2. This fruit is in all righteousness. — The principle of righteous- ness, fully understood, includes everything in moral worth, and is often used to denote in one word the entu*e fruit of God's grace in man. For righteousness is the sanctification of the conscience. It is loyalty to God's holy and perfect law. It is no mere outward keeping of formal rules, such as the legal righteousness of Judaism, no submission to necessity or calculation of advantages; it is a love of the law in a man's inmost spirit ; it is the quality of a heart one with that law, reconciled to it as it is reconciled to God
* Joseph Parker. * Benjamin Jowett.
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Himself in Jesus Christ. At the bottom, therefore, righteousness and goodness are one. Each is the counterface and complement of the other. Kighteousness is to goodness as the strong backbone of principle, the firm hand and the vigorous grasp of duty, the stead- fast foot that plants itself on the eternal ground of the right and true and stands against a world's assault. Goodness without righteousness is a weak and fitful sentiment : righteousness with- out goodness is a dead formality. He cannot love Grod or his neighbour truly who does not love God's law; and he knows nothing aright of that law who does not know that it is the law of love.
^ There is nothing so terrible as the insistence of love on perfect righteousness. It cannot compromise ; it is powerless to accept anything less, because it has a consuming desire to bring out the final touch of nobleness in the soul it loves. They have not known the divinest secret of love who have not suffered from its inflexible idealism, its inexorable determination to get the best and the most out of the loved one. Many a husband has rebelled in feeling against his wife's faithful loyalty to his own noblest nature, and has come at last, in the clearer vision of his own growth, to reverence that insistence upon the best in aim, conduct, and habit as the very highest form of tenderness. It is not easy to live under the same roof with the ideal of what one ought to be and to do ; but there comes a time, in such companionship, when the very roof is sacred because it has sheltered it. One must be good indeed before one can live at ease with a great love. For this reason Calvary is more awful than Sinai, and the patient sufferings of Christ more appalling than all the thunderings of the lawgivers. For love is not only all tenderness, forgiveness, and service ; it is also all severity, sanity, duty, righteousness. It is far stronger and safer than law, because it is far more searching and inexorable.^
^ The rule of right, the symmetries of character, the require- ments of perfection, are no provincialisms of this planet ; they are known among the stars ; they reign beyond Orion and the Southern Cross ; they are wherever the universal Spirit is ; and no subject mind, though it fly on one track for ever, can escape beyond their bounds. Just as the arrival of light from deeps that extinguish parallax bears witness to the same ether there that vibrates here, and its spectrum reports that one chemistry spans the interval, so does the law of righteousness spring from its earthly base and embrace the empire of the heavens the 1 H. W. Mabie, The Life of the Spirit, 136.
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moment it becomes a communion between the heart of man and the life of God.i
^ One morning I walked with a friend out of the city of Geneva to where the waters of the lake flow with swift rush into the Khone. And we were both greatly interested in the strange sight which has impressed so many travellers. There are two rivers whose waters come together here, the Ehone and the Arve, the Arve flowing into the Ehone. The waters of the Ehone are beautifully clear and sparkling. The waters of the Arve come through a clayey soil and are muddy, grey, and dull. And for a long distance the two waters are wholly distinct. Two rivers of water are in one river-bed, on one side the sparkling blue Ehone water, on the other the dull grey Arve water, and the line between the two is sharply defined. And so it continues for a long dis- tance. Then gradually they blend and the grey begins to tinge all through the blue. I went to the guide-book and maps to find out something about this river that kept on its way undefiled by its neighbour for so long. Its source is in a glacier that is between ten thousand and eleven thousand feet high, descending "from the gates of eternal night, at the foot of the pillar of the sun." It is fed continually by the melting glacier which, in turn, is being kept up by the snows and cold. Eising at this great height, ever being renewed steadily by the glacier, it comes rushing down the swift descent of the Swiss Alps through the lake of Geneva and on. There is the secret of purity, side by side with its dirty neighbour.
Our lives must have their source high up in the mountains of God, fed by a ceaseless supply. Only so can there be the purity and the momentum that shall keep us pure, and keep us moving down in contact with men of the earth. And we must keep closer to the source than is the Ehone at Geneva, else the streams flowing alongside will unduly influence us. Constant personal contact with Jesus is the beginning ever new of service.*