For as a stone, so Sufi legends run,
Wooed by unwearied patience of the sun
Piercing its dense opacity, has grown
From a mere pebble to a precious stone,
Its flintiness impermeable and crass
Turned crystalline to let the sunlight pass;
So hearts long years impassive and opaque.
Whom terror could not crush nor sorrow break,
Yielding at last to love's refining ray
Transforming and transmuting, day by day.
From dull grown clear, from earthly grown divine,
Flash back to God the light that made them shine.^
1. In all goodness. — Goodness seems to be used here in its narrower sense, just as the same Apostle uses it in the Epistle to the Komans in contrast with " righteousness," where he says, " for a good man some would even dare to die." There he means by " good," as he does here by " goodness," not the general expression
' R. Cynon Lewis, in Sermons hy Welshmen, 297.
* Jalaluddin Kumi, in A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom, 57.
240 THE FRUIT OF THE LIGHT
for all forms of virtue and gracious conduct, but the specific excellence of kindliness, amiability, or the like. " Kighteousness," again, is that which rigidly adheres to the strict law of duty, and carefully desires to give every man what belongs to him, and to every relation of life what it requires. And " truth " is rather the truth of sincerity as opposed to hypocrisy and lies and shams than the intellectual truth as opposed to error.
(1) Christian goodness is the sanctification of the heart and its affections, renewed and governed by the love of God in Christ. It is, notwithstanding, seldom inculcated in the New Testament; because it is referred to its spring and principle in love. Goodness is love embodied. Now love, as the Christian knows it, is of God. " We love," says the Apostle John, " because he first loved us. . . . He loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." This is the faith that makes good men — the best the world has ever known, the best that it holds now. Vanity, selfishness, evil temper and desire are shamed and burnt out of the soul by the holy fire of the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. In the warm, tender light of the cross the heart is softened and cleansed, and expanded to the widest charity. It becomes the home of all generous instincts and pure affections. So " the fruit of the light is in all goodness."
^ Mr. Watts painted his Miltonic Satan with the face averted from the light of the Creator with whom he talked.^
^ The soul of goodness is love ; for it is out of love that goodness issues, and it is in love that goodness culminates. There are other motives which incite to goodness, but they aid and foster, they do not create it. Without love there may be good actions, but there cannot be goodness ; as a quality, goodness must be rooted in love. Most men are still so far from a true conception of love that they suspect it of certain inherent possibilities of weakness, and strive to steady and invigorate it by bringing to its aid the ideas of law and duty ; not discerning that love carries in its heart a law far more searching and inexorable than any that was ever graven on tables of stone or written in statute-books, and that duty, in the sense of obligation to serve, is its daily life. The severity of Christ, the teacher of love, is more terrible than that of the sternest Old Testament lawgiver, because the test He applies not only tries conduct but searches motive. The law is satisfied when restoration is made or the penalty paid ; it cannot go further. But to love, which searches the heart as with a lighted 1 M. S. Watts, George Frederic Watts, i. 97.
EPHESIANS V. 9 241
torch, these are only the external signs of repentance ; it cannot rest short of a complete cleansing of the spirit. With a severity- born of a passionate determination to make the best in every man supreme, it will accept nothing less than final and lasting purification.
No quality of the infinite love is more Divine than its ability to bear and to impose suffering ; it w^ould rather the loved one were slain than dishonoured ; rather he were tortured than stained. In Mr. Watts's beautiful picture of " Love and Life " Love is leading Life up the steep pathway, over the stones that bruise and pierce, with infinite gentleness but with inexorable purpose. For love can lead where law cannot drive, and love can win where law is powerless to force obedience. For love has resources with which law is not armed; it has the fellowship of burden-bearing and suffering. It asks no one to go where it is not ready to go itself. By its very nature it takes in the experience of one whom it strives to reclaim or correct, and in the anguish of the repentance which it compels it often sweats great drops of blood. Law declares the guilt of the world and imposes its penalty ; love carries the consciousness of that guilt home to the deepest nature, compels not only the forsaking of the sin, but the re-birth, with all its pangs, of the soul of the sinner, and walks step by step through the humiliation and bitterness of repentance, restitution, and recovery. It shares the shame and anguish long after the law has run its course and is satisfied. It compels the guilty to confess and restore with an inexorableness more terrible than that of law itself ; but it does not leave the offender in the dark ; it goes to prison with him, wears the garb and does the work of punishment with him ; and when he has cleansed himself, welcomes him back to life and duty when all faces are turned away.^