This also, this above all is "the fruit of the light." Two watchwords we have from the lips of Jesus, two mottoes of His own life and mission,--the one given at the end, the other at the beginning of His course: "Greater _love_ hath none than this, that one lay down his life for his friends"; and, "Thus it becometh us to fulfil all _righteousness_." By a double flame was He consumed a sacrifice upon the cross,--by the passion of His zeal for God's righteousness, and by the passion of His pity for mankind. In that twofold light we see light, and become "light in the Lord." Therefore the fruit of the light, the moral product of a true faith in the gospel, is in all _goodness and righteousness_.
There is a danger of merging the latter in the former of these attributes. Evangelical piety is credited with an excess of the sentimental and emotional disposition, cultivated at the expense of the more sterling elements of character. High principle, scrupulous honour, stern fidelity to duty are no less essential to the image of Christ in the soul than are warm feeling and zealous devotion to His service. _Jesus Christ the righteous_, as His apostles loved to call Him, is the pattern of a manly faith, up to which we must grow in all things. "_He_ is the propitiation for our sins." Never was there an act of such unswerving integrity and absolute loyalty to the law of right as the sacrifice of Calvary. God forbid that we should magnify love at the expense of law, or make good feeling a substitute for duty.
3. _Truth_ comes last in this enumeration, for it signifies the inward reality and depth of the other two.
Truth does not mean veracity alone, the mere truth of the lips. Heathen honesty goes as far as this. Men of the world expect as much from each other, and brand the liar with their contempt. Truth of words requires a reality behind itself. The acted falsehood is excluded, the hinted and intended lie no less than that expressly uttered. Beyond all this, it is the truth of the man that God requires--speech, action, thought, all consistent, harmonious and transparent, with the light of God's truth shining through them. Truth is the harmony of the inward and the outward, the correspondence of what the man is in himself with that which he appears and wishes to appear to be.
Now, it is only children of the light, only men thoroughly good and upright who can, in this strict sense, be men of truth. So long as any malice or iniquity is left in our nature, we have something to conceal. We cannot afford to be sincere. We are compelled to pay, by very shame, the degrading tribute which vice renders to virtue, the homage of hypocrisy. But find a man whose intellect, whose heart and will, tried at whatever point, ring sound and true, in whom there is no affectation, no make-believe, no pretence or exaggeration, no discrepancy, no discord in the music of his life and thought, "an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile"--there is a saint for you, and a man of God; there is one whom you may "grapple to your soul with hoops of steel."
Truth is the hall-mark of entire sanctification; it is the highest and rarest attainment of the Christian life. It is equally the charm of an innocent, unspoilt childhood, and of a ripe and purified old age. The apostle John, "the disciple whom Jesus loved," is the most perfect embodiment, after his Master, of this consummating grace. In him righteousness and love were blended in the translucence of an utter simplicity and truth.
We must beware of giving a subjective and merely personal aspect to this divine quality. While truth is the unity of the outward and inward, of heart and act and word in the man, it is at the same time the agreement of the man with the reality of things as they exist in God. The former kind of truth rests upon the latter; the subjective upon the objective order. The truth of God makes us true. We magnify our own sincerity, until it becomes vitiated and pretentious. In our eagerness to realize and express our own convictions, we give too little pains to form them upon a sound basis; we make a great virtue of _speaking out_ what is in our hearts, but take small heed of what _comes in_ to the heart, and speak out of a loose self-confidence and idolatry of our own opinions. So the Pharisees were true, who called Christ an impostor. So every careless slanderer, and scandalmonger credulous of evil, who believes the lies he propagates. "Imagination has pictured to itself a domain in which every one who enters should be compelled to speak only what he thought, and pleased itself by calling such domain the Palace of Truth. A palace of veracity, if you will; but no temple of the truth. A place where each one would be at liberty to utter his own crude unrealities, to bring forth his delusions, mistakes, half-formed, hasty judgements; where the depraved ear would reckon discord harmony, and the depraved eye mistake colour; the depraved moral taste take Herod or Tiberius for a king, and shout beneath the Redeemer's cross, 'Himself He cannot save!' A temple of the truth? Nay, only a palace echoing with veracious falsehoods, a Babel of confused sounds, in which egotism would rival egotism, and truth would be each man's own lie."[137] In the pride of our veracity, we miss the verity of things; we are true only to our blind self, false to the light of God. "Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice:" so said He who was Truth incarnate, making His word a law for all true men.