^ When little children are baptized they receive a name, inalienable. Its possession means " given to God." Our surname is our old name. Our baptismal name, the name suggestive of our new nature is our new name for earth. When admitted into heaven, we shall receive a new name, Christ's name and ours. " I will write upon him mine own new name."
When the angels that await me,
Meet me at my entering in, With what name of love and music
Will their welcoming begin ? Not the name so dimmed with earth stains,
Linked with thoughts of grief and pain, No, the name which mortals give me
Will not be my angel name.^
4. The new name becomes ours by communication from Christ " I will give him a new name " — a deeper, a more inward, a fresh knowledge and revelation of My own character — as eternal love, eternal wisdom, all-sufficient, absolute power, the home and treasure and joy and righteousness of the whole heart and spirit. That is the representation uniformly given in Scripture with regard to all the change and glorifying of human nature which follows upon the entrance into the life beyond. It is ever set forth as being the consequence of a fuller knowledge and general
» A. W. Lewis.
112 VICTORY AND INTIMACY
possession of the name — the manifested character of Jesus Christ our Lord. The words of the Apostle John, who wrote the Apocalypse, mean the same thing without metaphor, as his words here in their metaphor : " We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is."
K The name is inscribed upon the beholder as the sun makes an image of itself on the photographic plate. If thou wouldest see Christ, thou must be as Christ ; if thou wouldest be as Christ, thou must see Christ. " We all, with unveiled faces mirroring," as a glass does, " the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image." ^
5. This new name is known only to its possessor. That, of course, is true in all regions of human experience. Did ever anybody describe a taste so that a man that had not tasted the thing could tell what it was like ? Did ever anybody describe an odour so as to do more than awaken the memory of someone who had once had the scent lingering in his nostrils ? Have all the poets who have been singing from the beginning of the world described love and sorrow, joy and hope and fear, so as to do more than kindle the reminiscences of men as to their own sorrows and joys ? If he has not known the love of a child, no talking will ever make a man understand what a father's heart is. Eeligious experiences are not unlike ordinary human experiences in this matter. It is not possible to communicate them, partly because of the imperfection of human language, partly because we need in all departments sympathy and prior knowledge in order to make the descriptions significant at all.
We have our own heart, with its own love and its own aspirations. We have our own tasks and responsibilities and failings. Hence our need of God is not the need of any other soul ; it is just our own need that He meets, and so we have our own special view and experience of Him. The harder, the stranger, our lot may be, the more distinct are our dealings with Him to whom we pray, on whose Spirit we depend, in whose goodness we are being exercised. We cling to Him, not as the great God of all, but as our own Father, in whose heart we have our own place, and into whose character we have our own insight.
Thus comes it that my own sense of God is a name for God
* A. Maclaren, The Unchanging Christ, 230.
REVELATION ii. 17 113
known only to Him and to me. You would need my heart, my history, to be indeed myself, before you could understand all that I mean and feel when I say, " God, my Father."
^ Nowhere do we find on earth that picture of society recon- structed by the idea of Jesus, society around the throne of God, which shines out upon us from the mysterious promises of the Apocalypse ; the glory of which society is to be this — that while the souls stand in their vast choruses of hundreds of thousands, and all chant the same anthems and all work together in the same transcendent duties, yet each bears the sacred name written on the flesh of his own forehead, and carries in his hand a white stone, on which is written a new name which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. It is individuality emphasized by company, and not lost in it, because the atmosphere in which the company is met is the idea of Jesus, which is the fatherhood of God.^
If You would be ashamed not to know the name and use of every piece of furniture in the house, and we ought to be as familiar with every object in the world — which is only a larger kind of house. You recollect the pretty story of Pizarro and the Peruvian Inca : how the Inca asked one of the Spaniards to write the word Dio (God) upon his thumb-nail, and then, showing it to the rest, found only Pizarro unable to read it ! Well, you will find as you grow older that this same name of God is written all over the world in little phenomena that occur under our eyes every moment, and I confess that I feel very much inclined to hang my head with Pizarro when I cannot translate these hieroglyphics into my own vernacular.^