If Just imagine where the Apostle's life would have gone had it followed its original bent. What a crusade of persecution it would have become ! With what swift and relentless fury he would have destroyed, one after another, the congregations of the hateful sect ! Would not the name of the Apostle of the Gentiles have been found first on the roll of those who have devastated and devoured the Church of God ? To him to live would have been not Christ, but anti-Christ. But now that his life had taken its rise in Christ it made for Him as its end. Left to work itself out to its natural issue, it would develop and expand exactly into such a life as Christ lived. He himself would become even as Christ was, pure as He was pure, perfect as He was perfect, his whole nature answering to His, enlarging till it filled out precisely into His stature and mould, line answering to line, and feature to feature. In short, Christ in His perfect manhood was that into which he would grow.^
3. The Apostle is not engrossed with a merely impersonal ideal.^ — He knows his Lord, knows Him for himself, knows Him, as it were, face to face and heart to heart ; and he is possessed by the conviction that he and his Master are one in a union so close that the lesser is lost and fulfilled in the greater. It is difficult to find an analogy for this spiritual experience. Perhaps the nearest we can come to it is that of the father who lives his life again in the career of his boy, or the woman whose whole existence is bound up with that of her lover, or the soldier or the clansman of ^ C. Moinet, The Great Alternative, 61.
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olden days whose body and soul were willingly yielded to the service of his chief, a service in which all the value of life was summed up for him. You know it is possible for one personality to fulfil itself, as it were, in ministering to and in living again in the career of another. This is what St. Paul did, and the sentence, " To me to live is Christ," is the expression of it.
^ Language like this has sometimes been used to set forth the power of the pursuits, relationships, affections of human life. Patriotism has been such a passion to many a man that he could say, " To me to live is my country — my country lives in me ! " So many a man is held and swayed by human affection. He may pursue his calling in distant lands, but in all the toil and change his dear ones live in him, and he lives for them. The influence of the departed is often a similar power. Tennyson tells how his departed friend became a celestial presence —
Thou standest in the rising sun, And in the setting thou art fair.
The influence of a commanding, captivating personality is great. In a real sense Dr. Arnold lived in Dean Stanley, who said, " I certainly feel that I have hardly a free will of my own on any subject about which he has written or spoken." Dean Vaughan tells of that growing and absorbing devotion to his great head- master, of which he sometimes accused himself as tending to the idolatrous. The influence of Arnold's character gave him a sort of fire of zeal which had in it the making of the future man, with that unresting energy, that forthright purpose, that resistless attraction, that clean and pure soul. And Mr. Prothero speaks of the influence of Dr. Arnold's character as " permeating Stanley's mind, remodelling his ideas, inspiring him with manly intents, earnest feelings, and large thoughts, which grew with his growth." 1
^ About the year 1850 a little band of missionaries landed on the bleak shores of Tierra del Puegc. The natives, whom they found in a savage state, were very jealous and unfriendly, and their position was one of great difficulty and danger. Eventually they all perished by starvation. They were obliged to watch by turns at night, lest they should be attacked by the savages. It was agreed that the guard should sound a whistle if he saw any danger. Amongst this brave devoted band was a young doctor named Richard Williams, who had left a good position, family, and friends that he might aid in the conversion of these poor ^ J. Lewis, The Mystic Secret, 204.
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savages. One morning, about four o'clock, two dangerous-looking natives approached the guard, and the whistle was sounded. Williams had just fallen asleep a short time before the alarm was given, and in that short sleep had a dream, which he thus relates in his own words. He says : " At the moment the whistle dis- turbed me from my sleep, after some hours of troubled and anxious thoughts, I had just begun to slumber. During the night I could not but feel how dark was our present horizon, and what dangers, difl&culties, and privations awaited us on all hands. I greatly deplored the presence of such thoughts, and resisted them over and over again with little success. But my compassionate Jesus enabled me to look up to Him as ready to help me even against myself. In this frame of mind I had sunk to sleep, and when the alarm awoke me it was just at the moment when I seemed to be hearing the songs of angels singing, 'We live to Christ alone.' Yes, yes," adds Dr. Williams, " my heart, my soul responded, ' By the grace of my blessed Saviour, I will live to Christ alone.' " This dream was a source of much comfort to him in the privations and trials he had afterwards to endure, and his death was very happy and joyful. He indeed could have echoed the Apostle's language and said, " For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." For so triumphant was his end that he declared he " would not have exchanged situations with any man living, for the hope laid up for him in heaven filled his whole heart with joy and gladness." ^ ^ .