Strong Souls | Page 2

one important constituent of happiness are far beneath their own. Upon such the shadow of the infinite seems to fall but seldom. They succeed in so many things that they undertake, as to escape the sense of the impassable barriers that hem in all human existence. The very fact of living is so much to them, that they fail to see the meaning of the limitations, the shortcomings, the disappointments of life. They feel no abiding smart of a thorn in the flesh, and so are never forced back upon a higher strength than their own. And yet it is when a nature richly endowed with all the elements of vitality, and living from the first, living to the last, devotes itself to the highest aims and is supported by the highest helps, that we see what I will venture to call the finest triumph of grace. Or if the word triumph seem to imply a struggle, which is not always necessary, and difficulties which may never have vexed the development of a vigorous life, I will describe the result as the richest and sweetest harvest of the Spirit's husbandry. Great things can be accomplished only by great natures, and even then by the help and under the eye of God.
"I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly." Life is the characteristic word of the great spiritual Gospel from which my text is taken. And no word can penetrate more deeply into the secret of Christ than this does. He was the sweetest, the most persuasive of moral teachers; but ethical principles and precepts are the common possession of humanity; and that in which Christ is pre-eminent over all sages is not so much that he gives us new matter of obedience, as that he infuses into us a fresh power to obey. I fail to see that he anywhere presents to us a dogmatic theological system: I do not believe that his apostles succeed in throwing his teaching into this shape. But supposing that it were so, as so many men believe, life is still the ultimate object, the life of God in man, the life which quickens all faculties, and casts off all impurities, and rises into a higher stage of vitality from year to year. "I am the way, the truth, and the life." "I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly." "The bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven and giveth life unto the world." "I am the bread of life." So, too, the author of this Gospel, speaking in his own person: "In him was life, and the life was the light of men." So Paul: "The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus." "Your life is hid with Christ in God." And last of all, in that antithesis so full of instruction: "The first man Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam was made a life-giving spirit."
Adam's children we all are in the possession of a physical nature full of possibilities of moral good and evil: the question for us is, shall we be Christ's children too? I cannot assert that this is the only line in which we can inherit life: heroes and saints before and apart from Christ would rise up to rebuke me if I did. God's tender mercies, even of the most intimately spiritual kind, are over all His human children. But it is the line in which we naturally stand; and to stand in it I count the highest privilege of our humanity. I will lay down no conditions of salvation where I believe Christ has laid none down: I will not attempt to compare his disciples with those of other masters: I am content to know that here is a fountain of living waters, which flows for us, and at which those who drink shall never thirst again. I will not even try to define the process by which a strong, bright, master-soul pours itself into poorer and narrower spirits, for I rest joyfully in the certain knowledge that it is so. Is it not possible to forget the fact too much in discussing the rationale of the process? "In the last day, that great day of the feast," when the silver trumpets were sounding, and the priests were bearing up to the temple court the water which they had drawn from that brook Siloam which "flows fast by the oracles of God," "Jesus stood and cried, 'If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. He that believeth in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.'" There is the whole secret. All true life is contagious. Not the dull and dead,