(1) The needs of the hody impose certain limitations on the soul. — Improve the social order as we may, this world will remain a hard, stern place, a valley of humiliation for most of its inhabi- tants. We submit to our daily drudgery as a matter of course. We have no alternative. We have been drilled into it by the patient toil of a hundred generations. We even learn to say, "Blessed be drudgery." But sometimes, as we consider God's lilies which toil not neither spin, and His birds which have neither storehouse nor barn, the thought dawns upon us that to eat bread in the sweat of the brow is not the permanent destiny of sons and daughters of the Lord God Almighty.
(2) The infirmities and pains of the hody form part of our humiliation. — We can trace little direct connexion between a man's misdeeds and his sicknesses and sufferings. Disease and decay come upon the holiest saints, as surely as they visit the worst sinners. No optimist " gospel of healthy-mindedness " can ever persuade us that we are not part of a groaning and travailing creation. We are made subject unto vanity against our will. And sooner or later the final humiliation lies in wait for us, one by one. As Pascal said : " The last act is always tragedy : On mourra seid " — " we shall die alone."
(3) The hody hides and isolates the spirit. — It hinders complete expression. The lover finds no words to utter his tenderness. The artist has no power to portray his haunting vision. The dull, plain-spoken man can never make himself properly understood, as he longs and strives to be. We gaze out wistfully through the windows of our isolation, we call and signal to each other across the severing spaces, but we cannot penetrate the barriers of personality to touch the real self who dwells captive there. Each of us must live his truest life in solitude, aloof and apart from his kind. And when we suffer the penalty of loneliness and fall into mutual misunderstanding or estrangement, when even Christians cannot be brought to realize the wrongs which they are inflicting on each other, this also is part of our humiliation.
* Canon Newbolt.
PHILIPPIANS III. 20, 21 393
^ In Little Dorrit the horror and curse of long confinement arrived when the debtor had grown naturalized and acclimatized in his prison, and felt proud to be called "the father of the Marshalsea." These physical appetites and necessities of ours have, in themselves, nothing common or unclean. They possess no inherent evil. But in their quality and character they are of the earth, earthy. And man's supreme instinct is that which makes him always a stranger and pilgrim upon earth, encamped here, but never properly domesticated, because his heart and his treasure are otherwhere. The romance of literature is filled with pictures of strange humiliation. The banished duke keeping court on the greensward in Arden, the foundling princess bred up under a shepherd's roof in Bohemia, are like parables of the spirit of man in exile, waiting for the times of the restitution of all things when mortality shall be swallowed up of life.^
2. The Apostle's ultimate hope was the resurrection body, not a continuance in a condition of disembodiment; his desire was, not to be " unclothed," but to be clothed upon. St. Paul speaks of our body of humiliation as an earthly house, earthly in its origin, earthly in its tendency, earthly in its destiny, but it is the house of a tabernacle. Like that which the Jews had during their years of wandering, it is not a permanent dwelling — it is to be "dissolved." When life, that strange undefined principle which directs our material existence, is withdrawn, the body yields to chemical action and other forces, and those elements which compose our frames return to their native clay. But " Dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul." In the case of every human spirit God will give it a body suit- able to its new surroundings. Perfect glory cannot be enjoyed by complex beings such as we are till we have bodies given to us in which perfect happiness can be realized ; and the promise of our Lord is fulfilled, " I will come again, and will receive you unto myself ; that where I am, there ye may be also."
^ I remember once meeting a student of the Word who told me that one of his greatest ambitions concerning the world to come was to meet Isaiah and have communion with him ! I could qi\ite well understand it. The man had been spending weeks and months in the company of that great prophet, until Isaiah had become exalted in the student's mind as a great and com-
1 T. H. Darlow, Via Sacra, 35.
394 CITIZENSHIP IN HEAVEN
manding hero. But Paul had the same intense desire concerning his Lord, and I think if we turned our thoughts upon the Lord with even a little of the Apostle's intensity we should have the same great and inspiring expectation. They say that Samuel Eutherford used to fall asleep speaking of Christ, and that if during the hours of sleep his unconscious lips muttered anything it was found to be about his Lord. We need to practise ourselves in these things. The more we consort with the Lord, the more we "love His appearing" when He comes to us, as it were, incognito, the more we shall be fired with the consuming ex- pectancy to see Him " as He is." ^