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Chapter iii.

THE DIVINE CALL.

OW wonderfully coloured is the Bible! What a mystery of light and shade, mercy and judgment, goodness and severity! We have found this all the way through the record, and now we find it on the last page of the revelation. God is the same God, and he changes not. All the change has been in form, in outward relation, in merely trivial circumstance; there has been no change in God; the standard of righteousness has never been lowered; hell has always been hot and bottomless. Make of the testimony what we will, there it is; many men wrote the Book-many men who never saw one another, and who never read what the other had written, and yet when all the parts of the Book are brought together they are one. The unity of the Bible is one of the strongest arguments in exposition and defence of its inspiration. If all the men had written in the same room, in the same day, under the same pronounced inspiration, we might have had the same mechanical unity; but the circumstances are wholly different. The men wrote without knowing that others were writing; some of them wrote at various times themselves, perhaps hardly remembering what they had written; they wrote amid the rush and storm of ever-changing political circumstance: yet when all the parts are gathered together, was ever such a literary temple seen on all the field of time?

Yet down to the last God is in controversy with certain people. He has not so wrought out the Bible that at last on the final page of the Old Testament everybody is in heaven. There is the clash of arms on the last page; men are still discontented, impious, selfish, rebellious to the uttermost—yea, men who ought to have known better. The men with whom God is now in controversy are men who have had opportunities of knowing

him, seeing him, reading his law, and watching his way in life and time, and yet at the very last their "words" are stout against" God. What a school God keeps! What stubborn scholars, what dense minds, what rebellious hearts! Yet the school is not closed. How patient is God! how merciful even in anger! How restrained is he to whom even the lightnings say, Here we are; use us, and we will put an end to rebellion. Still the school goes on, still the scholars are reading and writing, and praying and thinking; now and again God visits the school and sheds tears over it, but still he will not close its doors, or withdraw his light from its windows.

The complaint of the people was from a certain point of view not unnatural. How was the complaint grounded? It was grounded upon visible and obvious facts, such as, the prosperity of the wicked, the happiness of the proud, the abundance of the prayerless. These circumstances were aggravated by the fact that in many cases those who prayed most had least, those who made virtue a study were stung through and through with keenest disappointments. Yet this is God's world. It is some

body's world, because here it is. It is not a world of dream or speculation or intellectual invention, but a real world, visible, ponderable, tragical; scarred with graves, mad with grief. Yet to charge such a world upon God brings with it a difficulty of no ordinary kind. That difficulty, indeed, would be fatal were the history of the world limited to any statable number of years, though the years might run into centuries. The time of judgment is not yet. We could stop the builder and say, pointing to his unfinished house, his unroofed edifice, Is this a home for men? Can you mock human expectation by such rudeness of outline ? The builder says, Give me time, and you shall see a house, and you shall see burning in it a hospitable fire, and the walls shall be adorned with pictures, and every echo in the place shall answer musically to childish laughter and glee-give me time. It we give the builder time, shall we hasten God impiously? Our urgency may be blasphemy. Who will stop the artist and say, Do you call that the delineation of the human face? The artist says, No, I do not, but give me time. I have much to do there yet; all I want is patience on your part and patience

on my own, and then when I say I have done my utmost you may pronounce your judgment, but so long as I am working, hold your tongue. That would not be unreasonable. Is it, then, reasonable to point to God's world and say, Look at the graves, the agony, the misery, the disappointment, the whole tragedy! O dost thou call thyself Father and Sovereign ? The answer is, Yes; I am the Sovereign and the Father of the universe, and all creation shall be musical and beautiful; give me time.

At that period of history we read :—

"Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another: and the Lord hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name" (ver. 16).

So even at that period society was not given up wholly to impiety. Whilst some men were speaking against God, some were speaking for him. The Lord knew who were gathered together in his name. Even Christian critics are often too much given to noting the noise and the tumult, the riot and the success of wickedness, to catch the whisper of prayer on the part of others. Once a good man said he was left alone; he was the only man that prayed. Surely the Lord might have smiled upon such innocent ignorance as he said, No, poor rejected prophet"Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him." It is an infirmity on the part of Christians that they do not recognise the real, active, solid good that is in the world. Yet that infirmity is in some degree excusable. Christians do not want to see any darkness or iniquity or wrong-doing, and so long as they see aught of that kind they cannot open their eyes to the beauty that lies close at hand. Blessed be God, he is the registrar himself; he keeps the books, he marks the statistics; God takes the census.

A beautiful picture is this, containing men that "feared the Lord." Mark the reverence of their attitude, the benignity of their countenance; listen to the tender music of their voices: men that are speaking to one another, with one another, for one another; they may all be speaking together without disorder; in that holy tumult there is distinctness of articulation. Nor

is that enough: not only have we God-fearing men, and men speaking to one another, but we have such men "often" speaking to one another. Not once a week, not a Sabbatic interview, not an occasional fellowship, but an "often" brotherhood. Men should seek opportunities for talking and praying together. We should have a thousand prayer-meetings in the week if we would only enter into the real genius of religious communion. When two men meet together why should they not hold each other's hand, and in a moment pray; look one another in the face, and take a solemn pledge? Why this mechanical arrangement of praying at a certain hour on a certain evening? That may have its uses, but there ought to be an "often" meeting, roadside interviews, words few in number, but pregnant in meaning, uttered sometimes hastily, sometimes more by sign than by articulate speech; and thus the fraternal relationship should be kept up, and be turned into an instrument of religious inspiration, comfort, and progress. We may be cautioned against formality, and the caution is not without its uses; let us take care lest in denouncing formality we lose the whole fellowship.

No man can estimate the practical uses of religious intercourse. Take it that some men, say seven in number, pray in the city every day, they keep the city alive; yet the heads of the city, not being of the number, smile at the thought; but which is larger, the thing seen, or the thing not seen? Which is really mightier, the hammer that an arm can swing, or the gravitation that even mathematical genius cannot calculate or express in number and figure? Which is the more important, the man's body that must die, or the man's soul, the immortal unquenchable fire that makes him a man? We ourselves are driven along certain directions to confess that the spiritual is greater and mightier and more valuable in every sense than the material; we have only to carry our own admission to its highest consequences to ascertain and establish as a practical factor in life the holy doctrine that religious inspiration is the salvation of society. Is the air empty? Why, there is more vacancy than aught else in the universe if such be the fact. What does God want with all this unmeasured vacancy? We are told even by cold science that there is life in the air: we know by experience that with

out air this life could not live. What is air? What is its magnitude, its colour, its composition other than chemical? If the air itself is vital and vitalising, who shall say that the air is not a sanctuary, a temple of spirits? Who knows who goes forth on the wings of the wind? They must not speak who are always angry with religious dogmatism; they have by anticipation shut their own mouths on that subject. They will have no dogmatism; then let them be consistent with themselves, and refrain from being dogmatic. Let it be a question at all events that may tempt the fancy, and inflame with holy excitement the imagination. Who knows what presences are in the temple of the air? There are many things more unthinkable, to use a cant and grotesque expression, than things distinctively religious. If you have any kind of eternity you have something just as unknowable and unthinkable as God. We are all in the same condemnation, if it be a condemnation to be associated with that which is infinitely greater than ourselves. Where did this so-called matter come from? Has it always been here? "Always" is as indefinable a term as "God." Who knows the meaning of the term "always"? It is a debased form of the word "eternity." It is either always, or it is not always; if it is not always, when did it begin? If it is always, who can stretch his mind over dateless duration? We prefer, therefore, seeing that we must at some point be associated with so-called unthinkableness, to associate ourselves with the idea of living sovereignty, tender father. hood, merciful, gracious, and mighty providence. Accepting that theory, we often talk one to another about it; each man writes his own prophecy or psalm or history, and when a hundred of these are all brought together they make a beautiful Bible, one in thought, one in music, one in love. We should compare notes frequently; men should not be ashamed of talking about their soul's progress. Because certain men can degrade religious intercourse into fanaticism and hypocrisy, that is no reason why other men should not elevate it into a daily means of grace.

"A book of remembrance was written before him." All books are not made of paper. has a book, and "another " book, which is the Book of Life.

God

What we call book is a

sign or hint of that larger writing inscribed by the finger of

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