Now, if every Christian is a true poem of God, and if the Holy Catholic Church is the supreme Divine epic " created " in our world, who is the Hero of the composition ? Our text answers
^ T. Davies, Sermons, ii. 116.
' IT, H. Jowett, in The Examiner, Nov. 19, 1903, p. 508,
40 GOD'S WORKMANSHIP
that the Hero is the Lord Jesus Christ. The poem is full of Him. God's people are " created in Christ Jesus for good works." This Hero is both Divine and human. He is the Son of G-od and the Flower of men, and also the one Mediator between God and us. God has purchased the Church, and every individual member of it, with His own blood. The Church is Christ's body, " the fulness of him that filleth all in all." His Spirit dwells in the heart of every believer. His glory fills the entire Society of His people. Every poem of which He is the Hero shall spread His name and His fame throughout the universe to all eternity. ^
^ In every great poem there is a definite subject, a leaping thought, or a hero around whom everything gathers. The central figure of Homer's Iliad is Achilles, a typical Greek — handsome, brave, passionate, hospitable, affectionate. The hero of the Odyssey is the wandering Ulysses, also an ideal Grecian of the Homeric age. The hero of Virgil's jEneid is " the pious ^Eneas," a famous Trojan, one of the principal figures of classical legend. Dante's Commedia is the great poem of retribution, his own figure dominating the whole of it. The outstanding personality in Milton's Paradise Lost is Satan, while that in Paradise Regained is Jesus of Nazareth. The hero of Tennyson's Idylls of the King is King Arthur of the Eound Table, or, as some would have it, Sir Lancelot of the Lake.^
IL
The Practical End.
" For good works."
1. St. Paul indicates in one brief phrase the right relation of good works to the Christian life. It is " for good works " that we are created in Christ. Or, to put it otherwise, good works, holiness, Godlike character, are the aim of God in creating us afresh. They are His ultimate goal ; accordingly they cannot be the cause of our being saved, but must be its issue and consequence. They are the fruit of the good tree, not its root or \ vital sap ; and we are said to be created for good works just as a tree is created, or exists, for its fruit. Hence the true relation is altogether distorted and reversed when character and conduct are
^ C. Jerdau, 3fanna for Vouna Pilgrims, \Q^. ^ Ibid. J04
EPHESIANS II. lo 41
made pre-conditions of our obtaining Divine grace, instead of the joyous result of our having accepted it.
^ This is a problem exactly parallel to that of slave labour. If the end of labour be taken as the maximum of production, then the question history had to solve was this, How is this end attained most effectively ? — by slave labour or by free? In Greece, in Kome, in our own dependencies a hundred years ago, an unhesitating answer was given in favour of slavery ; yet emancipation had only to become a fact to prove that, even from the economic point of view, freedom was inestimably the more advantageous of the two. So is it also in religion. Let men believe that they must purchase salvation by hard, grim toil, as the mere bond-slaves of God, and their hands will sink in weakness and despair. But tell them that in Christ Jesus they are the sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty, and grateful love and wonder will evoke a beauty and a wealth of goodness of which else they had vainly dreamed.^
^ Wordsworth has described in a memorable and familiar passage the history of human life as it is developed under the influence of the world, the sum of external and transitory things.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting, And Cometh from afar :
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home : Heaven lies about us in our infancy ! Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy, But He beholds the light, and whence it flows.
He sees it in his joy ; The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away. And fade into the light of common day.
This description of the experience of the growing child is the exact reverse of the truth in regard to the life " in Christ." The
^ H. B. Mackintosh, Life o?i God^s Plan, 56,
42 GOD'S WORKMANSHIP
fresh rays of glory which the boy sees about him do not " fade " or " die away " with advancing years, but, as his power of vision is strengthened and disciplined by continuous use, are seen to spread from point to point with undimmed lustre, till at last all Nature is flooded with the heavenly splendour. The solitary star is found to be the quickening sun. Love for the Ascended Christ continually calls forth fresh and more glorious manifestations of His Person and will (John xiv, 23).