(1) Christ captures our thought by the subduing charm of His own personality. No sooner is He " lifted up " than our whole nature submits to Him. Our affections are won by His charms, our will gladly submits to His will, and our thoughts become free in His captivation. With His reign set up in the heart, submis- sion becomes a devotion, obedience a worship, and the whole life moves in charmed circles of rectitude and peace. The powers of His life, His light, His love are, therefore, the " weapons " of a warfare which are "mighty before God to the casting down of strong holds, casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ."
^ There is one power, and only one, that can draw after it all the multitudinous heaped waters of the weltering ocean, and that is the quiet silver moon in the heavens, which pulls the tidal wave, into which melt and merge all currents and small breakers, and rolls it round the whole earth. And so Christ, shining down ! lambent and gentle, but changeless, from the darkest of our skies, I will draw, in one great surge of harmonized motion, all the else contradictory currents of our stormy souls. "My peace I give unto you." ^
^ W. J. Dawson, The Comrade-Ohrist, 217. ^ A. Maclaren, The Holy of Holies, 17.
284 THE CAPTIVITY OF THOUGHT
^ It was said of Greece, when made captive by the power of Eome, that, by her charms, she turned vanquishment to victory, and conquered her conquerors. And He who is the Master of all charms, when He suffered Himself to be imprisoned in the under- world, returned triumphant, leading captivity captive. He is the heavenly magnet which, from amid the ruins of our nature, will gather together every fragment, adjust part to part, and restore every vestige of His long-lost image. He is the Sun which will make and govern the day of our reconstituted life. He is the spring of all our powers, and will regulate our activity and secure our rest. He is our life-fountain, whose streams will preserve health, and impart vigour to our whole nature.^
(2) We must accept the yoke of Christ ; we must bring our thoughts to the obedience of Christ. A man says " I cannot help my thoughts " : so far as deeds go, he may be moral and reput- able enough; but in his thoughts, malignity, or passion, or avarice, or impurity riots unchecked. He assumes that, so long as he does not commit murder, he may think it ; so long as he keeps within the bounds of morality, he may imagine immoralities. Men will cherish the most violent animosities, and think that it does not matter so long as they do not act upon them. They will read the most vile books, and suppose that no blame attaches to them so long as their actual conduct remains pure. Or, if they admit that they are tortured by such thoughts and imaginations, that they come unsolicited and are hated and dreaded by them, yet they will repeat that they cannot control them, and therefore cannot help them. The simple fact remains that thought can be controlled.
Do not we remember how in those vanished days of school- life the thought seemed resolute to elude us, and flew off" every- where on wings of its own, and defied recapture ? Did we not hear the bird singing in the tree outside the schoolhouse window, and the leaves talking to the breeze, and instantly our thought and fancy vanished into blue distances, and the dry facts of the book that lay before us were utterly forgotten ? But gradually we discovered the art of fixing our thought on our task, and knew that there was no learning for us in any other way. Moreover, we discovered, too, that the blue sky was all the bluer, and the green fields all the fresher to us, after the successful effort to ^ W. Pulsford, Trinity Church Sermons, 42.
2 COR. X. 5 285
master the duty that met us at our desk. We brought our thought into captivity to the obedience of knowledge, and so we grew in wisdom. We must bring our thought into captivity to Christ, and so also shall we grow in grace. Discipline is the very pulse of progress, and to win the battle of goodness, of self- mastery, of character, demands a harder training than any other battle-field to which this life can call us.
^ Professor Huxley once defined genius as a mind under perfect control — a servant always at heel, ready at any call to do its duty, and quick to respond to any demand that the will can legitimately make upon it. The process of education itself is nothing more or less than the art of controlling and disciplining the thought. We need to learn on what subjects to fix our thought, within what limits to confine it, how best to render it available ; and education affords us precisely this discipline. And so it is in the Christian life : we must begin by the discipline of the thought. We must steadfastly refuse to think evil, and must set our minds by resolute effort toward good. We must gather up each delicate fibre of imagination and fancy, and weave it into the fabric of our religion, and we can do so only by the most sedulous and unwearying vigilance.^