Gloucestershire printer, Eobert Eaikes, who saw the children wasting their Sundays idly in the streets. On the Embankment in London you see his statue and read the inscription : " As I asked, ' Can nothing be done ? ' a
ROMANS — 19
290 OUTWARD, INWARD, CHRISTWARD
voice answered ' Try ' ; I did try, and lo ! what God hath wrought."* Who can judge the amount of misery rolled off the despairing heart of the world by the reformers of prisons, John Howard and Elizabeth Fry — Elizabeth Fry entering the foul wards for women in Newgate Prison, protected only by the beauty of her holiness ; and John Howard traversing Europe, as Edmund Burke said, " to dive into the depths of dungeons, to plunge into the infections of hospitals, to take the gauge and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt " ?
^ All I am anxious for is that sympathy should be felt, or rather candour extended, towards the exaggerations of generous and unselfish men like Kingsley, whose warmth, even when wrong, is a higher thing than the correctness of cold hearts. It is so rare to find a clergyman who can forget the drill and pipeclay of the profession, and speak with a living heart for the suffering classes, not as a policeman established to lecture them into pro- prieties, but as one of the same flesh and blood vindicating a common humanity.^ '
3. The idea suggested by the word " fervent " is that of water heated to the boiling point. The figure is common in poetry and rhetoric. We speak of a man boiling with resentment; boiling over with rage. And the more generous and gentle affections, as well as the fiercer passions, are represented as working in this way. A patriot's soul boils over with indignation at his country's wrongs. A kind heart boils over with compassion when it sees a brother's woe. Warmth, enthusiasm, zeal ; amounting even, if there be occasion, to passionate grief, or pity, or anger — such is the frame or temperament here commended. The fervency, however, is to be spiritual. It is not animal excitement. It is not the natural fire of fervency of a hot and heady temper ; or of keen, nervous sensibility and susceptibility; or of vehement
^"- personal feeling, unaccustomed to self-control.
(1) The meaning may be, that we are to be fervent in our spirit ; fervent in the spiritual part of our nature ; fervent in that new spiritual life and being of ours into which, as members of Christ and of His body, we enter. We are spiritual men. It is as spiritual men, and not merely as business men, that we are
^ called to undertake offices and functions in the Church — to work
^ F. W. Robertson, Life cmd Letters, 292.
ROMANS XII. II 291
in, and with, and for Christ. Let ours be not a cold or lukewarm spirituality, but a spirituality that is hot and boiling.
(2) On the other hand, it may be maintained that it is the Holy Spirit, as personally dwelling in us, that is meant. " Fervent in the Spirit " is an exact rendering of the original. But in fact the two renderings are at one : fervent in spirit ; fervent in the Spirit. The fervency is, in every view of it, spiritual. It is so, inasmuch as it is fervency, not in the natural, but in the spiritual part of us ; fervency working in us, not as carnal, but as spiritual. And it is so also because it is fervency wrought in us by the Holy Spirit.
4. The fervency, then, is to be spiritual. It is to have its seat in the heart's core of our spiritual life ; it is to be the direct fruit of the Spirit there.
(1) To be fervent in spirit is something more than mere earnestness. Doing the work simply as a matter of business, we may do it very earnestly, taking a real interest in it, throwing our whole soul into it. But the interest which we take in it may be such as we might take in any employment that stimulated our activity and gave scope for the exercise of our natural sensibility. We may throw our soul into it, as into some heroic enterprise or >k^ sentimental scheme that has power to charm by its novelty or fascinate by its romance. But the essential element of real spirituality may be wanting; and with much bustling stir and much boiling enthusiasm in what we take to be religious work and duty, we may still need to be affectionately warned that " to be carnally miaded is death ; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace."
^ It is not by becoming like Him that men will approach towards incorporation with Him ; but by result of incorporation with Him, received in faith as a gift, and in faith adored, and used, that they will become like Him. It is by the imparted gift, itself far more than natural, of literal membership in Him; by the indwelHng presence, the gradually disciplining and dominating influence, of His Spirit, which is His very Self within us, the inmost breath of our most secret being ; that the power of His atoning life and death, which is the power of divinely victorious holiness, can grow to be the very deepest reality of ourselves.^