*-^ Life " in Christ " is, in other words, a progressive realization of a personal fellowship with God in thought, word and deed, which brings an ever-increasing power of discerning Him in His works and a surer faith by which we apprehend the invisible (Heb. xi. 1). Thus the Christian appropriates in action little by little what has been done once for all, and gladly recognizes " the good works, which God afore prepared that [he] should walk in them" (Eph. ii. 10). He is himself God's " workmanship " and his character is a reflection of the living Christ, gained in the common business of life as he places himself before His open presence
^ (2 Cor. iii. 18).i
2. The Christian life is always metrical, beating in harmony with the will of God. It is in religion as in music. Nature is full of musical voices, of simple notes that sound melodiously in every ear ; but out of these the cultured and quickened imagina- tion of the master can create harmonies such as Nature never has created or can create — can in his Oratorio weave sounds into symphonies so wondrous that they seem like the speech of the gods suddenly breaking articulate upon the ear of man, speaking of passions, hopes, fears, joys too tumultuous and vast for the human tongue to utter ; or opening and interpreting for mortals a world where, remote from discord or dissonance, thought and being move as to the stateliest music. So in the spiritual sphere the truly holy religious person is the master spirit, making audible to others the harmonies his imagination is the first to hear. In him the truths and ideas of God, as yet indistinctly seen or partially heard by the multitude, are embodied, become as it were incarnate and articulate, assume a visible and strenuous form that they may inspire men to nobler deeds, and show them how to create a higher manhood and purer society.
^ Professor Gilbert Murray writes of the Greeks that " the
^ p. F. Westcott, Christian Aspects of Life, 24.
EPHESIANS II. 10 43
idea of service to the community was more deeply rooted in them than in us, and that they asked of their poets first of all this question : ' Does he help to make men better ? Does he make life a better thing?'" These were the questions that Signor (Mr. Watts) asked himself daily and hourly. I remember how pleased he was when Verestchagin agreed heartily with his aphorism, " Art should be used to make men better." ^
^ Tennyson, in one of his earlier poems, gives his conception of the place and work of the true poet :
The poet in a golden clime was born,
With golden stars above; Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love.
He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill,
He saw thro' his own soul. The marvel of the everlasting will,
An open scroll.
Before him lay: with echoing feet he threaded
The secretest walks of fame : The viewless arrows of his thoughts were headed
And wing'd with flame.
The poet, says another, is the writer who pours forth his thought and inner life in the melody of metre, and under the inspiration and power of a Divine emotion. Poetry, like all creation, is self-revelation. It is the highest form of expression. In literature the imperial minds worthy of the name poet are few. The Hebrew race had but one David, the Greek but one Homer, the Italian but one Dante, the German but one Goethe, the English but one Shakespeare.^
^ In your concord and harmonious love Jesus Christ is sung. And do ye, each and all, form yourselves into a chorus, that being harmonious in love and having taken the scale (or keynote) of God, ye may in unison sing with one voice through Jesus Christ unto the Father, that He may both hear you and acknowledo-e you by your good deeds to be members of His Son.^
^ When Carlyle describes Elizabeth Fry standing fair as a lily, in pure womanliness, amid the abominable sights of old
^ Mrs. Watts, in George Frederic Watts, ii. 279. 2 A. Lewis, Sermons Preached in England, 125, ' Ignatius, Epistle to the E;phesians.
44 GOD'S WORKMANSHIP
Newgate; or Longfellow describes Florence Nightingale moving with her lamp among the wounded at Scutari —
And slow, as in a dream of bliss, The speechless sufferer turns to kiss
Her shadow, as it falls
Upon the darkening walls —
what is the effect on the mind ? It is the effect of poetry. We feel touched, purged, exalted : we know that these women were in truth God's poems. And there are men and women in the world still who touch the soul by the same Divine magic.^
III.
A Comprehensive Design.
" Which God afore prepared that we should walk in them."
1. God's great plan includes the Christian life and all its conditions. By the revelation of the moral law He has already fixed the pathway of the believer's obedience, and by creating us in Christ, He fits us by disposition and aptitude for that obedience. For each of us a path of spiritual development has been prepared beforehand, our travelling by which will be the realization of the Divine ideal of our life which has hovered before the mind of God from the beginning. For every life God has a plan that touches the details as well as the great issues of the life, and there comes into the life of the believer nothing unknown to God. There are certain words that we make use of very often. We say that a certain contingency has arisen, an exigency, a combination of circumstances, that such and such a thing happened. All those words may be very neces- sary when we are talking about our own arrangements and our own outlook upon life, but they find no place in the vocabulary of God. There is no contingency that can surprise or startle Him, no exigency that He does not see ; no detail of a human life is enshrouded in the mystery of an unborn hour so that God cannot detect it.