' George MacDouald.
REVELATION i. lo 37
our duty, and of our need, of ourselves, as God sees us, and, above all, of His will, His ways. His mercy, and His justice.
As is the Spirit, so is the Lord's Day. The one is pro- portionate to the other. You cannot make any day the Lord's Day for a man who has no Lord. You cannot make any day a Sabbath, if a man has no Sabbath in him. True, our Saviour said, " The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath," but then the Sabbath which is made for the man must be made in the man, and by him. Forced rest is not restful. The man whose day is only an outer quiet can have no inner peace. There is no dreariness so dreadful as the dreariness of a period of loneliness, of solitude, to a man who fears his own society and pants for the distraction that comes from the society of other men. Hence there can be no Lord's Day for any man unless he be in the Spirit, and just in proportion as he is in it will the day be to him rich with a message from heaven, great with the grace of God.
^ We all remember times when we have gone to our work all out of tune, and unable to fix the mind on what we had to do, half dead, as it were, to the demand ; to find, as the time went on, that things were slipping through our hands to no sort of purpose ; and when night came we had to say sadly, with the emperor, " I have lost a day." We have lost the day, because we have not caught its spirit. But on another day we have found we were so clear of head and sure of hand that we have done the work of two men, and come out all aglow with the spirit which has borne us as on the wings of eagles.
I go into my study, and become absorbed in a book. The author may be dead and gone this thousand years, and no other trace of him remain on the earth ; but if he has hidden his spirit in that book, and I can find it, he opens his heart to me, and I open mine to him, and find myself touched as he was touched when he wrote that chapter. I cannot help the tears in my eyes as I read, any more than he could help them when he wrote, or the strong throb of the heart, or the ripple of laughter. I see what he saw in human homes and human lives, catch the vision he had of the open heavens, or the lurid flame and smoke. I am in the spirit of this master of my morning, and his spirit is in me ; my senses are simply the messengers between his soul and mine. I seem to hear the voice when I read they used to hear who knew the writer. There is a spell on me which makes time and place of no account, and I wonder how my morning has slipped away.^ » R. Collyer, The Joy of Youth, 53.
38 THE LORD'S DAY
5. When we are in the Spirit on the Lord's Day, the gates of a new world open to us. The seer in Patmos saw visions and heard the sound of trumpets. The tradition is that he was banished to Patmos, to work in the mines there, because he was of the outcast and branded Christian sect ; and if this is the truth, we cannot doubt that his overseers would keep a stern hand on him, and allow no day for rest, or time for worship. He would have to dig and delve his full stint, like the slave he was, until the time came to lay down his pick and go to his hovel. Or, if it was known among his keepers that this day was more sacred to him than any other in the week, they would mark it for him, it may be, with the rubric of a deeper misery.
Sunday was not a holiday in the mines, but the spirit of this redeemed man is free, and he has access to the spiritual world. While his feet and hands toil at their dreary tasks, he passes into an ecstatic state, suspending his connexion with this material world, and leading him into the other land, unseen of any eyes but his. In this exalted state the boundaries of both time and. space are thrown down, and he moves free in a larger world. He is back again in the morning light of the day of Christ's rising. Again he runs to the empty tomb with Peter ; again the woman whom they have left sohtary by that empty tomb comes and tells them what she has seen ; and again, amid the evening shadows, he himself hears the words, " Peace be unto you." Similarly he escapes from the narrow confines of the island, and shares the life of the infant Church scattered along the coast-lines of the Great Sea. He is their brother and companion, both in the tribulation and in the Kingdom of Jesus Christ ; he is with them both in darkness and in glory. He is with them, too, in that patience of the saints which both the tribulation and the Kingdom have taught them — that wonderful patience of the Early Church, which had learned to be patient with life, both in its present trial and in its deferred hope.