face with a great fact, a great duty, a great idea, and stand as it were alone in its presence, we are, I fancy, startled to find how little we have ever really thought upon it, how slenderly we are prepared to give any account of its relation to ourselves. We grow familiar with traditional criticisms: we adopt conventional customs: we repeat popular phrases; but all these lie for the most part outside our own actual experience: we have not made them our own by resolute reflection and self-questioning. The fact, the duty, the idea, is itself strange to us. Is not this true of that which is for each one of us the greatest fact, the greatest duty, the greatest idea, life itself? How few of us pause even at such a time and in such a place as this to consider what life is, not in its circumstances but in its energy, in its capacities, in its issues. We all know, even if the knowledge has little practical effect, that no measure of time or sense gives a standard of its value. Life is more than the sum of personal enjoyments and pains through which it finds expression; more than the length of days in which it is visible to human eyes; more than the fulness of means which reveals to us its power. All these pass away, but in the process of their vanishing a spiritual result has been fulfilled. The soul of the man has been brought into fellowship-a fellowship welcomed or disregarded-with men and with the world and with God. It has consciously or unconsciously learnt much and done much. It has shaped a character for itself; it has helped to shape a character for others. It is at the end, most solemn thought, 'as it has been used.' Life then, we can see, consists not in abundance, in the overflowing richness of unemployed resources: it springs not spontaneously from the things which we possess, from our original endowments, as the necessary product of natural gifts. It is the opportunity of the individual to win for God by God's help that which lies within his reach: to accomplish on a scale little or great the destiny of humanity as it has been committed to him to consecrate, it may be, splendid wealth to common service to transfigure sordid cares by a divine vision: to rise to the truth of the Incarnation as the revelation of the purpose of the Father for the world which He made. Life, in a word, as has been most nobly said, Life, with all it yields of joy and woe, And hope and fear, Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love, Now it is here, I believe, in this view of life realised among us, of life as individual in its responsibility and social in its aims, that we shall find the sure hope of a solution of the terrible riddles of existence which meet us on all sides. The overwhelming sorrows by which we are surrounded and saddened, if we regard them steadily, make the Gospel of Christ--the Son of God and the Son of man-intrinsically credible. Nothing less could meet our wants, and this does meet them. But, in order that we may gain the inspiration of the glad-tidings, we must strive at least to reach forward to its scope, strive to find how it passes on this side and that beyond the utmost range of human thought, how it covers the whole field of being in which it is revealed, how it encourages and sustains us in the endeavour to understand practically that we are all bound one to another in the turmoil of our present conflict, bound to the past of which we are the children, bound to the future of which we are the parents, in the fellowship of our manhood which Christ came to save. As long as we isolate ourselves, and strive to stand apart, peace is impossible. But joy comes-the joy of Christ which no one taketh away—when we are enabled to sympathise in deed and in truth with the purpose of His redeeming love, to apprehend, however feebly and imperfectly, that below the wastes and wearinesses and wickednesses, on which we look, enduring beyond all that is of time, subsisting beyond all that is of space, He is the Life in whom we live. I came, He said, that they may have life and may have abundance (John x. 10). * * The essential relations of the Family introduce us at once to this vast, unseen, spiritual, eternal life to which every one of our lives is in its measure contributory and in which all find their unity and consummation. * * * * The poorest mother who clasps her newborn infant to her breast has found, if but for a moment, the secret of life. To live for others, to suffer for others, is the inevitable condition of our being. To accept the condition gladly is to find it crowned with its own joy. * * Other relations in the family emphasise in various ways this fundamental fact * helping us to feel that isolation is the measure of lasting pain, that we live truly exactly in proportion as we go out of ourselves and enter into the fulness of the experience of those whom we serve and by whom in turn we are served. Let anyone for instance, looking to his own home, put on one side the trivial commonplace occasions on which he has sacrificed others to himself, and on the other those in which he has sacrificed himself to others, and he will see that life is indeed the discipline of love, and that love is the soul of life. * * * * Again, we have not only a domestic ancestry, and a domestic heritage. We have also a national ancestry and a national heritage. A great part of our lives is made up of that which we have every one received in common as Englishmen. And this splendid patrimony is not for display, not for pride, but for most laborious and solemn employment. Patriotism, like affection, may unhappily degenerate into selfishness; but it may by God's grace be the devout expression of a duty to humanity. It may be a trembling thanksgiving on the part of those who feel that, as they have received much, much will be required of them. In any case the love of our country, the intense watchful interest in the growth or the waning of its influence, the passionate desire that it may be made a herald of righteousness and peace to the nations, does lie deep in the souls of all of us. There is I most sadly know another side to the picture. There are bitter feuds of party, intrigues, seditions, wars, just as there are the jealousies, the quarrels, the estrangements of home. The greater body has its grievous sicknesses, its fevers and its frenzies, even as the less. But the ocean lies deep and still below the storms which trouble its surface. The life, the natural life, is more than its corruptions: more for each one of us, I trust, in actual enjoyment more assuredly in its promises of hope. For is there one among us who has not known again and again in the last few years the throbbings of this larger life, as his own, when he has waited day after day for tidings of the little army which entered without power of return upon untravelled passes to relieve a beleaguered city, when he has heard of the silent night march of untried troops which made the end of a doubtful struggle possible, when he has found that statesmen could dare to consider the claims of justice in a moment of disaster, when he has entered into the fulness of a royal sorrow? Is there one of us who has not known that this life is fuller, deeper, intenser than his private pleasures and cares. Is there one of us who has not known that the tidings which meet us at such crises are more than the materials of passing excitement, that they call into vital energy the potency of the sympathy within us, through which we grow conscious that as a people we are one. * * Thus the life of the family, the life of the nation, bear us far beyond the visible from which they start. Through those larger forms of life we enter on the unseen. We * become prepared to understand at last that description of our position as Christians here on earth in which we read that we are come-not that we shall come unto mount Zion and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable hosts of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of a new Covenant...(Hebr. xii. 22 ff.). We learn to acknowledge that these words, glorious as they are, reaching far beyond all that we can think or feel, are written for us; that that fellowship with men and angels and God is for us; for us, not at some indefinite future but now, now when we stand like the Hebrews of old, to whom the words were first addressed, in the midst of sore temptations, on the verge of changes which we are unable to anticipate. * * * Such ideas of a boundless life reaching from the visible to the invisible, in which we all share, may seem to many to be strange, and visionary and difficult. I should not offer them now as the foundation of all I have to say here, if I did not believe them to be at present of momentous practical importance: if I did not find in them myself, as I said before, the solution of the enigmas of life which our age proposes to us. The pitiless sphinx-if I may recal the familiar story-sets before each generation the old riddle in a new shape; and the answer is still always, man in some new form. This is the answer which we have to make good and if by the Spirit's guidance we can read its meaning: if we can win for ourselves-for it must be a work of labour and discipline-the conviction of the reality of that human life which is made known in Christ, in His suffering and in His triumph: if we can realise that we all are members one of another, members of one body shaped in its unity through all time; then hope rises before us as great as our heart. |