^ Mrs. Watts, in George Frederic Watts, ii. 250. ^ T. Champness, New Coins from Old Gold, 86. 8 A. Lewis, Sermons Preached in England, 143,
EPHESIANS II. lo 47
3. The sense of a high vocation will go far to redeem life from failure. Our consciousness of being in touch with God would be deepened if we would only recognize that He has pre- pared the specific enterprise and exercise of duty for us, and is ready to meet us face to face upon that line. Whatever love may be, it is dutiful; it assigns duties to others, and to itself. To ignore this truth is to miss one of the dimensions of His great love. To accept it is to reach a new degree of cheerfulness and effectiveness in our service of God and man. More than that, to believe " we are his workmanship " here because we are needed for some end of His own makes us aware of the wonderful pre- cision and definiteness with which God uses the details of our individual lives to draw us into the destiny of our tie to Jesus Christ. We are created in Christ Jesus for good works. They are not irrelevant to our spiritual career any more than they were to His. If we understand anything of the moral energy which throbs in God's redeeming purpose, we shall grow more and more conscious that our duties are a vocation, and that they become for each of us a private interpretation of the great will of Love with its design and its demands.
^ I have been reading Margaret Fuller's love letters. Some- times the letters are light and frolicsome, glancing along the surface of things as a swallow skims the stream. At other times one is dropped sheer down into inconceivable depths. Here is a phrase which laid hold of me from these strange epistles. She is iwriting to the one she cared for and loved. "May God refine Won and chasten you until the word of your life is fully spoken." r The word of your life ! " As though every life was purposed to be some articulated word, clearly and fully spoken. It is only another way of saying that life is ordained to be a distinct and distinguished poem, expressing in some altogether peculiar way the mind and will of God.^
^ Among the art treasures of Eome there is a mysterious un- finished statue. It represents a barbarian king in chains — one of those tall fair-haired men of the North — men of our own blood — who, even when they stood in captivity before their Eoman con- querors, extorted admiration by their splendid physique and their royal dignity of bearing. The peculiarity of this statue is that it has never been finished. The work is wrought with great care and skill up to a certain point — then it suddenly stops short. ^ J. H. Jowett, in The Examiner, Nov. 19, 1903, p. 508.
48 GOD'S WORKMANSHIP
Conjecture has been busy about the statue. Why did the sculptor stop, after having done so much ? Was the reason caprice, or accident, or sudden death, or impatience at his failure to realize the ideal aimed at ? Who can tell ? The secret lies buried in a forgotten past. But He who labours at the chiselling of new men and women in Christ never loses patience, never tires of His task. Obstacles may delay, but they can never finally baffle His sublime purpose.^
There's heaven above, and night by night
I look right through its gorgeous roof; No suns and moons though e'er so bright
Avail to stop me; splendour-proof
I keep the broods of stars aloof: For I intend to get to God,
For 'tis to God I speed so fast. For in God's breast, my own abode.
Those shoals of dazzling glory, passed
I lay my spirit down at last. I lie where I have always lain,
God smiles as he has always smiled; Ere suns and moons could wax and wane.
Ere stars were thunder-girt, or piled
The heavens, God thought on me his child; Ordained a life for me, arrayed
Its circumstances every one To the minutest; ay, God said
This head, this hand should rest upon
Thus, ere he fashioned star or sun. And having thus created me,
Thus rooted me, he bade me grow, Guiltless for ever, like a tree
That buds and blooms, nor seeks to know
The law by which it prospers so: But sure that thought and word and deed
All go to swell his love for me, Me, made because that love had need
Of something irreversibly
Pledged solely its content to be.^
^ More than once in those long nights I spent on the Atlantic, I went on deck when all was still, and felt how insignificant a thing was man, in all that lonely immensity of sea and sky.
' Martin Lewis. ' Browning, " Johannes Agricola in Mpfiitation."
EPHESIANS II. lo 49
There was no sound save the cry of the wind among the spars, tfie throb of the great engines, the sound of the many waters rushing round the vessel's keel. I felt the mystery of life ; I was conscious of " the whisper and moan and wonder and diapason of the sea." And then out of the stillness there came a voice, clear and ringing — the voice of the man on the look-out crying to the night, " All's well, and the lights burn bright ! All's well, and the lights burn bright ! " How did I know all was well ? What knew I of the forces that were bridled in the mysterious throbbing heart of those unceasing engines, of the peril that glared on me in the breaking wave, or lay hidden in the dark cloud that lay along the horizon ? I knew nothing ; but the voice went sounding on over the sea : " All's well, and the lights burn bright ! " And the wind carried it away across the waters, and it palpitated round the world, and it went up soaring and trembling, in ever fainter reverberations, among the stars. So I stand for a little while amid great forces of which I know little ; but I am not alone in the empty night. The world moves on to some appointed goal, though by what paths I know not ; it has its Steersman, and it will arrive. And, amid the loneliness and mystery, the peril and uncertainty, I have learned to hear a Voice that cries, " All's well ! " and tells me why all is well ; it is the Voice of Christ saying, " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." God has not left His world. He is working out His supreme art in it every day, and if we be true Christians we are God's poems wrought in Christ Jesus unto good works.^