^ Think seriously, you who are in Christ, of that life in Christ which you ought to live. And how will you say, one day, that your life has been lived, according to the life of Christ, if Christ has not dwelt in the details, the constituents of that life ; if your own desires, your own thoughts, your own wisdom, your own interests, your own glory, your own ease, have been the main- spring of your actions ? If this has been the case from minute to minute, from hour to hour, without a thought of Christ or His word, without the influence of His Spirit, how will you be able even to suppose hereafter that you have lived in Christ ? ^
I saw Thee at the cross,
Where Thou didst die that we might live; And love possessed my heart.
When Thou didst cry "Forgive."
I saw Thee at the tomb,
When all Thy passion tide was o'er;
I joyed to hear Thee say, "Alive for evermore,"
" Alive for evermore ! "
So when to death I shall draw nigh, Then Thou wilt take my hand;
I shall not fear to die.
I shall not fear to die !
But worse than fear of death is sin; So, more than help without,
I ask for Thee within.
I ask for Thee within.
Yea, in my heart victorious be! That I transformed by love
May live my life in Thee.^
3. "Christ in you." If we give due weight to phrases like this, phrases of which the New Testament is full, and which
1 The Life of Ccesar Malan, X66. 2 Bishop Boyd Carpenter.
EPH.-COL. — 29
450 CHRIST IN YOU THE HOPE OF GLORY
speak, as one may say, the common-sense of religion, we see once more that the thought of the Atonement is not of any external sacrifice. Eather the Atonement, so far as we are concerned, is some spiritual change, some change of the inmost soul in its relation to God. We cannot trust in an external sacrifice, not even in the death of the Son of God, if all the while we are content to go on living with quite a different spirit in our lives from His. We know how people sometimes talk about trusting in Christ, and of looking to Christ alone for salvation, as if all this were possible without the great interior change, the change of character which comes from the actual dwelling of Christ in the soul. We have heard people talk, perhaps, of trusting in Christ, and of looking to Him for salvation, when their lives showed very little of His Spirit, when their hearts seemed to be set mainly if not entirely upon the things of this world, upon material comfort and ease, if not upon money-making and pleasure, and upon the selfish enjoyment of these things, without a thought of helpfulness to others, without a notion of spending in the cause of God something like the same proportion of time and money that they spend on their own families or their own establishments, without a thought of the great needs of the world and of their responsibility for meeting them.
^ Thus it is that you are to conceive of the holy Jesus, or the Word of God, as the hidden treasure of every human soul, born as a seed of the Word in the birth of the soul immured under flesh and blood.
If Christ was to raise a new life like His own in every man, then every man must have had originally, in the inmost spirit of his life, a seed of Christ, or Christ as a seed of heaven.
For we cannot be inwardly led and governed by a spirit of good- ness but by being governed by the Spirit of God Himself. For the Spirit of God and the spirit of goodness are not two spirits, nor can we be said to have any more of the one than we have of the other.
The Christian religion is no arbitrary system of Divine worship, but is the one true, real, and only religion of nature : that is, it is wholly founded in the nature of things, has nothing in it supernatural or contrary to the powers and demands of nature ; but all that it does is only in, and by, and according to the workings and possibilities of nature.
A Christ not in us is the same as a Christ not ours.^ ^ Williara Law, The Spirit of Love.
COLOSSIANS I. 27 451
(1) The secret of the growth of the Christ in us is the practice of quick mental concentration, in every moral crisis, upon the Presence in which we " live, move, and have our being." Witness, in the hidden lives of the greatest men, the strengthening effect of this practice. Such men will make what we call mistakes (though there are no mistakes in the full purpose of God — the mistakes are part of the purpose, and men and nations learn as much by their mistakes as by their successes). They may make mistakes ; but they are kept in perfect peace, because their minds are stayed on Him.
*[| In The Life, of Gladstone^ by Lord Morley, the biographer has given us glimpses, from Mr. Gladstone's most private diary, of this ceaseless lifting up of the heart, always, everywhere, in every crisis. It was his custom when waiting to catch the Speaker's eye, in the House of Commons, to occupy the interval in intense mental prayer. On one occasion, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, before rising to make his first great budget speech, his lips were observed moving. Members might have thought he was rehearsing his figures. His diary tells us what he was doing. He was murmuring the words of the Psalmist, " Turn unto me, and have mercy upon me ; give thy strength to thy servant, and save the son of thine handmaid." ^