3. He owns the world who uses it as the arena, or wrestling
1 R. L. Stevenson, Ordered Soutk. z & Harford
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ground, on which, by labour, he may gain strength, and in which he may do service. Antagonism helps to develop muscle, and the best use of the outward frame of things is that we shall take it as the field upon which we can serve God.
First, then, behold the world as thine, and well
Note that where thou dost dwell : See all the beauty of the spacious case ;
Lift up thy pleased and ravisht eyes; Admire the glory of this Heavenly place,
And all its blessings prize. That sight well seen thy spirit shall prepare
To make all other things more rare.
Men's woes shall be but foils unto thy bliss :
Thou once enjoying this : Trades shall adorn and beautify the earth ;
Their ignorance shall make thee bright : Were not their griefs Democritus's mirth ?
Their slips shall keep thee right; All shall be thine advantage ; all conspire
To make thy bliss and virtue higher.1
iii. Life, Death.
Of the powers acting in the world there are two, of formid- able and mysterious greatness, which seem to decide the course of the universe — life and death. The first comprehends all phenomena which are characterized by force, health, productive- ness; the second, all those which betray weakness, sickness, decay. From the one or the other of these two forces proceed all the hostile influences of which the believer feels himself the object. But he knows also that he is not their puppet ; for it is Christ his Lord who guides and tempers their action.
1. " Life is yours." Life is a very inclusive term. Think of the vastness of its meaning. It means here, as always, more than existence. Life has its dimensions: length and breadth, and depth and height. It is not enough to count the years that you live if you would measure your life. "The days of our years are threescore years and ten." That is simply a line from the cradle to the grave, reaching over seventy years of length.
1 Thomas Tralierne.
126 YET POSSESSING ALL THINGS
A man may broaden out his life by broadening out his sympathy, his love, by taking into the embrace of his thought and his affection things that are outside the narrow line of self-interest. As he thinks of his neighbour ; of a dying world ; of the destitute and the widowed and the orphan and the oppressed; as he thinks of the Kingdom of God in all its vast out-reachings, the little narrow line of self-interest is crossed, and the territory of life broadens out to cover a vast continent of affection and of thought. When a man begins to cultivate his own nature, when he goes down into the depths of his own soul to find out what is there of sin, and by the grace of God expel it ; what is there of weakness, and by the grace of God strengthen it; and what is there of selfishness, and by the grace of God displace it ; when he learns, like a man who occupies uncultivated land on a farm, to plough it up, and subsoil it, and enrich the ground, so that he may yet get out of his own being the utmost possible yield for himself and his family and humanity — that man is discovering the depth that is possible to life. And when he looks beyond the present and the transient and the temporal, when he casts his eyes upward to God, when he reaches up after God, His likeness, His honour, His glory, then he is learning the height that is possible to life.
How is this abundant life ours ?
(1) The world of human life is most his who knows it best, and loves it best. How shall we appropriate this world of man to ourselves and make it ours ? The common idea has been to get some kind of lordship or kingship or mastership over it, or over as much of it as we can. In the old feudal times, the vassal used to kneel at the feet of the lord of the manor and swear to be " his man." But that is a poor notion. Let us go forth into the busy world and love it ; interest ourselves in its life ; mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows ; try what we can do for men rather than what we can make them do for us, and we shall know what it is to have men ours, better than if we were their king or master. If we look through history, whose, most of all, is the world ? Not Alexander's or Napoleon's, but Christ's, who made men His because He knew them and loved them. He whom we bind to ourselves by love becomes, as far as it is possible, ours.
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A friendship is more truly a possession than a slave. Shake- speare's plays become ours not by our owning a handsome copy of them, but by our knowing them and loving them. Beethoven and Mendelssohn are theirs who love and understand them. So true is this, that Euskin has pleaded that in works of art it is wrong to claim any private property or ownership. Such things belong to humanity. Would we allow that any money purchase could give a man any real right to make a bonfire of Kaphael's pictures or to break up the Laocoon into paperweights ? So of character and the deep qualities of life itself. We cannot buy these things ; we cannot pay a master even to teach us goodness, or uprightness, or purity. This does not mean that the teacher can do nothing — knowing here too goes for something, but it is loving that does infinitely the most. The quality we love becomes a part of us. Our friend's nobleness, if that is what we really love in him, gives us also some touch of nobleness. We may never have much opportunity for heroism ; but if, as we read of some brave, heroic deed, our heart throbs with deep loving admiration, that love by subtle chemistry transmutes the deed into our character; not the whole of it, but some touch of it, becomes a part of what we are.