THE KING’S BUSINESS
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him the apostle conceives co-operative and friendly powers. “The mountain is full of horses and chariots of fire round about him.” He exults in the consciousness of abounding resources. He discovers the friends of God in things which find no place among the scheduled powers of the world. He finds God’s raw material in the world’s discarded waste. “Weak things,” “base things,” “things that are despised,” “things that are not,” mere noth ings; among these he discovers the opera ting agents of the mighty. God. Is it any wonder that in this man, possessed of such a wealthy consciousness of multiplied re-’ sources, the spirit of a cheery optimism should be enthroned? With what stout confidence he goes into the fight! He never mentions the enemy timidly. He never seeks to underestimate his strength. Nay, again and again he catalogs all pos sible antagonisms in a spirit of buoyant and exuberant triumph. However numer ous the enemy, however subtle and ag gressive his devices, however towering and well-established the iniquity, however black the gathering clouds, so sensitive is the apostle to the wealthy resources of God that amid it all he remains a sunny opti mist, “rejoicing in hope,” laboring in the spirit of a conqueror even when the world was exulting in his supposed discomfiture and defeat. TOOK TIME TO THINK And, finally, in searching for the springs 1of this man’s optimism, I place alongside his sense of the reality of redemption and his wealthy consciousness of present resources his impressive sense of the real ity of future glory. Paul gave himself time to think of heaven, of the home of God, of his own home when time should be no more. He loved to contemplate “the glory that shall be revealed.” He mused in wistful expectancy of the day “when Christ who is our life shall be manifested,” and when we also “shall be manifested with him in glory.” He pondered the thought of death as “gain,” as transferring him to conditions in which' he would be “at home
with the. Lord,” “with Christ, which is far better. He looked for “the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ,” and he con templated “that great day” as the “hence forth,” which would reveal to him the crown of righteousness and glory. Is any one prepared to dissociate this contempla tion from the apostle’s cheery optimism? Is not rather the thought of coming glory one of its abiding springs? Can we safely exile it from our moral and spiritual cul ture? I know that this particular contem plation is largely absent from modern relig ious life, and I know the nature of the recoil in which our present impoverishment be gan. Let us hear less about the mansions of the blessed and more about the housing of the poor!” Men revolted against an effeminate contemplation, which had run to seed, in favor of an active philanthropy which sought the enrichment of the com-' mon life. WISE RESTRICTION But, my brethren, pulling a plant up is not the only way of saving it from run ning to seed. You can accomplish by a wise restriction what is wastefully. done by severe destruction. I think we have lost immeasurably by the uprooting, in so manv lives, of this plant of heavenly contempla tion. We have built on the erroneous as sumption that the contemplation of future glory inevitably unfits us for the service of man. It is an egregious and destructive mistake. I do not think that Richard Bax ter’s labors were thinned or impoverished by his contemplation of “The Saint’s Ever lasting Rest.” When I consider his men tal output, his abundant labors as father- confessqr to a countless host, his pains and persecutions and imprisonments, I can not but think he received some of the pow ers of his optimistic endurance from con templation such as he counsels in his incom parable book. “Run familiarly through the streets of the heavenly Jerusalem; p sit the patriarchs and prophets, salute the apostles, and admire the armies of martyrs; lead on the heart from street to street, bring it
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