^ When all went well with St. Paul and he felt his powers sufficient for the task he had in hand, he could not realize the presence of the unseen Partner of his labours. But when he was
1 Life of R. W. Dale, 329.
' A. L. Moore, From Advent to Advent, 144.
PHILIPPIANS III. lo, II 347
swept off his feet in some storm like that which overwhelmed him in Jerusalem when the mob tried to murder him, or when he had to face the Csesar's judgment seat, absolutely alone, without a single friend by him, then he felt an inrush of Divine Power which made him realize that the Lord was standing by him and strengthening him. Such an experience was worth a hundred tumults.^
^ Charles Kingsley, speaking of some dark and awful days he had experienced, tells us that he challenged our Lord in such earnest prayer to fulfil His promise that he almost expected Him to appear visibly ; but though He did not do this, He gave him a sufficient answer in the still small voice which brought peace to his soul.2
2. How can we realize the fellowship of Christ's sufferings ? We can meditate lovingly on His awful sufferings, till our deepest sympathies are aroused. And then, taking our own sufferings, we can unite them with His, and so get Him to share them with us. When St. Paul wished that he might suffer as His master suffered, doubtless it was because in partaking of Christ's sufferings, he would get great good which could be got in no other way. And this for two reasons easily thought of. For one thing, the wise and good man knew that the very best, noblest, kindest, sweetest, that is in human nature or that can be got out of it, the most heavenly character and disposition, the things that make man or woman look but a very little lower than the angels, are brought out by sanctified sorrow, as never by anything else. And for another thing, he, who knew human nature so well, knew that there is nothing that draws so close together as the great tie of common suffering — suffering which people have with a patient mind endured together: and thus that there was something in the " fellowship of his sufferings " that would seem to unite him very nearly with his Lord, by the bond of a brotherly sympathy.
^ On the one hand, those who have keenest sympathy are those who look closest and pierce deepest and hold securest ; and on the other, those who have so pierced and seen the melancholy deeps of things are filled with the most intense passion and gentleness of sympathy.^
1 Bishop G. H. S. Walpole, Vital Belicjion, 94.
2 Bishop G. H. S. Walpole.
' Ruskin, Modem Painters ( Works, iv. 257).
348 THE POWER OF HIS RESURRECTION
"f[ Experience alone completely teaches ; it is participation in a particular situation that brings true comprehension of it, and so gives the Divine capacity of sympathy. There is a universal priest- hood of man apart from anything otllcial, a Divine feeling for human infirmity, the glow of a heart that sorrows and joys because it loves. Nothing will teach this so powerfully as experience. The unerring appreciation of an event comes to the man who himself has felt the force of it. Experimental knowledge is of the lasting sort, and the sort which brings comprehension. The world is made kin by a touch of nature, and nature teaches with irresistible force by facts. Actual community of sorrow or of joy will dissolve all conventionalities, when nothing else could. The recognition of nature's bond will then come in a flash, a gleam of intuition. It brings sympathy ; and sympathy will unite men as no written bond could do, though it were attested and secured by every legal means. It is stronger than any deed of contract ; for it is a compact written in flesh, and signed with blood.^
3. To know Him and the fellowship of His sufferings must be to suffer as He suffered, and to have the same mind amidst suffering that He had ; and while suffering, to remember that He also suffered, and thus, like the three children in the furnace, to feel beside us another like the Son of God, That is what Paul means in this passage. He refers principally to external sufferings, to persecutions and probable martyrdom which lay before him, and which at the last overtook him. In his trials he was knowing Christ and the fellowship of His sufferings ; in his martyrdom he was made conformable unto His death. But, though not exactly in the same way, every Christian in his life partakes of the sufferings of Christ, and in dying is made conformable unto His death. We must go over again what Christ went through. It is given us not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer because of Him, having the same conflict which we saw in Him, — " to bear in our body the marks of the Lord Jesus."
^ Water has no power to generate electrical energy as it lies in the still, tideless lake, the sluggish river which moves placidly through a flowered landscape, or in the dikes and canals of Holland, the land of tulips and dairy farms. The engineer puts his turbines and his dynamos where torrents come thundering through the frowning chasms and rushing out of the gloomy valleys. In the dim mountain defiles, and amidst the sheer precipices where giant 1 Hugli Black, Comfort, 130.