1 F. B. Meyer, Tried hy Fire, 39.
56 LOVE AND JOY IN BELIEVING
preserve some natural semblance of Divine and infinite mystery. The passionate and exulting fondness of the mother for her babe, of the boy for his parent, of the young bridegroom for his bride, is drawn forth, not by the actual realities of its objects, but by the imagination of all conceivable and all inconceivable excellences, which floats before the soul in unformed and untried vagueness. When the natural heart loves its grandest and its best, it loves but its own dream. The love of the spiritual mind, however, finds the beauty and the worth of its Beloved greater and ever greater as it gazes on Him with fixed, fond look — greater than anything the eye hath seen or the heart conceived. To the Christian's love for Jesus necessarily belongs that character of transcendency and mystery which so essentially belongs to true love.^
II.
Joy in the Unseen Cheist.
"In whom," with all the disabilities and pains and absence, " yet believing," you can put out a long arm of faith across the gulf that lies, not only between to-day and nineteen centuries ago, but the deeper and more impassable gulf that lies between earth and heaven, and clasp Christ with a really firm grasp, which will fill the hand, and which we shall feel has laid hold of something, or rather has laid hold of a living person and a loving heart. That is faith. The Apostle uses a very strong form of expression here, which is only very partially represented by our English version. He does not say only " in whom believing," but " towards whom"; putting emphasis upon the effort and direction of the faith, rather than upon the repose of the heart when it has found its object and rests upon Him. And so the conception of the true Christian attitude is that of a continual outgoing of trust and its child love ; of desire and its child possession ; and of expecta- tion and its child fruition towards that unseen Christ.
^ It is much to believe Christ, it is more to believe in Him ; it is — I was going to say — most of all to believe towards Him. For in this region, quite as much as, and I think more than, in the one to which the saying was originally applied, "search is better than attainment." Our condition must always be that of " forgetting the things that are behind " ; and however much we may realize the union with the unseen Christ in the act of resting
' J. Hamilton, Faith in God, 237.
I PETER I. 8 57
upon Him, that must never be suffered to interfere with the longing for the larger possession of Himself, and fuller consequent likeness to Him, which is expressed in that great though simple phrase " believing towards Him." Such a continual outgoing of effort, as well as the rest and blessedness of reposing on Him, is indispensable for all true gladness. For the intensest activity of our whole being is essential to the real joy of any part of it, and we shall never know the rapture of which humanity, even here and now, is capable until we gather our whole selves, heart, will and all our practical as well as our intellectual powers in the effort to make more of Christ our own, and to minimize the dis- tance between us to a mere vanishing point.^
^ Faith does something from which I think joy specially springs. It appropriates. It takes possession, and you all know how possession of anything gives joy. Though it is only a very little thing, if you have long had possession of it how you cling to it. And still more is this the case with more important things. Now, for instance, you and I may have a natural love of children, and will love children wherever we see them. But what a different emotion is produced in us when we first know that we possess a child of our own ! What must it be to possess a Saviour of our own ? To possess a Saviour is to possess pardon and peace; it is to possess a holy life; it is to possess the assurance of a happy death and of a blessed eternity. Everything that the mind of man can think of in its highest and holiest moments is included in possessing Christ.^
^ It is this which made the fortunes of Christianity — its glad- ness, not its sorrow ; not its assigning the Spiritual world to Christ, and the material world to the Devil, but its drawing from the Spiritual world a source of joy so abundant that it ran over upon the natural world and transfigured it.^
1. This joy is described as (1) unspeakable, and (2) full of glory. Why is it unspeakable ?
(1) Because it is too deep and sacred for words. — " Still waters run deep." The worldling's joy barely covers the stones of his daily sorrow, and therefore it babbles like a shallow brook as it runs along in its narrow bed ; but the Christian's joy is broad and deep, and it scarcely makes any sound as it majestically rolls on like some great river on its way to the sea. The Christian's joy is unspeakable, because it is unfathomable, c^'en by those who enjoy it.