And the third stage—the triumphant stage? Bunyan felt that the scales were merely level because, in the balance that contained the hope, he had thrown only four of the six words that make up the text. 'My grace is sufficient'; he had no doubt about that, and it gave him encouragement. But 'for thee'; he felt that, if only he could add those words to the others, it would turn the scales completely. 'I had hope,' he says, 'yet because the "for thee" was left out, I was not contented, but prayed to God for that also. Wherefore, one day, when I was in a meeting of God's people, full of sadness and terror, these words did with great power suddenly break in upon me; My grace is sufficient for thee, My grace is sufficient for thee, My grace is sufficient for thee, three times together. And oh! methought that every word was a mighty word unto me; as My and grace, and sufficient, and for thee; they were then, and sometimes are still, far bigger than all others. Then, at last, that about Esau finding no place for repentance began to wax weak and withdraw and vanish, and this about the sufficiency of grace prevailed with peace and joy.' And so the issue was reversed; the scale that held the hope overweighed completely the scale that held the despair.

If it were not that others have passed through an identically similar experience, we should feel inclined to marvel at Bunyan's reluctance to cast into the balances the tail of the text: My grace is sufficient—for thee! It seems strange, I say, that Bunyan should have grasped with such confidence the four words and then boggled at the other two. And yet it is always easier to believe that there is a Saviour for the world than to believe that there is a Saviour for me. It is easy to believe that

There is grace enough for thousands Of new worlds as great as this; There is room for fresh creations In that upper home of bliss;

but it is much harder to believe that there is grace and room for me. Martin Luther believed implicitly and preached confidently that Christ died for all mankind, long before he could persuade himself that Christ died for Martin Luther. John Wesley crossed the Atlantic that he might proclaim the forgiveness of sins to the Indians; but it was not until he was verging upon middle life that he realized the possibility of the forgiveness of his own.

It is all very illogical, of course, and very absurd. If we can accept the four words, why not accept all six? If we credit the head of the text, why cavil at the tail? Sometimes the absurdity of such irrational behavior will break upon a man and set him laughing at his own stupidity. Mr. Spurgeon had some such experience. 'Gentlemen,' he said, one Friday afternoon, in an address to his students, 'Gentlemen, there are many passages of Scripture which you will never understand until some trying or singular experience shall interpret them to you. The other evening I was riding home after a heavy day's work; I was very wearied and sore depressed; and, swiftly and suddenly as a lightning flash, that text laid hold on me: My grace is sufficient for thee! On reaching home, I looked it up in the original, and at last it came to me in this way. MY grace is sufficient for THEE! "Why," I said to myself, "I should think it is!" and I burst out laughing. I never fully understood what the holy laughter of Abraham was like until then. It seemed to make unbelief so absurd. It was as though some little fish, being very thirsty, was troubled about drinking the river dry; and Father Thames said: "Drink away, little fish, my stream is sufficient for thee!" Or as if a little mouse in the granaries of Egypt, after seven years of plenty, feared lest it should die of famine, and Joseph said: "Cheer up, little mouse, my granaries are sufficient for thee!" Again I imagined a man away up yonder on the mountain saying to himself: "I fear I shall exhaust all the oxygen in the atmosphere." But the earth cries: "Breathe away, O man, and fill thy lungs; my atmosphere is sufficient for thee!"' John Bunyan enjoyed a moment's merriment of the same kind when he threw the last two words into the scale and saw his despair dwindle into insignificance on the instant.

III

Some such thought shines through the passage in which Paul tells us how the great words came to him. He was irritated by his thorn; he prayed repeatedly for its removal; but the only answer that he received was this: My grace is sufficient for thee! Grace sufficient for a thorn! It is an almost ludicrous association of ideas!

It is so easy for Bunyan to believe that the divine grace is sufficient for the wide, wide world; it is so difficult to realize that it is sufficient for him!

It is so easy for Wesley to believe in the forgiveness of sins: it is so difficult for him to believe in the forgiveness of his own!

It is so easy for Paul to believe in the grace that is sufficient to redeem a fallen race: it is so difficult for him to believe in the grace that can fortify him to endure his thorn!

And yet, in a fine essay on Great Principles and Small Duties, Dr. James Martineau has shown that it is the lowliest who most need the loftiest; it is the tiny thorn that calls for the most tremendous grace. The gravest mistake ever made by educationalists is, he says, the mistake of supposing that those who know little are good enough to teach those who know less. It is a tragedy, he declares, when the master is only one stage ahead of his pupil. 'The ripest scholarship,' he maintains, 'is alone qualified to instruct the most complete ignorance.' Dr. Martineau goes on to show that a soul occupied with great ideas best performs trivial duties. And, coming to the supreme example of his subject, he points out that 'it was the peculiarity of the Saviour's greatness, not that he stooped to the lowliest, but that, without stooping, he penetrated to the humblest wants. He not simply stepped aside to look at the most ignominious sorrows, but went directly to them, and lived wholly in them; scattered glorious miracles and sacred truths along the hidden by-paths and in the mean recesses of existence; serving the mendicant and the widow, blessing the child, healing the leprosy of body and of soul, and kneeling to wash even the traitor's feet.' Here is a strange and marvelous and beautiful law! The loftiest for the lowliest! The greatest grace for the tiniest thorn!

Is it any wonder that, this being so, Paul felt that his splinter positively shone? 'I will glory in it,' he cried, 'that the power of Christ may be billetted upon me.' He feels that his soul is like some rural hamlet into which a powerful regiment has marched. Every bed and barn is occupied by the soldiers. Who would not be irritated by a splinter, he asks, if the irritation leads to such an inrush of divine power and grace? It is like the pain of the oyster that is healed by a pearl.

And so, with Paul as with Bunyan, the grace turns the scales. It is better to have the pain if it brings the pearl. It is better to have a thorn in the one balance if it brings such grace into the opposite balance that one is better off with the thorn than without it. Therein lies life's deepest secret—the secret that Catherine Booth and John Bunyan learned from the lips that unfolded it to Paul. In The Master's Violin, Myrtle Reed tells us the secret of the music that the old man's fingers wooed from the Cremona. You have but to look at the master, she says, and you will comprehend. 'There he stands, a stately figure, gray and rugged, yet with a certain graciousness; simple, kindly, and yet austere; one who had accepted his sorrow, and, by some alchemy of the spirit, transmuted it into universal compassion, to speak, through the Cremona, to all who could understand!'

That is the secret—the old musician's secret; Catherine Booth's secret; Bunyan's secret; Paul's secret; the secret of all who have learned the text by heart!

My grace is sufficient for thee—the inrush of the grace turned Paul's torturing splinter into a cause for life-long thankfulness!

My grace is sufficient for thee—the inrush of the grace turned Mrs. Booth's fierce struggle into a ceaseless song!

My grace is sufficient for thee! To the man who like John Bunyan, stands weighing his gladnesses and sadnesses with that text in his mind, it will seem that the one scale is overflowing and the other empty. For it is the glory of the grace that it takes what sadnesses there are and transmutes them into songs sublime.



XIX

UNCLE TOM'S TEXT

I

Poor old Uncle Tom has been stripped of everything. All that he counted precious has vanished. He has been torn away from the old Kentucky home; has been snatched away from the arms of old Aunt Chloe; has been sold away from children and kindred; and has fallen into the merciless hands of that vicious slave-dealer, Simon Legree. And now Uncle Tom is dying. He lies in the dusty shed, his back all torn and lacerated by the cruel thongs. All through the night there steal to his side the other slaves on the plantation, poor creatures who creep in to see the last of him, to bathe his wounds, to ask his pardon, or to kneel in prayer beside his tortured frame. With the morning light comes George Shelby, his old master, to redeem him.

'Is it possible, is it possible?' he exclaims, kneeling down by the old slave. 'Uncle Tom, my poor, poor old friend!'

But Uncle Tom is too far gone. He only murmurs faintly to himself:

Jesus can make a dying bed Feel soft as downy pillows are.

'You shan't die; you mustn't die, nor think of it! I've come to buy you and take you home!' cries George, with impetuous vehemence.

'Oh, Mas'r George, ye're too late. The Lord's bought me and is going to take me home—and I long to go. Heaven is better than old Kentucky!'

At this moment the sudden flush of strength which the joy of meeting his young master had infused into the dying man gives way. A sudden sinking falls upon him; he closes his eyes; and that mysterious and sublime change passes over his face that suggests the approach of other worlds. He begins to draw his breath with long, deep inspirations, and his broad chest rises and falls heavily. The expression of his face is that of a conqueror.

'Who,' he murmurs, 'who—who—who shall separate us from the love of Christ?' And, with that unanswerable challenge upon his quivering lips, he falls into his last long sleep. Severed from all that is dear to him, there is yet One heart from which nothing can separate him. And in that indissoluble tie he finds strong consolation at the last.

II

I was speaking the other day to a lady who had known Signor Alessandro Gavazzi. 'When he was in England,' she told me, 'he used to come and stay at my father's home, and, to us girls, he seemed like a visitor from another world.' The life of Gavazzi is one of the stirring romances of the nineteenth century. Born at Bologna in 1809, he became, at the age of fifteen, a Barnabite monk. His eloquence, even in his teens, was so extraordinary that, at twenty, he was made Professor of Rhetoric in the College of Naples. Some years afterward Pope Pius the Ninth sent him on a special mission to Milan as Chaplain-General to the Patriotic Legion. A little later, however, a new light broke upon him. He left the church of his fathers and devoted his distinguished gifts to the work of evangelism. In connection with his conversion, a pathetic incident occurred. A superstitious Italian mother will sometimes hang a charm around her boy's neck to drive away malignant powers. When Gavazzi was but a baby, his mother placed a locket on his breast, and he never moved without it. But when, in riper years, he found the Saviour, his mother's gift caused him great perplexity. As a charm he had no faith in it; he relied entirely on the grace of his Lord to sustain and protect him. And yet, for his mother's sake, he felt that he should like to wear it. He solved the problem by placing in the locket the words by which he had been led to Christ. When he died, an old man of eighty, the locket was found next his skin. And, when they opened it, they read: 'Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.' Gavazzi's excommunication nearly broke his heart. He left Rome to wander in strange lands, the most frightful anathemas and maledictions ringing in his ears. He was an exile and an outcast, shuddering under the curse of the church that he had served so devotedly and so long. Yet, after all, what did it matter? He had found a love—the love of Christ—that he had never known before; and from that all-compensating love no power in church or state, in heaven or earth, in time or in eternity, had power to tear him.

III

One is tempted to continue in this strain. It would be pleasant to speak of Hugh Kennedy, of Savonarola, and of others who found life and grace and inspiration in the text on which poor Uncle Tom pillowed his dying head. The testimony of such witnesses is strangely fascinating; their name is legion; we may yet cite one or two of them before we close. Meanwhile, we must pay some attention to the words of which they speak so rapturously. And even to glance at them is to fall in love with them. They are among the most stately, the most splendid, in all literature. Macaulay, who read everything, once found himself in Scotland on a fast day. It was a new experience for him, and he did not altogether enjoy it. 'The place,' he said, 'had all the appearance of a Puritan Sunday. Every shop was shut and every church open. I heard the worst and longest sermon that I ever remember. Every sentence was repeated three or four times over, and nothing in any sentence deserved to be said once. I withdrew my attention and read the Epistle to the Romans. I was much struck by the eloquence and force of some passages, and made out the connection and argument of some others which had formerly seemed to me unmeaning. I enjoyed the "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" I know few things finer.'

The words constitute themselves the greatest challenge ever uttered. Poets and painters have gloried in the conception of Ajax, on his lonely rock, defying all the gods that be. But what is that compared with this? In the passage whose sublimities awoke the enthusiasm of Macaulay, and delivered him from insufferable boredom, Paul claims to have reached the limits of finality, and he hurls defiance at all the forces of futurity.

'Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Death? Life? Angels? Principalities? Powers? Things Present? Things to Come? Height? Depth? Any fresh Creation? I am persuaded that none of them can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.'

IV

Neither death nor life can do it. Not death—nor even life. Both are formidable forces; and Paul knew which was the more dangerous of the two.

So he died for his faith. That is fine— More than most of us do. But, say, can you add to that line That he lived for it, too?

When Elizabeth came to the English throne, a number of men and women, who were awaiting martyrdom under Mary, were liberated. Animated by the spirit of Ridley and Latimer, they would have kissed the faggots and embraced the stake. Yet, in the years that followed, some of them lapsed into indifference, went the way of the world, and named the name of Christ no more. The ordeal of life proved more potent and more terrible than the ordeal of a fiery death.

Bunyan had learned that lesson. When he was in the depths of his despair, envying the beasts and birds about him, and tormenting himself with visions of hell-fire, he went one day to hear a sermon on the love of Christ. To use his own words, his 'comforting time was come.' 'I began,' he says, 'to give place to the word which with power did over and over again make this joyful sound within my soul: "Who shall separate me from the love of Christ?" And with that my heart was filled full of comfort and hope, and I could believe that my sins would be forgiven me. Yea, I was so taken with the love and mercy of God that I remember that I could not tell how to contain till I got home; I thought I could have spoken of His love to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me. Surely I will not forget this forty years hence?'

Forty years hence! Forty years hence Bunyan was sleeping in his quiet grave in Bunhill Fields; and nobody who visits that familiar resting-place of his supposes for a moment that death has separated him from the love of Christ.

But life! Life is a far more dangerous foe. 'The tempter,' Bunyan tells us, 'would come upon me with such discouragements as these: "You are very hot for mercy, but I will cool you. This frame shall not last. Many have been as hot as you for a spirit, but I have quenched their zeal." With this, several, who were fallen off, would be set before mine eyes. Then I would be afraid that I should fall away, too, but, thought I, I will watch and take care. "Though you do," said the tempter, "I shall be too hard for you. I will cool you insensibly, by degrees, by little and little. Continual rocking will lull a crying child to sleep. I shall have you cold before long!" These things,' Bunyan continues, 'brought me into great straits. I feared that time would wear from my mind my sense of the evil of sin, of the worth of heaven, and of my need of the blood of Christ.' But at that critical moment a text came to his help—Uncle Tom's text, Signor Gavazzi's text. 'What shall separate us from the love of Christ? For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.' 'That,' Bunyan says, 'was a good word to me.'

Death cannot do it!—that is good!

Life cannot do it!—that is better!

'And now I hoped,' says Bunyan, in concluding his narrative of this experience, 'now I hoped that long life would not destroy me nor make me miss of heaven.'

V

Paul dares the universe. He defies infinity. He summons, in pairs, all the powers that be, and glories in their impotence to dissolve the sacred tie that binds him to his Lord.

He calls Life and Death before him and dares them to do it!

He calls the Powers of this World and the Powers of Every Other; none of them, he says, can do it!

He calls the Things of the Historic Present and the Developments of the Boundless Future. Whatever changes may come with the pageant of the ages, there is one dear relationship that nothing can ever affect!

He calls the Things in the Heights and the Things in the Depths; but neither among angels nor devils can he discover any force that makes his faith to falter!

He surveys this Creation and he contemplates the Possibility of Others; but it is with a smile of confidence and triumph.

'For I am persuaded,' he says, 'that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.'

VI

The covenanters knew the value of Uncle Tom's text. Among the heroic records of Scotland's terrible ordeal, nothing is more impressive or affecting than the desperate way in which persecuted men and women clung with both hands to the golden hope enshrined in that majestic word. It was in a Scottish kirk that Macaulay discovered its splendor; but even Macaulay failed to see in it all that they saw.

It was a beautiful May morning when Major Windram rode into Wigton and demanded the surrender, to him and his soldiers, of two women who had been convicted of attending a conventicle. One of them was Margaret Wilson, a fair young girl of eighteen. She was condemned to be lashed to a stake at low tide in such a way that the rising waters would slowly overwhelm her. In hope of shaking her fidelity, and saving her life, it was ordained that her companion should be fastened to a stake a little farther out. 'It may be,' said her persecutors, 'that, as Mistress Margaret watches the waves go over the widow before her, she will relent!' The ruse, however, had the opposite effect. When Margaret saw the fortitude with which the elder woman yielded her soul to the incoming tide, she began to sing a paraphrase of the twenty-fifth Psalm, and those on the beach took up the strain. The soldiers angrily silenced them, and Margaret's mother, rushing into the waters, begged her to save her life by making the declaration that the authorities desired. But tantalized and tormented, she never flinched; and, as the waves lapped her face she was heard to repeat, again and again, the triumphant words: 'I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.'

As a representative of the men of that stern time, we may cite John Bruce. When that sturdy veteran, after a long life of faithful testimony and incessant suffering, lay dying, he beckoned his daughter to the chair beside his bed. He told her, in broken sentences and failing voice, of the goodness and mercy that had followed him all the days of his life; and then, pausing suddenly, he exclaimed: 'Hark, lass, the Master calls! Fetch the Buik!' She brought the Bible to his side. 'Turn,' he said, 'to the eighth of Romans and put my finger on these words: "Who can separate us from the love of Christ? For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Now,' he continued, as soon as she had found the place, 'put my finger on the words and hold it there!' And with his finger there, pointing even in death to the ground of all his confidence, the old man passed away.

VII

'Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?' asked Uncle Tom, with his last breath.

'Massa George sat fixed with solemn awe,' says Mrs. Beecher Stowe, in continuing the story. 'It seemed to him that the place was holy; and as he closed Tom's lifeless eyes, and rose to leave the dead, only one thought possessed him—What a thing it is to be a Christian!'

It is indeed!



XX

ANDREW BONAR'S TEXT

I

It is an old-fashioned Scottish kirk—and the Communion Sabbath. Everybody knows of the hush that brooded over a Scottish community a century ago whenever the Communion season came round. The entire population gave itself up to a period of holy awe and solemn gladness. As the day drew near, nothing else was thought about or spoken of. At the kirk itself, day after day was given up to preparatory exercises, fast-time sermons and the fencing of tables. In this old kirk, in which we this morning find ourselves, all these preliminaries are past. The young people who are presenting themselves for the first time have been duly examined by the grave and somber elders, and, having survived that fiery and searching ordeal, have received their tokens. And now everything is ready. The great day has actually come. The snowy cloths drape the pews; everything is in readiness for the solemn festival; the people come from far and near. But I am not concerned with those who, on this impressive and memorable occasion, throng around the table and partake of the sacred mysteries. For, at the back of the kirk, high up, is a cavernous and apparently empty old gallery, dark and dismal. Is it empty? What is that patch of paleness that I see up in the corner? Is it a face? It is! It is the grave and eager face of a small boy; a face overspread with awe and wonder as he gazes upon the affecting and impressive scene that is being enacted below. 'As a child,' said Dr. Bonar, many years afterwards, when addressing the little people of his own congregation, 'as a child I used to love to creep up into that old gallery on Communion Sabbaths. How I trembled as I climbed up the stairs! And how I shuddered when the minister entered and began the service! When I saw young people of my own acquaintance take the holy emblems for the first time, I wondered if, one great and beautiful day, I should myself be found among the communicants. But the thought always died in the moment of its birth. For I found in my heart so much that must keep me from the love of Christ. I thought, as I sat in the deep recesses of that gloomy old gallery, that I must purge my soul of all defilement, and cultivate all the graces of the faith, before I could hope for a place in the Kingdom of Christ or venture as a humble guest to His table. But oh, how I longed one day to be numbered among that happy company! I thought no privilege on earth could compare with that.'

II

A couple of entries in his diary will complete our preparation for the record of the day that changed his life. He is a youth of nineteen, staid and thoughtful, but full of life and merriment, and the popular center of a group of student friends.

May 3, 1829.—Great sorrow, because I am still out of Christ.

May 31, 1829.—My birthday is past and I am not born again.

Not every day, I fancy, do such entries find their way into the confidential journals of young people of nineteen.

III

God's flowers are all everlastings. The night may enfold them; the grass may conceal them; the snows may entomb them; but they are always there. They do not perish or fade. See how the principle works out in history! There is no more remarkable revival of religion in our national story than that represented by the Rise of the Puritans. The face of England was changed; everything was made anew. Then came the Restoration. Paradise was lost. Puritanism vanished as suddenly as it had arisen. But was it dead? Professor James Stalker, in a Centennial Lecture on Robert Murray McCheyne—a name that stands imperishably associated with that of Andrew Bonar—says most emphatically that it was not. He shows how, like a forest fire, the movement swept across Europe, returning at last to the land in which it rose. When, with the Restoration, England relapsed into folly, it passed over into Holland, preparing for us, among other things, a new and better line of English kings. From Holland it passed into Germany, and, by means of the Moravian Brethren, produced the most amazing missionary movement of all time. From Germany it returned to England, giving us the Methodist Revival of the eighteenth century, a revival which, according to Lecky, alone saved England from the horrors of an industrial revolution. And from England it swept into Scotland, and kindled there such a revival of religion as has left an indelible impression upon Scottish life and character. It was in the sweep of that historic movement that the soul of Andrew Bonar was born.

IV

'It was in 1830,' he says, in a letter to his brother, written in his eighty-third year, 'it was in 1830 that I found the Saviour, or rather, that He found me, and laid me on His shoulders rejoicing.' And how did it all come about? It was a tranquil evening in the early autumn, and a Sabbath. There is always something conducive to contemplation about an autumn evening. When, one of these days, one of our philosophers gives us a Psychology of the Seasons, I shall confidently expect to find that the great majority of conversions take place in the autumn. At any rate, Andrew Bonar's did. As he looked out upon the world in the early morning, he saw the shrubs in the garden below him, and the furze on the moorland beyond, twinkling with the dew-drenched webs of innumerable spiders. In his walk to the church, and in a stroll across the fields in the afternoon, the hush of the earth, broken only by the lowing of cattle, the bleating of sheep and the rustle of the leaves that had already fallen, saturated his spirit. The world, he thought, had never looked so beautiful. The forest was a riot of russet and gold. The hedge-rows were bronze and purple and saffron. The soft and misty sunlight only accentuated the amber tints that marked the dying fern. In the evening, unable to shake off the pensive mood into which the day had thrown him, he reached down Guthrie's Trial of a Saving Interest in Christ, and gave himself to serious thought. Was it in the pages of Guthrie's searching volume that he came upon the text, or did he, later on, lay down the book and take up his New Testament instead? I do not know. But, however that may have been, one great and glowing thought took complete possession of his soul. As the tide will sometimes rush suddenly up the sands, filling up every hollow and bearing away all the seaweed and driftwood that has been lying there so long, so one surging and overmastering word poured itself suddenly in upon his mind, bearing away with it the doubts and apprehensions that had tormented him for years. 'Of His fullness have we all received, and grace for grace.' Then and there, he says, he began to have a secret joyful hope that he did really believe on the Lord Jesus. 'The fullness and freeness of the divine grace filled my heart; I did nothing but receive!'

'Of His fullness have all we received!'

'His fullness filled my heart!'

'I did nothing but receive!'

Forty-two years afterwards, at the age of sixty-two, he revisited that room and tried to recapture the holy ecstasy with which, so many years earlier, he had 'first realized a found Saviour.'

'Grace for grace!'

V

'Of His fullness have all we received, and grace for grace!'

I know a fair Australian city that nestles serenely at the foot of a tall and massive mountain. Half way up the slopes is the city's reservoir. In a glorious and evergreen valley it has been hollowed out of the rugged mountain-side. The virgin bush surrounds it on every hand; at its western extremity a graceful waterfall comes pouring down from the heights, mingling its silvery music with the songs of the birds around. It is the favorite haunt of gaily-colored kingfishers. Swallows skim hither and thither over its crystalline and placid surface; and, as if kissing their own reflections in the glass, they just touch the water as they flit across, creating circles that grow and grow until they reach the utmost edge. Like a giant who, conscious of his grandeur, loves to see his image in the mirror, the scarped and weather-beaten summit gazes sternly down from above and sees his splendors reproduced, and even enhanced, in the limpid depths below. Often, on a hot day, have I resorted to this sylvan retreat. At this altitude, how deliciously cool is the air; how icy cold the water! It has come pouring down the cataract from the melting snows above! For, strangely enough, the winter rains and the summer suns conspire to keep it always full. Far down the mountain-side I see the city, shimmering in the noonday heat. I think of its population, hot, tired and thirsty. And then it pleases me to reflect that every house down there at the mountain's foot is in direct communication with this vast basin of shining water. The people have but to stretch forth their hands and replenish their vessels again and again. This crystal reservoir far up the slopes is really a part of the furniture of each of those homes. Have not I myself been down there in the dust and heat on such a day as this? Have not I myself been parched and thirsty? And have I not thought wistfully of the reservoir far up the slopes? And have I not taken my glass and filled it and quaffed with relish the sweet and sparkling water? And have I not said to myself, as I thought of the familiar scene among the hills: 'Of its fullness have all we received, and water for water.'

'His fullness filled my heart!'

'I did nothing but receive!'

'Of His fullness have all we received, and grace for grace!'

VI

Yes, grace for grace! Grace for manhood following upon grace for youth! Grace for sickness following upon grace for health! Grace for sorrow following upon grace for joy! Grace for age following upon grace for maturity! Grace to die following upon grace to live! Of that fullness of which he first drank on that lovely autumn evening, he drank again and again and again, always with fresh delight and satisfaction.

Twenty-five years later, I find him saying that, 'if there is one thing for which I praise the Lord more than another it is this: that He opened my eyes to see that Christ pleases the Father to the full, and that this is the ground of my acceptance.'

Five years later still, he says that 'I have been many, many times unhappy for awhile, but have never seriously doubted my interest in the Lord Jesus.'

When he was fifty-four, his wife died, leaving him to bring up his young family as best he could. But 'grace for grace.' A year or two later, I find him rejoicing that 'to-night both Isabella and Marjory came home speaking of their having been enabled to rest on Christ. What a joyful time it has been! I think, too, the young servant has found Christ. Blessed Lord, I have asked Thee often to remember Thy promise, and "when mother leaves thee, the Lord will take thee up." I have asked Thee to be a mother to my motherless children, and now, indeed, Thou hast given me my prayer. Praise, praise for evermore!'

On the fiftieth anniversary of that never-to-be-forgotten autumn evening, he records with gratitude the fact that, 'for fifty years the Lord has kept me within sight of the Cross.'

Ten years later still, now an old man of eighty, he declares that his Saviour has never once left him in the darkness all these years.

And, two years later, just before his death, he writes, 'it was sixty-two years ago that I found the Saviour, or, rather, that He found me; and I have never parted company with Him all these years. Christ the Saviour has been to me my true portion, my heaven begun; and my earnest prayer and desire for you and Mary and little Marjory will always be, that you may each find, not only all I ever found in Christ, but a hundredfold more, every year!'

Grace for grace!

Grace for the father and grace for the children!

Grace for the old man just about to die, and grace for the little child just learning how to live!

'Of His fullness have all we received, and grace for grace!'

VII

Yes, grace for grace! Grace for the pulpit and grace for the pew!' For, through all these years, Andrew Bonar was a minister, and the text was the keynote of all his utterances.

Fullness! Fullness! Fullness!

Receive! Receive! Receive!

Grace for grace! Grace for grace!

'Of His fullness have all we received, and grace for grace!'

In his study there hung a text of two words. He had had it specially printed, for those two words expressed the abiding fullness on which he loved to dwell. 'Thou remainest!' One day, we are told, a lady in great sorrow called to see him. But nothing that he said could comfort her. Then, suddenly, he saw a light come into her face. 'Say no more,' she said, 'I have found what I need!' and she pointed to the text: 'Thou remainest!'

That was it! Come what will, He abides! Go who may, He remains! Amidst all the chances and changes of life, He perennially satisfies. Like the thirsty toilers in the city, I draw and draw again, and am each time refreshed and revived.

'His fullness fills my heart!'

'I do nothing but receive!'

'Of His fullness have all we received, and grace for grace!'



XXI

FRANCIS D'ASSISI'S TEXT

I

Oscar Wilde declares that, since Christ went to the cross, the world has produced only one genuine Christian, and his name is Francis d'Assisi. Certainly he is the one saint whom all the churches have agreed to canonize; the most vividly Christlike man who has ever submitted his character to the scrutiny of public criticism. His life, as Green says in his Short History of the English People, his life falls like a stream of light athwart the darkness of the mediaeval ages. Matthew Arnold speaks of him as a figure of most magical potency and sweetness and charm. Francis called men back to Christ and brought Christ back to men. 'All Europe woke with a start,' Sabatier affirms, 'and whatever was best in humanity leaped to follow his footsteps.'

II

A blithe saint was Francis. He loved to laugh; he loved to sing; and he loved to hear the music of laughter and of song as it rippled from the lips of others. Every description that has come down to us lays stress on the sunshine that played about his lofty forehead and open countenance. The days came when, though still in the heyday of early manhood, his handsome figure was gaunt and wasted; his fine face furrowed with suffering and care; his virile strength exhausted by ceaseless toil, wearisome journeyings, and exacting ministries of many kinds. But, emaciated and worn, his face never for a moment lost its radiance. He greeted life with a cheer and took leave of it with a smile.

His youth was a frolic; his very sins were pleasant sins. His winsomeness drew to him the noblest youths and fairest maidens of Assisi. The lithe and graceful figure of Francis, with his dark, eloquent but sparkling eyes, his wealthy shock of jet black hair, his soft, rich, sonorous voice and his gay but faultless attire, was the soul and center of every youthful revel. He was, as Sir James Stephen says, foremost in every feat of arms, first in every triumph of scholarship, and the gayest figure in every festival. 'The brightest eyes in Assisi, dazzled by so many graces, and the most reverend brows there, acknowledging such early wisdom, were alike bent with admiration towards him; and all conspired to sustain his father's confidence that, in his person, the family name would rival the proudest and most splendid in Italy's illustrious past.' His bewitching personality, his rollicking gaiety, his brooding thoughtfulness, his dauntless courage and his courtly ways swept all men off their feet; he had but to lead and they instinctively followed; he commanded and they unquestionably obeyed. He was nick-named the Flower of Assisi. He loved to be happy and to make others happy. 'Yet,' as one Roman Catholic biographer remarks, 'he did not yet know where true happiness was to be found.' He was twenty-four when he made that sensational discovery. He found the source of true happiness in the last place in the world in which he would have thought of looking for it. He found it at the Cross! And, in perfect consistency with his youthful conduct, he spent the rest of his days—he died at forty-four—in pointing men to the Crucified. As a youth he had done his best to radiate laughter and song among all the young people of Assisi; it was therefore characteristic of him that, having discovered the fountain-head of all abiding satisfaction, he should make it the supreme object of his maturer years to share his sublime secret with the whole wide world.

III

London was a village in the time of Francis d'Assisi, and the baying of the wolves was the only sound heard in the forests that then covered the sites of our great modern cities. Whilst King John was signing Magna Carta, Francis was at Rome seeking recognition for his brotherhood of friars. It was the age of the Crusaders and the Troubadours. Yet, as I read the moving record of his great spiritual experience, I forget that I have invaded a period in which English history had scarcely begun. Francis has his affinities in every land and in every age. Francis died four hundred years before John Bunyan was born; yet, as I read Bunyan's description of Christian at the Cross, I seem to be perusing afresh the story of the conversion of Francis. The language fits exactly. Strike out the word 'Christian,' and substitute the word 'Francis,' and the passage could be transferred bodily from the Pilgrim's Progress to the Life of Francis d'Assisi.

The conversion of Francis occurred five hundred years before Dr. Watts wrote his noble hymn, 'When I survey the wondrous Cross'; yet, without knowing the words, Francis sang that song in his heart over and over and over again.

The conversion of Francis was effected six hundred years before the conversion of Mr. Spurgeon. Yet that conversion in the ruined church of St. Damian's in Italy is the very counterpart of that later conversion in the little chapel at Artillery Street, Colchester.

'Look!' cried the preacher at Colchester, 'look to Jesus! Look to Jesus!' 'I looked,' says Mr. Spurgeon; 'I looked and was saved!'

'Francis looked to the Crucified,' says his biographer. 'It was a look of faith; a look of love; a look that had all his soul in it; a look which did not attempt to analyze, but which was content to receive. He looked, and, looking, entered into life.'

You can take the sentences from the Life of Francis and transfer them to the Life of Spurgeon, or vice versa, and they will fit their new environment with the most perfect historical accuracy.

IV

As, with your face towards Spello, you follow the windings of the Via Francesca, you will find the little church of St. Damian's on the slope of the hill outside the city walls. It is reached by a few minutes' walk over a stony path, shaded with olive-trees, amid odors of lavender and rosemary. 'Standing on the top of a hillock, the entire plain is visible through a curtain of cypresses and pines which seem to be trying to hide the humble hermitage and set up an ideal barrier between it and the world.' Francis was particularly fond of this wooded walk and of the sanctuary to which it led. In pensive moments, when it was more than usually evident to him that, with all his merriment, he had not yet discovered the fountain of true gladness, he turned his face this way.

The crucifix at St. Damian's—which is still preserved in the sacristy of Santa Chiara—has features peculiarly its own. It differs from other images of the kind: 'In most of the sanctuaries of the twelfth century, the Crucified One, frightfully lacerated, with bleeding wounds, appears to seek to inspire only grief and compunction; that of St. Damian, on the contrary, has an expression of unutterable calm and gentleness; instead of closing the eyelids in eternal surrender to the weight of suffering, it looks down in self-forgetfulness, and its pure, clear gaze says, not "See how I suffer!" but "Come unto Me!"'

That, at any rate, is what it said to Francis on that memorable day. With an empty and a hungry heart he kneeled before it. 'O Lord Jesus,' he cried, 'shed Thy light upon the darkness of my mind!' And then an extraordinary thing happened. The Saviour to whom he prayed was no longer an inanimate image; but a living Person! 'An answer seemed to come from the tender eyes that looked down on him from the Cross,' says Canon Adderley. 'Jesus heard his cry, and Francis accepted the dear Lord as his Saviour and Master. A real spiritual union took place between him and his Divine Lord. He took Him for better for worse, for richer for poorer, till death and after death, for ever.' 'This vision marks,' Sabatier says, 'the final triumph of Francis. His union with Christ is consummated; from this time he can exclaim with the mystics of every age, "My beloved is mine and I am His." From that day the remembrance of the Crucified One, the thought of the love which had triumphed in immolating itself, became the very center of his religious life, the soul of his soul. For the first time, Francis had been brought into direct, personal, intimate contact with Jesus Christ.' 'It was,' Canon Adderley says again, 'no mere intellectual acceptance of a theological proposition, but an actual self-committal to the Person of Jesus; no mere sentimental feeling of pity for the sufferings of Christ, or of comfort in the thought that, through those sufferings, he could secure a place in a future heaven, but a real, brave assumption of the Cross, an entering into the fellowship of the Passion of Christ, a determination to suffer with Him and to spend and be spent in His service.'

Francis never forgot that moment. His whole soul overflowed with the intensity of his affection for his Saviour. To the end of his days he could never think of the Cross without tears; yet he never knew whether those tears were prompted by admiration, pity, or desire.

When he arose and left the little sanctuary, he felt, as Bunyan's pilgrim felt, that he had lost his load, and lost it for ever.

But he felt that he had assumed another. He had taken up the Cross. He had devoted himself to its service. 'God forbid,' he cried, 'that I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world.' When, five centuries later, Isaac Watts surveyed the wondrous Cross on which the Prince of Glory died, his contemplation led to the same resolve:

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast, Save in the death of Christ my God! All the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them to His blood.

And so, once more, without knowing the words, Francis sang in his soul that song of consecration.

'I looked and looked and looked again!' say Francis and Spurgeon, six centuries apart.

'It was very surprising to me that the sight of the Cross should thus ease me of my burden!' say Francis and Bunyan, with four centuries between.

'Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast save in the death of Christ my God!' cry Francis and Isaac Watts, undivided by a chasm of five hundred years.

In the presence of the Cross all the lands are united and all the ages seem as one.

V

'God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world.' In the one cross Francis saw—as Paul did—three crucifixions.

He saw on the Cross his Lord crucified for him.

He saw on the Cross the world crucified to him.

He saw on the Cross himself crucified to the world.

From that hour Francis knew nothing among men save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Laying aside the gay clothing of which he was so fond, he donned a peasant's cloak and tied it at the waist with a piece of cord—the garb that afterwards became the habit of the Franciscan Order. He then set out to initiate the greatest religious revival and the greatest missionary movement of the mediaeval ages—the enterprise that paved the way for the Renaissance and the Reformation. Beginning at his native town, he journeyed through the classic cities of Italy, unfolding to all sorts and conditions of men the wonders of the Cross. Although the hideous sight and loathsome smell of leprosy had always filled him with unconquerable disgust, he gladly ministered to the lepers, in the hope that, by so doing, he might impart to them the infinite consolations of the Cross. Worn as he soon became, he set out to tramp from land to land in order that he might proclaim through Europe and Asia the matchless message of the Cross. In his walks through the lonely woods he loved to proclaim to the very birds the story of the Cross. It is another link with Bunyan. Bunyan felt that he should like to tell the crows on the ploughed fields the story of his soul's salvation; but Francis actually did it. He would sit down in the forest: wait until the oaks and beeches and elms about him were filled with sparrows and finches and wrens; and then tell of the dying love of Him who made them. And, as they flew away, he loved to fancy that they formed themselves into a cross-shaped cloud above him, and that the songs that they sang were the rapt expression of their adoring worship. In his long journeyings he was often compelled to subsist on roots and nuts and berries. Meeting a kindred spirit in the woods he one day suggested that they should commune together. His companion looked about him in bewilderment. But Francis pointed to a rock. 'See!' he said, 'the rock shall be our altar; the berries shall be our bread; the water in the hollow of the rock shall be our wine!' It took very little to turn the thoughts of Francis to the Cross; he easily lifted his soul into communion with the Crucified. Whenever and wherever Francis opened his lips, the Cross was always his theme. 'He poured into my heart the sweetness of Christ!' said his most eminent convert, and thousands could have said the same. Feeling the magnitude of his task and the meagerness of his powers, he called upon his converts to assist him, and sent them out, two by two, to tell of the ineffable grace of the Cross. In humanness and common sense he founded his famous Order. His followers were to respect domestic ties; they were to regard all work as honorable, and to return an equivalent in labor for all that they received. They were to husband their own powers; to regard their bodies as sacred, and on no account to exhaust their energies in needless vigils and fastings. The grey friars soon became familiar figures in every town in Europe. They endured every conceivable privation and dared every form of danger in order that, like their founder, they might tell of the deathless love of the Cross.

Francis himself did not live long to lead them; but in death as in life his eyes were on the Cross. Fifty of his disciples knelt around his bed at the last. He begged them to read to him the 19th chapter of John's gospel—the record of the Crucifixion. 'In living or in dying,' he said, 'God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ!'

VI

Francis d'Assisi and Matthew Arnold appear to have little or nothing in common. Francis was emotional, mystical, seraphic; Arnold was cultured, cold, and critical. Yet Francis threw an extraordinary spell over the scholarly mind of Arnold, and, dissimilar as were their lives, in death they were not divided.

'O my Lord Jesus,' prayed Francis, 'I beseech Thee, grant me two graces before I die; the first, that I may feel in my soul and in my body, as far as may be, the pain that Thou, sweet Lord, didst bear in the hours of Thy most bitter passion; the second, that I may feel in my heart, as far as may be, that exceeding love wherewith Thou, O Son of God, didst willingly endure such agony for us sinners.'

His prayer was answered. As the sun was setting on a lovely autumn evening, he passed away, sharing the anguish, yet glorying in the triumph of the Cross. The song of the birds to whom he had so often preached flooded the air with the melody he loved so well.

On another beautiful evening, nearly seven centuries later, Matthew Arnold passed suddenly away. It was a Sunday, and he was spending it with his brother-in-law at Liverpool. In the morning they went to Sefton Park Church. Dr. John Watson (Ian Maclaren) preached on The Shadow of the Cross. He used an illustration borrowed from the records of the Riviera earthquake. In one village, he said, everything was overthrown but the huge way-side crucifix, and to it the people, feeling the very ground shuddering beneath their feet, rushed for shelter and protection. After the sermon, most of the members of the congregation remained for the Communion; but Arnold went home. As he came down to lunch, a servant heard him singing softly:

When I survey the wondrous Cross On which the Prince of Glory died, My richest gain I count but loss, And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast, Save in the death of Christ my God! All the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them to His blood.

In the afternoon he went for a walk with his relatives. He had, he told them, seldom been so deeply impressed by a sermon as by Dr. Watson's. He particularly mentioned the story of the Riviera crucifix. 'Yes,' he said, earnestly, 'the Cross remains, and, in the straits of the soul, makes its ancient appeal.' An hour later his heart had ceased to beat.

'God forbid that I should glory save in the Cross!' cried Francis.

'The Cross remains, and, in the straits of the soul, makes its ancient appeal!' exclaims Matthew Arnold.

For the Cross, as Francis discovered that great day, is the true source of all abiding happiness; the Cross is the stairway that Jacob saw, leading up from earth to heaven; the Cross has a charm for men of every clime and every time; it is the boast of the redeemed; the rock of ages; the hope of this world and the glory of the world to come.



XXII

EVERYBODY'S TEXT

I

Centuries seemed like seconds that day: they dwindled down to nothing. It was a beautiful September morning: I was only a little boy: and, as a great treat, my father and mother had taken me to London to witness the erection of Cleopatra's Needle. The happenings of that eventful day live in my memory as vividly as though they had occurred but yesterday. I seem even now to be watching the great granite column, smothered with its maze of hieroglyphics, as it slowly ascends from the horizontal to the perpendicular, like a giant waking and standing erect after his long, long sleep. All the way up in the train we had been talking about the wonderful thing I was so soon to see. My father had told me that it once stood in front of the great temple at Heliopolis; that the Pharaohs drove past it repeatedly on their way to and from the palace; and that, very possibly, Moses, as a boy of my own age, sat on the steps at its base learning the lessons that his tutor had prescribed. It seemed to bring Moses and me very near together. To think that he, too, had stood beside this self-same obelisk and had puzzled over the weird inscriptions that looked so bewildering to me! And now Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, has vanished! A single column tells the traveler where it stood! London is the world's metropolis to-day. And the monument, that stood among the splendors of the old world, is being re-erected amidst the glories of the new!

Will a time ever come, I wondered, when London will be as Heliopolis is? Will the Needle, in some future age, be erected in some new capital—in the metropolis of To-morrow? Had you stood, three thousand years ago, where St. Paul's now stands, the only sound that you would have heard coming up from the forests around would have been the baying of the wolves. Wild swine ranged undisturbed along the site of the Strand. But Egypt was in her glory, and the Needle stood in front of the temple! Where, I wonder, will it stand in three thousand years' time? Some such thought must have occurred to the authorities who are presiding over its erection. For see, in the base of the obelisk a huge cavity yawns! What is to be placed within it? What greeting shall we send from the Civilization-that-is to the Civilization-that-is-to-be? It is a strange list upon which the officials have decided. It includes a set of coins, some specimens of weights and measures, some children's toys, a London directory, a bundle of newspapers, the photographs of the twelve most beautiful women of the period, a box of hairpins and other articles of feminine adornment, a razor, a parchment containing a translation of the hieroglyphics on the obelisk itself—the hieroglyphics that so puzzled Moses and me—and last, but not least, a text! Yes, a text; and a text, not in one language, but in every language known! The men who tear down the obelisk from among the crumbling ruins of London may not be able to decipher this language, or that, or the other. But surely one of these ten score of tongues will have a meaning for them! And so, in the speech of these two hundred and fifteen peoples, these words are written out: FOR GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD THAT HE GAVE HIS ONLY BEGOTTEN SON THAT WHOSOEVER BELIEVETH IN HIM SHOULD NOT PERISH BUT HAVE EVERLASTING LIFE. That is the greeting which the Twentieth Century sends to the Fiftieth! I do not know what those men—the men who rummage among the ruins of London—will make of the newspapers, the parchments, the photographs and the hairpins. I suspect that the children's toys will seem strangely familiar to them: a little girl's doll was found by the archaeologists among the ruins of Babylon: childhood keeps pretty much the same all through the ages. But the text! The text will seem to those far-off people as fresh as the latest fiftieth-century sensation. Those stately cadences belong to no particular time and to no particular clime. Ages may come and go; empires may rise and fall; they will still speak with fadeless charm to the hungry hearts of men. They are for the Nations-that-were, for the Nations-that-are, and for the Nations-yet-to-be. That Text is EVERYBODY'S TEXT.

II

Few things are more arresting than the way in which these tremendous words have won the hearts of all kinds and conditions of men. I have been reading lately the lives of some of our most eminent evangelists and missionaries; and nothing has impressed me more than the conspicuous part that this text has played in their personal lives and public ministries. Let me reach down a few of these volumes.

Here is the Life of Richard Weaver. In the days immediately preceding his conversion, Richard was a drunken and dissolute coal miner. It is a rough, almost repulsive, story. He tells us how, after his revels and fights, he would go home to his mother with bruised and bleeding face. She always received him tenderly; bathed his wounds; helped him to bed; and then murmured in his ear the words that at last seemed inseparable from the sound of her voice: God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. The words came back to him in the hour of his greatest need. His soul was passing through deep waters. Filled with misery and shame, and terrified lest he should have sinned beyond the possibility of salvation, he crept into a disused sand-pit. He was engaged to fight another man that day, but he was in death-grips with a more terrible adversary. 'In that old sand-pit,' he says, 'I had a battle with the devil; and I came off more than conqueror through Him that loved me.' And it was the text that did it. As he agonized there in the sand-pit, tormented by a thousand doubts, his mother's text all at once spoke out bravely. It left no room for uncertainty. 'God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' 'I thought,' Richard tells us, 'that whosoever meant me. What faith was, I could not tell; but I had heard that it was taking God at His word; and so I took God at His word and trusted in the finished work of my Saviour. The happiness I then enjoyed I cannot describe; my peace flowed as a river.'

Duncan Matheson and Richard Weaver were contemporaries. They were born at about the same time; and, at about the same time they were converted. Matheson was Scottish; Weaver was English. Matheson was a stonemason; Weaver was a coal-miner; in due course both became evangelists. In some respects they were as unlike each other as two men could possibly be: in other respects their lives are like sister ships; they seem exactly alike. Especially do they resemble each other in their earliest religious experiences. We have heard Weaver's story: let us turn to Matheson's. Weaver, at the time of his conversion, was twenty-five: Matheson is twenty-two. He has been ill at ease for some time, and every sermon he has heard has only deepened his distress. On a sharp winter's morning, with the frost sparkling on the shrubs and plants around him, he is standing in his father's garden, when, suddenly, the words of Richard Weaver's text—Everybody's Text—take powerful hold upon his mind. 'I saw,' he says, 'that God loves me, for God loves all the world. I saw the proof of His love in the giving of His Son. I saw that whosoever meant me, even me. My load was loosed from off my back. Bunyan describes his pilgrim as giving three leaps for joy as his burden rolled into the open sepulchre. I could not contain myself for gladness.' The parallel is very striking.

'God loves me!' exclaims Richard Weaver, in surprise.

'I saw that God loves me!' says Duncan Matheson.

'I thought that "whosoever" meant "me"' says Weaver.

'I saw that "whosoever" meant "me,"' says Matheson.

'The happiness I then enjoyed I cannot describe,' says our English coal-miner.

'I could not contain myself for gladness,' says our Scottish stonemason.

We may dismiss the evangelists with that, and turn to the missionaries.

III

Like Richard Weaver and Duncan Matheson, Frederick Arnot and Egerton R. Young were contemporaries. I heard them both—Fred Arnot in Exeter Hall and Egerton Young in New Zealand. They lived and labored on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Fred Arnot gave himself to the fierce Barotses of Central Africa; Egerton Young set himself to win the Red Men of the North American woods and prairies.

Arnot's life is one of the most pathetic romances that even Africa has given to the world. He made the wildest men love him. Sir Francis de Winton declares that Arnot made the name of Englishman fragrant amidst the vilest habitations of cruelty. 'He lived a life of great hardship,' says Sir Ralph Williams; 'I have seen many missionaries under varied circumstances, but such an absolutely forlorn man, existing on from day to day, almost homeless, without any of the appliances that make life bearable, I have never seen.' And the secret of this great unselfish life? The secret was the text. He was only six when he heard Livingstone. He at once vowed that he, too, would go to Africa. When his friends asked how he would get there, he replied that, if that were all, he would swim. But nobody knew better than he did that the real obstacles that stood between himself and a life like Livingstone's were not physical but spiritual. He could not lead Africa into the kingdom of Christ unless he had first entered that kingdom himself. As a boy of ten, he found himself lying awake at two o'clock one morning, repeating a text. He went over it again and again and again. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. 'This,' says Sir William Robertson Nicoll, 'was Arnot's lifelong creed, and he worked in its spirit.' 'This,' he says himself, 'was my first and chief message.' He could imagine none greater.

Exactly so was it with Egerton Young. He tells us, for example, of the way in which he invaded the Nelson River district and opened work among people who had never before heard the gospel. He is surrounded by two hundred and fifty or three hundred wild Indians. 'I read aloud,' he says, 'those sublime words: For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. They listened with the most rapt attention whilst for four hours I talked to them of the truths of this glorious verse. When I had finished, every eye turned towards the principal chief. He rose, and, coming near me, delivered one of the most thrilling addresses I have ever heard. Years have passed away since that hour, and yet the memory of that tall, straight, impassioned Indian is as vivid as ever. His actions were many, but all were graceful. His voice was particularly fine and full of pathos, for he spoke from the heart.'

'"Missionary," exclaimed the stately old chief, "I have not, for a long time, believed in our religion. I hear God in the thunder, in the tempest and in the storm: I see His power in the lightning that shivers the tree: I see His goodness in giving us the moose, the reindeer, the beaver, and the bear. I see His loving-kindness in sending us, when the south winds blow, the ducks and geese; and when the snow and ice melt away, and our lakes and rivers are open again, I see how He fills them with fish. I have watched all this for years, and I have felt that the Great Spirit, so kind and watchful and loving, could not be pleased by the beating of the conjurer's drum or the shaking of the rattle of the medicine man. And so I have had no religion. But what you have just said fills my heart and satisfies its longings. I am so glad you have come with this wonderful story. Stay as long as you can!"'

Other chiefs followed in similar strains; and each such statement was welcomed by the assembled Indians with vigorous applause. The message of the text was the very word that they had all been waiting for.

Fred Arnot found that it was what Africa was waiting for!

Egerton Young found that it was what America was waiting for!

It is the word that all the world is waiting for!

For that text is Everybody's Text!

IV

A pair of evangelists—Weaver and Matheson!

A pair of missionaries—Arnot and Young!

I have one other pair of witnesses waiting to testify that this text is Everybody's Text. Martin Luther and Lord Cairns have very little in common. One was German; the other was English. One was born in the fifteenth century; the other in the nineteenth. One was a monk; the other was Lord Chancellor. But they had this in common, that they had to die. And when they came to die, they turned their faces in the same direction. Lord Cairns, with his parting breath, quietly but clearly repeated the words of Everybody's Text. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

During his last illness, Luther was troubled with severe headaches. Someone recommended to him an expensive medicine. Luther smiled.

'No,' he said, 'my best prescription for head and heart is that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.'

A fortnight before he passed away, he repeated the text with evident ecstasy, and added, 'What Spartan saying can be compared with this wonderful brevity? It is a Bible in itself!' And in his dying moments he again repeated the words, thrice over, in Latin.

'They are the best prescription for headache and heartache!' said Luther.

There were headaches and heartaches in the world three thousand years ago, when Cleopatra's Needle stood beside the Temple at Heliopolis!

There will be headaches and heartaches in the world centuries hence, when the obelisk is rescued from among the ruins of London!

There were headaches and heartaches among those Barotse tribes to whom Fred Arnot went!

There were headaches and heartaches among those tattooed braves to whom Egerton Young carried the message!

There are headaches and heartaches in England, as the Lord Chancellor knew!

There are headaches and heartaches in Germany, as Luther found!

And, because there are headaches and heartaches for everybody, this is Everybody's Text. There is, as Luther said, nothing like it.

V

When Sir Harry Lauder was here in Melbourne, he had just sustained the loss of his only son. His boy had fallen at the front. And, with this in mind, Sir Harry told a beautiful and touching story. 'A man came to my dressing-room in a New York theater,' he said, 'and told of an experience that had recently befallen him. In American towns, any household that had given a son to the war was entitled to place a star on the window-pane. Well, a few nights before he came to see me, this man was walking down a certain avenue in New York accompanied by his wee boy. The lad became very interested in the lighted windows of the houses, and clapped his hands when he saw the star. As they passed house after house, he would say, "Oh, look, Daddy, there's another house that has given a son to the war! And there's another! There's one with two stars! And look! there's a house with no star at all!" At last they came to a break in the houses. Through the gap could be seen the evening star shining brightly in the sky. The little fellow caught his breath. "Oh, look, Daddy," he cried, "God must have given His Son, for He has got a star in His window."'

'He has, indeed!' said Sir Harry Lauder, in repeating the story.

But it took the clear eyes of a little child to discover that the very stars are repeating Everybody's Text. The heavens themselves are telling of the love that gave a Saviour to die for the sins of the world.

THE END