Bunyan Characters (1st series) | Page 5

Butler says in one deep place, that benevolence and justice
and veracity are the basis of all good character in God and in man, and
thus also in the God-man. And those three foundation stones of our
Lord's character settled deeper and grew stronger to bear and to suffer
as He went on practising acts and speaking words of justice, goodness,
and truth. And so of all the other elements of His moral character. Our
Lord left Gethsemane a much more submissive and a much more
surrendered man than He entered it. His forgiveness of injuries, and
thus His splendid benevolence, had not yet come to its climax and
crown till He said on the cross, 'Father, forgive them'. And, as He was,
so are we in this world. This world's evil and ill-desert made it but the
better arena and theatre for the development and the display of His
moral character; and the same instruments that fashioned Him into the
perfect and express image He was and is, are still, happily, in full
operation. Take that divinest and noblest of all instruments for the
carving out and refining of moral character, the will of God. How our
Lord made His own unselfish and unsinful will to bow to silence and to
praise before the holy will of His Father, till that gave the finishing
touch to His always sanctified will and heart! And, happily, that awful
and blessed instrument for the formation of moral character is still
active and available to those whose ambition rises to moral character,
and who are aiming at heaven in all they do and all they suffer upon the
earth. Gethsemane has gone out till it has covered all the earth. Its cup,
if not in all the depth and strength of its first mixture, still in quite
sufficient bitterness, is put many times in life into every man's hand.
There is not a day, there is not an hour of the day, that the disciple of
the submissive and all-surrendered Son has not the opportunity to say
with his Master, If it be possible, let this cup pass: nevertheless, not as I
will, but as Thou wilt.
It is not in the great tragedies of life only that character is tested and
strengthened and consolidated. No man who is not himself under God's
moral and spiritual instruments could believe how often in the quietest,
clearest, and least tempestuous day he has the chance and the call to say,
Yea, Lord, Thy will be done. And, then, when the confessedly tragic
days and nights come, when all men admit that this is Gethsemane
indeed, the practised soul is able, with a calmness and a peace that
confound and offend the bystanders, to say, to act so that he does not

need to say, Not my will, but Thine. And so of all the other forms and
features of moral character; so of humility and meekness, so of purity
and temperance, so of magnanimity and munificence, so of all self-
suppression and self-extinction, and all corresponding exalting and
magnifying and benefiting of other men. Whatever other passing uses
this present world, so full of trial and temptation and suffering, may
have, this surely is the supreme and final use of it--to be a furnace, a
graving-house, a refining place for human character. Literally all things
in this life and in this world--I challenge you to point out a single
exception--work together for this supreme and only good, the
purification, the refining, the testing, and the approval of human
character. Not only so, but we are all in the very heat of the furnace,
and under the very graving iron and in the very refining fire that our
prefigured and predestinated character needs. Your life and its trials
would not suit the necessities of my moral character, and you would
lose your soul beyond redemption if you exchanged lots with me. You
do not put a pearl under the potter's wheel; you do not cast clay into a
refining fire. Abraham's character was not like David's, nor David's like
Christ's, nor Christ's like Paul's. As Butler says, there is 'a providential
disposition of things' around every one of us, and it is as exactly suited
to the flaws and excrescences, the faults and corruptions of our
character as if Providence had had no other life to make a disposition of
things for but one, and that one our own. Have you discovered that in
your life, or any measure of that? Have you acknowledged to God that
you have at last discovered the true key of your life? Have you given
Him the satisfaction to know that He is not making His providential
dispositions around a stock or a stone, but that He has one under His