COLOSSIANS III. i6 521
from daily discipline and exercise in the use as well as in the acquisition of knowledge.
^ It is ideas that rule. It is ideas that influence and change the conduct both of the individual and of society. History is full of proofs of this. And " the word of the Christ " embodies the ideas of the Christ, the ideas which Jesus of Nazareth brought into the world, or upon which He laid special stress. A modern writer on sociology has shown that in lands where the doctrine of the Incarnation has either never been accepted, or where belief in it has been lost, there we find an inadequate conception both of the worth and of the possibilities of man, and that this inadequate conception lias resulted in slavery, in regardlessness of the value of human life, in unnecessary human suffering, in the degradation of woman, and generally in the debasement of humanity.^
I.
The Woed of Chkist,
1. What are we to understand by the " word of Christ " ? You might, perhaps, interpret it to mean the recorded utterances of Christ that are found in the Gospels. In that case the " word of Christ " would be the same thing as the " words of Christ." You might understand it as meaning the New Testament, because there you have not only the record of Christ's uttered words, but also the explanation of His work and His person and His life given by His own Apostles. You might understand it as meaning the whole of the Bible, because in some sense here the Lord Jesus Christ is for us the centre ; to Him all the early books point, and from Him all the later books lead on and forward. But the " word of Christ " does not consist merely in words written upon parchment, or in any number of words printed in a book. When St. Paul said, " Let the word of Christ abide in you," he did not mean, " Let the book abide in you." His words are spirit, and they are life. As poetry has been defined to be the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, so the word of Christ is the quintessence of all sacred utterance. All that it tells us concerning Himself is mind and heart. It is the book because through the book so largely comes our knowledge of Him. But
' W. E. Chadwick.
522 THE INDWELLING WORD
it is the voice of Him who speaks through the book only to those faithful souls who come to catch His accents ; and St. Paul says, " When you hear Him speak after that fashion take His word into the innermost recesses of your soul, let it dwell there, and fashion your whole character."
^ At this time I wrote, on a lovely morning in April : " ' The Breath of Life ' seems to be in the air. On our ride Signor (G. F. Watts) begins to search for the unfound word which Professor Max Miiller calls ' The Self,' but from which it is difficult to divest the ' Myself ' that has so long been associated with it. ' The Word,' ' The Life,' ' The Fire of Life,' the ' I Am,' Matthew Arnold's ' Tendency that maketh for Eighteousness,' even our own word ' God,' seemed to him to contain but a fraction of what the word should convey. He tells me that he is conscious of this Presence — seeks after it and knows that in every great effort of the human mind, from Egypt to Greece, from Greece to Wordsworth, in the poetic philosophy of India and in all sacred books of the East, there is to be found a consciousness of the Presence. ' In those Parthenon fragments, in all great art, I hear the organ tone ; in my own work I am always trying for it. Yes,' he added, answering something I had said, 'religion is nothing unless it is the music that runs through all life, from the least thing that we can do to the greatest. After all there is very little to be said ; we know we have to desire to live well, to love goodness and to aspire after it, that is for God : to live in love towards all, and to do rightly towards all, that is for man. There is only one great mystery — the Creator. We can never return to the early ideas of Him as a kind white-bearded old man. If I were ever to make a symbol of the Deity, it would be as a great vesture into which everything that exists is woven.' " ^
(1) There is now in the world, and especially in Christendom, something Christian that never came through the Scriptures — something that has come down through the ages by what may be called the tradition of souls, unwritten and almost unspoken. Jesus Christ, by His living presence in this world, and by His spoken word, generated and set in motion a spiritual force that has never died, and never will. But the rule of this force is in the Scriptures. Its explanation is the Scripture. It is not so much a tradition that could be expressed in any human language as a living influence that flows on, and must flow as long as the