^ A. Taylor Innes, Chapters of Eeminiseenee, 172.
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of the heavenly bodies, or indeed by the same laws ; keeping its appointed place, and serving its appointed use. Every odour exhales in the nicest conformity with its appointed place and law. Even the viewless and mysterious heat, stealing through the dark centres and impenetrable depths of the worlds, obeys its uses with unfaltering exactness, dissolving never so much as an atom that was not to be dissolved. What now shall we say of man, appearing, as it were, in the centre of this great circle of uses ? They are aU adjusted for him : has he, then, no ends appointed for himself ? Noblest of all creatures, and closest to God, as he certainly is, are we to say that his Creator has no definite thoughts concerning him, no place prepared for him to fill, no use for him to serve, which is the reason of his existence ?
God has a plan for all our lives. There is a definite and proper end, or issue, for every man's existence ; an end which, to the heart of God, is the good intended for him, or for which he was intended ; that which he is privileged to become, called to become, ought to become ; that which God will assist him to be- come, and which he cannot miss, save by his own fault. Every human soul has a complete and perfect plan cherished for it in the heart of God — a Divine biography marked out, which it enters into life to live. This life, rightly unfolded, will be a complete and beautiful whole, an experience led on by God and unfolded by His secret nurture, as the trees and the flowers by the secret nurture of the world ; a drama cast in the mould of a perfect art, with no part wanting ; a Divine study for the man himself, and for others ; a study that shall for ever unfold, in wondrous beauty, the love and faithfulness of God ; great in its conception, great in the Divine skill by which it is shaped ; above all, great in the momentous and glorious issues it prepares.
^ The world is not a mere necessary sequence of material phenomena, but a spiritual stream that, swift or sluggish be its course, flows irresistibly to God. The existing fact is not the law ; choice between good and evil, heroism, sacrifice are not illusions ; conscience, the intuition of the ideal, the power of will, and moral force are ultimate and mastering spiritual facts. The Divine design controls it all, and man has liberty to help God's plan. And he who knows this, knows that " a supreme power guards the road, by which believers journey towards their goal," and he will be " bold with God through God." The crusaders' cry, " God
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wills it," is for him, and his are the courage and consistency and power of sacrifice that come to those who know they battle on the side of God.^
^ When a farmer goes into town on a market-day to hire, let us suppose, a ploughman into his service, it may happen that the man he hires is one who was previously quite unknown to him, and whom he had no thought of engaging till he chanced to meet him in the street. In these matters we are obhged to do the best we can in a rough haphazard way, with very little of fore- ordination. But it is never so with the Great Husbandman. When He comes into the market-place and hires labourers into His service, He never hires a man with whom He had no previous acquaintance; He never makes an unpremeditated choice. The man who is hired may not have known Christ before, but Christ has known him ; and not only known him, but had His eye upon him, ever since he had a being ; and has been all along preparing him for the place intended for him in the service. Christ, in everything He does, and especially in calling men into His grace and service, acts by determinate counsel and foreknow- ledge.*
2. How did St. Paul know that, before he was born, God had destined him to be an Apostle ? Did Ananias tell him that he was " a chosen vessel unto God " ? There are more ways than one by which God's purposes may come to light. As St. Paul looked back upon his life he could see that the Divine purpose had been controlling his personal history from the very beginning, and preparing him for a service of which he had no thought, and which, if it had been proposed to him, he would have regarded with horror. His birth, by which he inherited the rights of Eoman citizenship, though he was also " of the stock of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews " ; his early years in Tarsus, a great Greek city, famous for its wealth, its commerce, and its schools of learning and philosophy ; his life as a student in Jerusalem ; his zeal in mastering the doctrines and methods of the Eabbis ; the earnestness and fidelity with which he had submitted to the discipline of the most austere of Jewish sects, so that " touching the righteousness which is in the law " he was " blameless " — all these had contributed in various ways to his fitness for the work to which God had destined him,