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St. PAUL'S Ruling Passion.
For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.— Phil. i. 21.
1. The words of this text are not the words of a newly-born Christian, but the language of a full-grown man in Christ. They contain the ripe experience of a well-matured Christian. There are thirty years of Christian life and experience at the back of these words, " For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." We must not expect to leap into a religious experience of this kind ; like St. Paul, we must grow in grace and knowledge to attain it. St. Paul grew more of a saint every day he lived, and his last days were the crowning days of a glorious and triumphant life.
2. When the Apostle wrote the sentence, " For me to die is gain," he felt that he was near the experience of which he spoke. Death could not appear to him as a remote event, but as one that might come to him at any hour. He was in prison, and amid all the uncertainties of such a position. The executioner might enter his cell at any moment. He felt that the hour of his martyrdom was drawing nigh. He was writing, as it were, his farewell love-letter to the church which, of the many he founded, he seems to have loved the best. He had led a chequered life, and it was drawing to a close. It was under such circumstances that, sitting in his lonely cell, he calmly wrote to his dear children in Christ at Philippi, " For me to die is gain." It was not a boast, it was not even exultation ; it was only a statement, but a state- ment in which all the forces of his faith, all the fulness of his hope, all the longing of his soul, were centred. It was as the sky when it spreads out in calm, motionless, unruffled blue; no shade of jasper, no tinge of azure in it ; but here and there a deep- seated star shines out, and the gazer feels that at any moment
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the blue may break into orange, and the curtain be changed to the colour of the out-streaming glory behind it.
3. A circumstance that seemed more deplorable than Paul's imprisonment, a«id one more likely to depress the spirit and almost break the heart of the great Apostle, was the fact that, while many of those who preached the gospel preached it in love and in hearty sympathetic co-operation with him, knowing that he was " set for the defence of the gospel," others, filled with envy, while in some sense preaching Christ, never missed an opportunity of making a thrust at him. So they stirred up contention and strife, hoping to add to his aJBflictions; and this greatly aggravated and discouraged his loyal friends at Philippi. But Paul's own reply was in the ringing words : " What then ? notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretence, or in truth, Christ is preached ; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice. For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, according to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death." And then he broke out in the jubilant language of this text, a single golden sentence that ought to be engraven on every Christian heart and wrought out in every Christian life, " For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain."
4 The Apostle's thoughts and feelings have here, as it were, a threefold bend in their flow. First, we have the clear un- hesitating statement of the comparative advantages of life and death to a Christian man, when thought of as affecting himself alone. The one is Christ, the other gain. But we neither live nor die to ourselves ; and no man has a right to think of life or death only from the point of view of his own advantage. So the problem is not so simple as it looked. Life here is the condition of fruitful labour here. There are his brethren and his work to think of. These bring him to a stand, and check the rising wish. He knows not which state to prefer. The stream is dammed back between rocks, and it chafes and foams and seems to lose its way among them. Then comes a third bend in the flow of
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thought and feeling, and he gladly apprehends it as his present duty to remain at liis work. If his own joy is thereby less, his brethren's will be more. If he is not to depart and be with Christ, he will remain and be with Christ's friends, which is, in some sort, being with Him too. If he may not have the gain of death, he will have the fruit of work in life.
^ Hamlet is oppressed by the frightful discovery that his uncle has murdered his father and then hastily married his mother, and that upon him lies the duty of avenging his father's death. With this burden weighing upon him, life becomes un- bearable ; he longs to be rid of it, and he cries :