In the Church of the living God we are all set to carve the beauty of the face of Christ, not on the rafters or walls of any cathedral, but on our own heart and life. Be it ours to do this work with such care and skill that, when our eyes are closed in death, men may look with reverence upon the beauty of the face our hands have fashioned. Some of us may feel ourselves too feeble, or too unskilled, to do any great work in this world for Christ; but none are too feeble or too unskilled to carve the beauty of Christ on our life. And it may be that in the time of
^ Dean Fremantle, The Gos2kI of the Secular Life, 177.
I PETER II. 4, 5 75
great revealing, it shall appear that some trembling disciple among us, timid and shrinking, whose work is in some quiet corner, out of sight, has wrought the beauty of Christ-likeness in an exquisite- ness which shall outshine all that any even of the greatest of us have done.^ ,
III.
The Saceifices.
1. The sacrifices are spiritual, like the temple in which they are offered. They originate in the spiritual life of man, under the inspiration of the Spirit of God. They are spiritual acts. Mere external acts, however striking, however splendid, however impressive, are worthless. Only if there is real spiritual force in them can they be acceptable to God, and then only through Christ. The external pomp, the artistic beauty are of no account, but for the excitement of passion and delight which the pomp and the beauty may create. The sacrifices we have to offer are spiritual sacrifices.
^ The value of a material sacrifice lies in the thing given ; the value of the spiritual offering consists in the will to give it. A material sacrifice has its beginning in an act ; a spiritual sacrifice has its beginning in a thought. A material sacrifice is one which, by its very nature, demands constant repetition ; a spiritual sacrifice, if it be a full expression of the heart, is offered once for all.
^ I am on a pastoral round among lowly cottage homes. I ask at a certain door for one of our devoted church members, a labourer's wife. She is not at home, but may be found five or six doors higher up in the street. We go and inquire for her there. It is the home of a sick friend, another labourer's wife, and when we find her she says to her minister : " You see Mary is ill and in bed, and I considered what I could do to help her ; and I decided that I could at least do her week's washing for her." It was beautiful! Our sister was a priest, or priestess, if you like, offering, amidst the steam of the washhouse, a spiritual sacrifice.*^
2. The sacrifice will mean —
(1) Worship. — The essential idea of sacrificial worship is communion, not propitiation — the identification of our wills with God's by definite spiritual effort as a means to the identification
^ J. R. Miller, Gllwj^ses through Life's Windows, 17. ^ J. C. Story.
'je THE TEMPLE OF LIVING STONES
of the will with God's will in every act and moment of our lives. And this sacrifice of worship, of which the Christian Eucharist forms the highest act, must be looked upon as the act of the whole community. Every Christian must take his part in it. It is not a thing that can be done for one man by another, or rather in one sense it is a thing that can and must be done by every man for every other: since every prayer of the Christian is social, offered by him not as an isolated individual but as a member of the community, for the whole community as well as for himself.
\ Of Philip Edward Pusey (Pusey's only son) Dean Burgon says, " Though too deaf to hear what was being spoken, he was constant in his attendance at the daily Service and at Holy Communion: yes, and was absorbed in what was going on. A man, he was, of great religious earnestness, and consistent heart- felt piety. I cannot express what a help and comfort dear Philip was to me, nor how much I felt his loss : nay, how much I feel it still."!
^ We went to the cathedral, which is mere heaps upon heaps : a huge, misshapen thing, which has no more of symmetry than of neatness belonging to it. I was a little surprised to observe that neither in this, nor in any other of the Eomish churches where I have been, is there, properly speaking, any such thing as joint worship ; but one prays at one shrine or altar, and another at another, without any regard to or communication with one another. As we came out of the church a procession began on the other side of the churchyard. One of our company scrupling to pull ofif his hat, a zealous Catholic presently cried out, " Knock down the Lutheran dog." But we prevented any contest by retiring into the church.2
(2) Mediation. — It is only through the Christian community that the individual can enter into this knowledge of Christ which is the knowledge of God — only through the tradition of Christian teaching handed down by the community, through the religious life which pervades it, through the ideal which is more or less perfectly realized in its corporate life and in the life of some at least among its individual members. Thus it is no platitude to say that every Christian is bound to be a priest ; for to say that he is a priest means that he is bound to take a part in this great task of revealing God to his fellow-men, by word and by deed, by