^ Speaking of Phillips Brooks in early manhood, his biographer says : To be true to himself, to renounce nothing which he knew to be good and yet bring all things captive to the obedience of Christ, was the problem before him. He hesitated long before he could believe that such a solution was possible. His heart was with this rich attractive world of human life, in the multiplicity and wealth of its illustrations, until it was revealed to him that it assumed a richer but a holier aspect when seen in the light of God. But to this end, he must submit his will to the Divine will in the spirit of absolute obedience. Here the struggle was deep and prolonged. It was a moral struggle mainly, not primarily intellectual or emotional. He feared that he should lose some- thing in sacrificing his own will to God's will. How the gulf was bridged he could not tell. He wrote down as one of the first of the texts on which he should preach, " Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power," with the comment that " willingness is the first Christian step." Thus the conversion of Phillips Brooks becomes a representative process of his age. So far as the age has been great, through science or through literature, its greatness passed into his soul. The weakness of his age, its sentimentalism, its fatalism, he overcame in himself when he made the absolute surrender of his will to God. All that he had hitherto loved and cherished as the highest, instead of being lost, was given back to him in fuller measure. To the standard he had now raised there rallied great convictions and blessed experiences, the sense of the unity of life, the harmony of the whole creation, the consciousness of joy in being alive, the conviction that heaven is the goal of earth.*
3. Now it follows with every man who thus apprehends the Gospel of Christ and Christ Himself, that his life and thoughts
1 Dean Alford. ^ Phillips Brooks, 82.
412 ETERNALLY THE LORD'S
must be changed and purified and sanctified by Christ's Spirit. For if I, with my inner man, have laid hold on this truth as my truth of life, that Christ is my Lord and Head, that it is Christ who lives in me, not I myself merely, and that I am the partaker of Christ's victory and Christ's glory, just so far as His holy and sin-hating and godly life is carried on and carried out in me, is it not totally impossible that I should live in sin or to sin ?
^ Writing to the Corinthian Christians St. Paul does not endeavour to persuade them into the belief that they are living a new life in Christ ; he speaks of it in the simplest language of fact — " I thank my God always on your behalf, for the grace of God which is given you by Jesus Christ ; that in every thing ye are enriched by him, in all utterance and in all knowledge ; even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed in you : so that ye come behind in no gift ; waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ " (1 Cor. i. 4-7). This is the strain in which men write to their friends about assured facts ; thus would a man express thankfulness for his friend's health or his prosperity, or the advancement of his children, or any of those matters of fact which admit least doubt, and require least argument. More than one of the apologists of Christianity, as Justin Martyr and Tertullian, appeal to the exist- ence of conspicuous Christian virtues amongst them, which even their enemies are expected to admit. Their patience of wrong and of suffering, their strict morality, their unselfishness, their mutual love, contrasted so strongly with the tone of pagan society, that they were like water-springs in a dry and barren ground. " Christ," says Augustine, " appeared to the men of an old and expiring world, that whilst all around them was fading away, they might receive through Him a new life and youth." It was the evidence of good works, rather than of miracles, that attracted new inquirers to the Christian ranks, even whilst persecutions were thinning them. Young lads and tender women, common workmen and slaves, showed that a new spring moved all their actions ; and those who came into contact with them, if they had in their hearts any germ of good at all, must have felt the influence of this moral superiority. And can we find any other solution of this change than the simplest of all, that Christ was keeping His promise of being ever with His disciples ? It was God who wrought in them ; it was the promised Spirit of God who guided them ; it was the Lord of the dead and the living who was sitting at the right hand of God, and helping and communing with those whom the Father had given Him.^
* Archbishop Thomson.
ROMANS XIV. 7-9 413
They whose hearts are whole and strong,
Loving holiness, Living clean from soil of wrong,
Wearing truth's white dress, — They unto no far-off height
Wearily need climb; Heaven to them is close in sight
From these shores of time.