And a certain aloofness of spirit is required. Of spirit, not of body. I am not to retire to any herifiitage or desert or solitary's cell. No arbitrary fences are to divide me from my neighbours. Yet, if I would be an epistle of Christ, I must hold on firmly to the heavenly life around the earthly life; my heart will move there while my feet stay here. " The holy man," said Jacob Bohme, who made and mended shoes, " hath his church about him every- where, even in himself. He standeth and walketh, sitteth and lieth down, in his church."
And there must be intimacy with my Lord. His thought. His temper. His motives. His decisions, I am to share. So I must commit myself implicitly and continuously to His Holy Spirit, who takes His things and shows them to me. I must dwell much with Himself in prayer. I must read often the story of His life and death. I must accustom myself to consider Him, the Apostle and High Priest of my confession.
These are some of the modes in which I shall touch and grasp
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and keep the grace and the wisdom and the power and the gentle- ness and the splendour of Jesus Christ.^
^ In one way or another the idea of withdrawing entirely from the world engaged Francis' thoughts. He often discussed it with the Brothers of the Order and weighed the pro and con. There was one thing that always prevented him from choosing the hermit life, and that was the example of our Lord. Jesus could have chosen to remain in His glory at His Father's right hand, but instead descended to earth to endure the vicissitudes of human life and to die the bitter death of sliame on the Cross. And it was the Cross that had from the first been Francis' model, the Cross to which he applied with the rest of the Middle Ages God's word to Moses : Fac secundum exemplar — " Make it according to the pattern, that was shewn thee in the mount." ^
3. " His steps." As a guide going across a wet moor with a traveller calls out, " Step where I step, or else you will be bogged," so we must tread in the steps of the Saviour, and then we shall come safe to the other side.
^ It is said of the Bohemian king, Wenceslaus, that on one occasion he set forth in a wild snowstorm, when the frost was keen and the air bitterly cold, on an enterprise of mercy and love. His servant, following him barefooted, as was the habit in those days, could not keep up to his master by reason of the bleeding of his naked feet as they trod upon the sharp protruding icicles. So the king said to his follower, " Watch where I plant my steps, and plant yours there too." And so the master advanced and the servant followed, treading in the master's steps.
^ Dean Stanley was one day showing, as he loved to do, some working men over Westminster Abbey. One of them in conversa- tion referred to the Dean's work on Sinai and Palestine, which he had just been reading, and remarked, as he thought of its graphic descriptions of the Holy Land, and how the Dean had actually stood upon the sacred soil, and personally visited the hallowed places, " How beautiful to have been able to walk where the Saviour had walked." The man said, " I shall never forget the answer, nor the look with which it was accompanied, as the Dean replied : ' Beautiful indeed, and not beyond the power of any man to endeavour to walk in the footsteps of the Saviour.' "
4. Our Lord's life, as recorded in the Gospels, does not present situations corresponding to all those in which human beings may
' A. Smellie, In the Secret Place, 350. ^ J. Jorgensen, St. Francis of Assist, 148.
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be placed. Perhaps too much is sometimes attempted to be made out, with regard to the extent to which the life of Christ tallies in its outward features with the lives of men. It is true that Jesus was an infant, a youth, and a grown man; and it is profitable to consider Him as therefore sharing our infancy, our boyhood, and our adult age. But then it must be admitted that He was not an old man. He was a son, a friend, and presumably an artisan. But He was not a husband or a father ; not a landowner or a tradesman. We make perhaps a graver admission still, when we say that He was not a woman. These admissions we might carry on without limit, as we reckon up the various relations and circumstances in which we may be placed. They prove con- clusively that a close repetition of the acts of our Lord cannot be what is meant, when it is said that His example is one for all men to follow. If a father seeks to know, for instance, how he ought to act in the management of his children, he will not find it reported how the Son of God acted in similar circumstances. Even when we find a correspondence of circumstances, and can learn how Jesus acted when placed as one of us may be placed, we ought not to consider the following of His example to be simply the repeating of His actions.