^ The smile which ever beams from the face of Christ, the eternal love which fills the heart of God, and the Holy Spirit who fills the hearts of the children of God with consciousness of His eternal love, are to be our companions along the pilgrimage of life. And, if so, the sunshine of Christ's smile, the unchanging love of God, and the guidance and strengthening of the Holy Spirit, will make our path, be it ever so rough, a path of peace and joy.^
2. And the great glory of this benediction is its unrestricted comprehensiveness — grace, love, fellowship "be with you aXU' For this assures our hearts in spite of past failure and shame, in spite of broken ideals and unfulfilled vows. No sin-created dis- ability can stand before the victorious flow of God's grace and love, and the one who has failed hitherto may yet realize the promise. Just as through the smallest and feeblest members of our bodies there flows the same life which animates the brain, so the life of our great Head flows through all His members. And we may well take heart afresh to appropriate anew this triad of blessings which is possible of realization by us alL
It is a broad and blessed prayer. It comes to any. It reaches all. It knows no limitation or barrier. It needs no title or merit
* J. A. Beet, A Commentary on St. Paul's Episdes t» the Corinthians, 479,
328 THE APOSTOLIC BENEDICTION
or worth on the part of those it would benefit and bless. That glorious, shining sun in the heavens flings its splendour lavishly and freely away on every side. It is as welcome to a beggar as to a king. A miserable wretch may shiver in rags, and his fellows may grudge him the very ground he stands on, or the grave he shall soon lie down in ; but he has only to lift his head and look upward, that he may have lighting on him the glory of God's shining sun, as if it were all his own, and none had any right to share with him its benignity and blessedness. Even so, a sinner — any sinner in all this weary world — with nothing but his sin and misery and awful need — may come, and welcome, to the grace and love and fellowship so sweetly and generously prayed for here.^
^ The " favour," the " benediction " of Christ, with which the Apostle always parts from his readers is, he now finally assures them, the nearest approach of God to man, the nearest approach of man to God. It is no less, on the one hand, than the expression of the Creator's affection for His creatures ; it is no less, on the other hand, than the union of the hearts and spirits of men with the Heart and Spirit of God. And this blessing he invokes, not on a few individuals, or on any one section of the Corinthian Church, but expressly on every portion and every individual of those with whom, throughout these two Epistles, he had so earnestly and so variously argued and contended. As in the First, 80 in the Second Epistle, but still more emphatically, as being here his very last words, his prayer was, that this happiness might be with them all." ^
^ John Morgan, The Ministry of the Holy Ghost, 321.
' A. P. Stanley, The Epistles of St. Paul to the Corinthians, 583.
The Inner Revelation.
Literature.
Banks (L. A.), 27i« Sinner and his Friends, 39.
Binnie (W.), Sermons, 90.
Clark (H. W.), Meanings and Methods of the Spiritiuil Life, 68.
Dale (R. W.), Fellowship with Christ, 215.
Findlay (G. G.), The Epistle to the Galatians (Expositor's Bible), 68.
Hall (E,.). ff^orks, v. 199.
Hayman (H. H.), Rugby Sermons, 145.
Hodge (C), Princeton Sermons, 223.
Matheson (G,), Moments on the Mount, 52.
Meyer (F. B.), Paul, 27.
Miller (J.), Sermons Literary and Scientific, i. 52.
Moore (E. W.), The Promised Rest, 160.
Moule (H. C. G.), The Secret of the Presence, 202.
Russell (A.), The Light that Lighteth every Man, 41.
Sanday (W.), The Oracles of God, 59.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xi. (1865), No. 656 ;
liv. (1908), No. 3078 ; Ivi. (1910), No. 3202. Virgin (S. H.), Spiritual Sanity, 16. Christian World Pulpit, xx. 234 (E. Johnson). Church of England Pulpit, Ixiii. 106 (W. J. S. Simpson),
3aa
The Inner Revelation.
It was the good pleasure of God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles.— Gal. i. 15, z6.
It would not be easy to overestimate the service which has been rendered to the cause of true religion by such narratives as that which Bunyan has given of his own conversion in his Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, or the similar narrative which Scott, the commentator, gives of his religious history in The Force of Truth. This text in Galatians is just such a narrative. It is St. Paul's account of his own conversion — the secret history, as we may call it, of that ever-memorable event. It is perhaps the shortest and most compact piece of religious autobiography that was ever penned. And one need hardly say that, in this case, the story may be read without any misgiving respecting either the truth of the facts or the wisdom of the narrator.