CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES
Hebrews 6:9-10.—The writer now turns from warning to conciliation and encouragement. He urges steadfastness, diligence, and growth. Better things.—Than any such tendency to apostatise. Accompany salvation.—Full salvation is meant, which includes growth and sanctifying. Farrar renders, “that are akin to salvation”: “near to, conjoined with, salvation.” As apostates are κατάρας ἐγγύες, nigh unto a curse, so those who persevere in maintaining the true religion are ἐχόμενοι σωτηρίας, their salvation is at hand. Labour of love.—Christian service is ever the best Christian defence.
Hebrews 6:11. Same diligence.—Continuing efforts until you have reached the very fulness of the stature of Christ. Full assurance of hope.—Indicating confirmed Christian stability, beyond all fear of falling away.
Hebrews 6:12. Slothful.—Remiss in discharge of Christian duties, or in using all means of Christian culture. Always peril of Christian indifference. The word νωθροί, “tardy,” is applied either to body or mind, to external actions or internal conceptions.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Hebrews 6:9-12
Blended Hopes and Fears.—The writer of this epistle evidently occupied a ministerial position in relation to the Churches he addressed. There is the union of recognised authority with personal interest and anxiety in his advice and reproofs. It may be at any time ministerial duty to say stern, severe, searching things, but they should never be said in a hard or harsh tone. Personal interest and affection should at once qualify the severity, and make it all the more severe. The spirit of Christian reproof is given in this sentence: “As my beloved sons, I warn you.” The strong things this writer found it necessary to say concerning wilful apostasy might offend some, and might give many a wrong impression of the writer and of Christianity. He must make it plain that he was dealing with a possible case, and not assuming that they were in such a condition. It was necessary to point out what might be, in order to gain an influence over the evil things which might work out into such hopeless relations. To see where a road leads is often enough to convince us that it cannot be the right road. Every minister of Christ shares the experience of this writer concerning those entrusted to his charge.
I. He has hope in some.—The hope is based on recognised signs of Christian life. Hope is essential to the Christian ministry. There should be persistency in looking at the brighter side of things, quickness to discern every sign and possibility of good, and skill to nourish it into expression and strength. In many really good people, good has a way of hiding and almost disguising itself; and ministers need the wisdom of hopefulness in dealing with such persons. It may be that some in every Christian Church cause grave anxiety; it is almost always true that the many inspire confidence, win affection, and become to the minister his “joy and crown of rejoicing” in the day of God. He must never shrink from the duty of dealing with the careless, the inconsistent, and the wilful, but he can never do his work worthily unless he persistently hopes for the best. And the signs of healthy Christian life, which man may observe and God is sure not to forget, are summed up in this: “your work, and the love which ye shewed toward His name, in that ye ministered unto the saints, and do minister.”
1. Your work; activity and energy are satisfactory indications of vigorous and healthy life.
2. Love for Christ’s name, seen in doing the service which He did, and wants done. Christ’s name is a synonym for service to others, ministry to others. There is something of Christliness in all self-denying ministry; the full true Christliness when the ministry is distinctly rendered for Christ, and as Christ’s. Defection from the Christian spirit shows itself at once in failing ministry to others. Where soul-health flags there is no love of service.
II. He has fears for some.—And the fears find expression in anxious prayers on their behalf. Three things are objects of desire and prayer:
1. Where there is trembling and sign of weakness, the minister has his fears, and prays that these may be replaced by steadfastness, the firm tread, and upright pose of the man who feels the strength of good health.
2. Where there is flagging, through failing interest in Divine things, the minister has his fears, and prays that a new spirit of persistency may be given, and the aims of the Christian life become the inspiration of new and holier endeavour.
3. Where there is sluggishness, the dulness of stealthy spiritual disease, which saps the vital energy, and makes life a weariness, and lays the soul open to the attacks of spiritual disease, there the minister has his grave fears, and prays for grace to enable him to arouse and revive, by presenting in an inspiring way the example of them who “through faith and patience inherit the promises.” What the minister wants for all his people is, that they should have two graces—faith and patience; that each should be in full vigour of health; that the two should harmoniously and helpfully blend together; and so blending, protect from all attacks of temptation, open or insidious,—faith ever looking toward higher things, and patience ever enduring while those higher things are being attained.
SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES
Hebrews 6:9. The Hopefulness of the Christian Teacher.—“We are persuaded better things of you.” A well-known and greatly honoured Christian preacher, in advising a younger minister, once said, “I would not care to preach, if the Christian religion were not a religion of hope.” Whatever subject that good man dealt with, he persisted in seeing the hopeful side of it, though he bore the burden of a frail body, and was placed in circumstances of great strain and difficulty. In hopefulness concerning those to whom he ministers, the preacher gains his power. He has reason to nourish a spirit of hopefulness:
(1) in view of the truths with which he has to deal;
(2) in view of the presence of the Spirit with him, in doing the service of Christ;
(3) in view of the inspiring power of hope on the human heart;
(4) in view of the fact that just what the pressure of weekly life does for men is, take the hope out of them;
(5) and in view of the fact, that Christianity holds out its best things as things to come. But the hopefulness of the Christian teacher is only sometimes a happy disposition. The nature of the minister’s work tends to nourish depression. Hopefulness is usually a gracious disposition won out of fierce conflict, won for the sake of gaining efficiency in the service of men, and of rightly representing Him who saves us by kindling hope.
Hebrews 6:10. God’s Observations and Remembrances.—“God is not unrighteous to forget your work.” When the Divine inspections are dealt with, the observation of our frailties, short-comings, and sins is usually commended to our attention. The Divine observation is made a ground for nourishing a holy fear. But we have lost much in fixing too close an attention on this side of the Divine observation. It ought to be made the means of nourishing a holy restfulness, and a holy joy. The inspection takes notice of everything that is good and hopeful in us. The inspection always considers the good things in their relation to the capacities and possibilities of the individual who does them, and so calls things very good which the individual mourns over as sadly below his own standard. And it is of the essence of God’s righteousness that He never forgets what He observes. His dealings with us are based on what He remembers, as well as what He sees.
Hebrews 6:11. Hope elevated into Full Assurance.—“Full assurance of hope unto the end.” R.V. “fulness of hope even to the end.” Can human hope ever rise to “full assurance,” to absolute confidence? Not in a strict sense. The element of human frailty, that necessarily involves uncertainty, must always be in it. It can never cease to be hope, because trust, which is the ground of hope, can never be removed from the creature, who is, and for ever must be, a dependent being. If hope then is to grow and enlarge, what can it grow into? The R.V. may help us. It can grow into “fulness,” into maturity, into completeness, into its ideal, into itself at its best possible. The man who has nourished the grace of hope into its maturity has whatever is meant by “full assurance.” And matured hope can do a most full and gracious work in the Christian life—especially in steadying it. Therefore the anchor is the symbol of hope, because it keeps the vessel steady when tides sway, currents draw, and winds drive. When the hold of Christian hope—its hold of the present realities of our Christian standing, and its hold of the exceeding great and precious promises, and its hold of God as the infinite satisfaction for our future—is firm and full and strong, then we can move calmly among the ever-changing, often trying, scenes of our mortal life. With the good hope of the heavenly Canaan, we can deal wisely with the wearying experiences of our “forty” long wilderness years. It is not, however, very frequently or very forcibly presented in Christian teachings, that Christian hope may and ought to grow into something, and that we are responsible for its nourishment and growth into something. It may be well therefore—
1. To show what a passionate, but unintelligent, and sentimental thing—often utterly unworthy thing—hope is in the young Christian. Its value is not unfairly represented by the expectations of Pliable in the Pilgrim’s Progress.
2. To show what a thing of mixed value hope is in the middle-aged Christian; often by no means cleared of its sordid and sentimental elements, and indeed often crushed down into silence, by the fierce strain, the wearying care, and the overwhelming disappointments of life. To the middle-aged Christian there is seldom any vision from Delectable Mountains, and Heaven seems “far to go.”
3. To show how in days of Christian maturity hope comes out clear, gains its fulness, and anchors the soul in quietness, security, and peace.
Hebrews 6:12. The Peril of Slothfulness.—“Be not slothful,” R.V. “sluggish.” Slow-blooded; showing no enterprise or energy. “Let us then be up and doing.” In the religious life there is supreme peril in resting content with anything that has been attained. The laissez-faire principle must be stoutly resisted, if any attempt is made to apply it in the Christian life. Therefore the apostle Paul so vigorously describes his own resolve, “Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may apprehend that for which also I was apprehended by Christ Jesus.” And the living Lord sends His messages to His seven Churches, making His promises only to “him that overcometh,” which must mean that he has kept up the fight even to the end.
I. Under what circumstances is a spirit of slothfulness likely to creep over the professing Christian?—
1. It is a frequent attendant on certain natural dispositions. The man who is slow-moving, sluggish, listless, in business affairs, is sure to carry his natural disposition into his religion. His life-work is correcting natural disposition.
2. It is associated with conditions of bodily health. There is lowered vitality where there is not active disease; and subtle diseases usually show themselves in languor, and flagging interest in things; and our bodily states affect the spirit in which our religious duties are done.
3. Slothfulness and indifference are often the rebounds from times of strained religious excitement and emotion. It should always be borne in mind that unusual religious emotion cannot be maintained, and the rebound from it is always serious.
4. Slothfulness in religious life may come with unusual business demands. A man may be compelled to give up his Christian work for a time, and then he has no interest in taking it again.
5. Slothfulness is sometimes a result of Christian jealousy. Others seem to be doing the work better than we are, and then we say, “Let them do it,” and put ourselves out of the ranks of the workers.
II. What perils lie in the path of those who give way to slothfulness?—
1. This peril—their own souls cease to grow, because they have no exercise.
2. This peril—temptation and religious disease secure their opportunity.
3. This peril—the final judgment of their Divine Master, who will surely be severe in dealing with those who “came not to the help of the Lord against the mighty.”
Slothfulness.—“Slothful”—a word which has quite passed out of common use. It may, however, be only the more suggestive to us for that reason. Sometimes our familiar employment of a word plucks out all vigour and force from its meanings. It is a strong old Saxon word, very little changed. The Saxon form is slewdth, from slaw, slow; and the idea of the word is tardiness, disinclination to action or labour; sluggishness, as represented by the level river in contrast with the fresh-flowing, hurrying, eddying mountain stream. It may even be dull, as the same word is translated in Hebrews 5:11: “Ye are dull, or slothful of hearing; take heed lest ye become dull altogether.” This slothfulness was the characteristic sin of the civilised and effeminate times of the book of Proverbs. It is the great sin, in respect of religious things, of all highly civilised and luxurious ages and nations, and the great peril of all persons who are not placed under the stern necessity of working with hand or brain for their daily bread. But a more precise idea can be given to this term as it is used in this epistle. Slothfulness is action which has in it no energy; nothing of that essential characteristic of manliness—energy. The precise danger against which we are warned in the text is that of dropping down from the earnestness of our first love, to live a Christian life without energy. Such words as “energy” we know apply directly to success in business life, but it seems strange to apply such a term to Christian life and work. We dwell so often on the submissive, patient, and trustful sides of Christian duty, that we may profitably consider other sides which are, perhaps, too much neglected in religious teachings. If a religious life is to be worth anything at all, it must be a life in earnest. The epistle to the Hebrews we cannot affirm with certainty was written by Paul, but it is certainly Pauline in tone and doctrine; it belongs most closely to Paul’s order of thought. It is more rhetorically constructed than any of Paul’s known epistles. There is a balancing of sentences, a sense of artistic effect, a choice of language, and a wealth of elaborated illustration which we do not find in Paul’s intenser writings; and there is a breaking up of the argument for the sake of introducing hortatory passages, which belongs to the public speaker rather than the logical writer. Paul has, indeed, passages of splendid eloquence; but they are specimens of the natural eloquence to which an impassioned soul rises, rather than the eloquence which attends speaking gifts and elaborate education. Such an eloquent contrast as that given in the twelfth chapter of the epistle to the Hebrews between the Mounts Sinai and Sion you feel is the result of study and care. The occasion of writing this epistle is evidently the observation, or the tidings, of flagging and relaxed energy marking the Christian life and work of the disciples, and putting them in peril of final apostasy from the Christian faith. They were caught in the downward current, and, though they discerned it not, Christian teachers knew that the rapids and the fatal falls were near. The cause of such slothfulness was partly the state and tone of society in that age, partly the enervating influence of a divided effort. The disciples could not rise wholly up out of Judaism, but painfully tried to blend Jewish observances with Christian spirituality. The corrective proposed is a worthier estimate of Christ and of Christianity, in contrast with the great Jewish officials and Judaism. Each stage in the contrast is relieved by passages of direct and intense personal application and persuasion. Our chapter is one of these digressions, partly persuasive, partly introductory to a difficult branch of the subject, viz. the deeper meaning of the Old Testament figure of Melchizedek. The writer urges that there ought to be kept up an exceeding interest in Christian growth—growth in intelligence, growth in activity, growth into the very fulness of the Christian manhood. Christians ought to respond to the various influences culturing growth, even as the earth ought to respond to the refreshing rains. What must become of earth that lies barren, or only brings forth thorns and briars, merely receiving all those quickening rains, and never worthily responding? Surely, “it is nigh unto cursing; its end is to be burned.” But counsels couched in this reproachful tone tend only to depress; so he speaks brightly and hopefully, as indeed he well may, of the Church as a whole; there was a general desire for growth, and signs of the spirit of energy. But he was afraid of individuals, and of their hindering, repressive influence. He has a word of earnest persuasion for them. “We desire that every one of you do shew the same diligence to the full assurance of hope unto the end.” Show the same diligence. Be not slothful. Share all together in the Church energy, activity, and growth. Worthily follow the examples of those heroic men who, by daily faith that kept alive daily energy, and by daily patience that kept the energy from flagging, have obtained the promises. Remember Abraham, the father of the trustfully patient, and be quite sure that for you also the inspiring promises are pledged in the “immutability of God’s counsel.”
I. The sin of slothfulness in the Christian life.—The word does not mean mere “slowness of movement.” That may be a characteristic of the natural disposition; it may belong to the firm, strong, but slow pulse, and may be quite compatible with a true energy. It is opposed to “diligence,” so we may say that it is the taking up of a Christian profession weakly, manifesting in the Christian life no earnestness, easily permitting the claims it makes on us to be relaxed or denied for the sake of our self-indulgences. We know the sin and its ruinous consequences well enough in business life. We have often been wearied out with the kid-gloved young man, who counts business a bore, dawdles about, puts no soul into anything, drags through his day’s work, and tries the patience of everybody that has to do with him. Can it possibly be that he represents the way in which, by our Christian slothfulness, we are wearying God and all good men? It must be a sin to live a listless, easyful Christian life: a sin like that of the soldier who hides among the stuff, or feigns a sickness, when the trumpet-blast is summoning all heroic souls to the front. It must be sin in view of those all-absorbing claims of King Jesus under which we come. He demands body, soul, and spirit, life, time, powers, all. No man can be truly His without being wholly His. It must be sin in view of the consecration vow which we have made, yielding ourselves up as living sacrifices, like the whole burnt-offering, given over, body, and fat, and skin, and blood, and life, for a whole consuming on the Lord’s altar. It must be sin in view of that great work in the world which has yet to be done ere Christ shall “see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied.” It must be the sin of the most shameful ingratitude when we remember how He bought us with His precious blood, giving Himself unto the death for us. Think, I beseech you, what manner of persons we ought to be who profess to live with the “love of Christ constraining us.” And yet what a frequent sin it is! Mark is slothful, shrinks from fatiguing, dangerous journeys in the cause of Christ; as Matthew Henry so quaintly puts it, “He wanted to go home and see his mother.” Demas fails, even in the hour of the apostle’s need: he could not put any energy into his Christian life, through the love of this present world. Even Timothy must be reproved for yielding to his retiring, studious disposition, and shrinking back from the active features of ministerial duty. And with withering severities the angel of the Churches pleads with the Laodiceans, “Thou art neither cold nor hot.… I would thou wert cold or hot.” The stability, the usefulness, the joy, and the ultimate triumph of the Christian life absolutely depend on our taking it up with energy. It is miserable to think of Christian people that, some on boards, and some on broken pieces of the ship, they shall all escape safe to land. What noble soul will care to drift into the harbour of God like that? Let us be in earnest, and win an “abundant entrance.” As we pass round over the bar, let every flag be flying, every man be at his post; a battered hull, but sound; rent but mended canvas filling with the heavenward breeze, and round the crowded harbour the thousand white-robed shouting our glad welcome, and saying,—
“Come in, come in; eternal glory thou shalt win.”
That is the way to go to heaven and God from an earnest Christian life. A little hut, built of half-burnt logs and boards, was raised amid the smouldering fire-ruins of Chicago, the first sign of the restoration of that desolated city, and on the front was placed this inscription:—
“WILLIAM D. KERFOOT;
All gone except wife, children, and energy.”
With energy all could be retrieved. With energy a noble Christian life can be lived. Work for Christ is worth doing “with both hands earnestly.” “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” “Do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.” “Curse ye, Meroz, saith the Lord; for they came not unto the help of the Lord against the mighty.” Beware of this subtle, seductive, ruinous Christian sin of slothfulness!
II. The temptations to the sin of Christian slothfulness in modern life.—Certainly there is no temptation to slothfulness in modern business life. Intensity, haste, keenness, over-grasping, are the modern business sins. But this business life of ours in many ways brings temptation to a weak Christian living. Observe how it tends to exhaust energy, expending all the gathered stores of physical and mental strength, and leaving none to be given to Christian uses. What sort of men are you when the day’s work is done? It can be put in a few words: fit only for the social dinner-table and the easy-chair. All else but actual business hours must be devoted to recruiting strength for the coming business hours. Christ and His claims are simply crowded out. Sounding almost unheard in every office and warehouse and shop are words of Christ’s with which He fain would still the fevers, and calm the hurrying waves, of modern life. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” Then, too, it brings wealth, and the enervating influence of luxury. Precisely the sin of old Sodom, old Jerusalem, and old Tyre, against which a prophet’s voice is ever needed. “Pride, fulness of bread, and idleness” were in them and their daughters, telling fatally upon the national energy. We know how our very food affects us, and we only care to rest. Once at home we can find plentiful excuse for shrinking from Christian worship or work. Other things besides business are seriously telling on the energy of religious life. I do but suggest them to your thought, that you may ponder over them seriously. To what an alarming extent personal Christian effort is excused by an arrangement for money payment; as if cold cash could ever do in the world for Christ what living souls can! The extravagant pursuit of mere pleasure, and interest in the excitingly sensational, and weakly sentimental, in literature. Intelligent Christian evenings are out of fashion, and our houses are flooded with tale-books, until we can get our children to read nothing that is solid and instructive. And then in other departments of life we have the open enthronement of intellect as the deity for modern worship. Men have not yet dared to call her “Minerva” or “Athene,” and claim for her a temple and an altar; but the goddess of wisdom is fast pushing Jehovah, the God of righteousness and love, out of His claim to men’s thoughts. Now can you seriously weigh the influence of all these things on Christian energy, on religious life? Can you see how these things account for the religious easyfulness that is all around us—an easyfulness that makes all Christian work drag heavily? Can you, by the help of these things, explain the pleasant way in which you are being borne along to heaven, as if in some delightful gondola, on a still and flowing stream—your boat fitted up with exquisite taste, pleasant companions around you, delightful music to soothe you into a dreamy half-sleep, rowers to dip their oars in the sparkling waters and relieve you of all the toil, and a strange delusion possessing you that in this way you may sail on, and never know a windy, stormy ocean, and never feel one tossing wave until the boat rounds in to the heavenly landing-stage? Awake, O sleeper! Arise from the death of such delusions! Let Christ give you light; let Christ inspire you to higher things with His constraining love. Christian life is conflict; Christian life is pilgrimage; Christian life is toil. No rowers can ever row for you while you recline on soft pillows of ease. The Christian boat is no fancy-painted gondola. It is a stout fisherman’s boat; and there is nothing for thee but thine own hand to the oars, and a life of hard pulling against the down-rushing stream. Christian work demands your help. A heaven that could be any real joy to you is to be won. Your crown is to be gained through a present victory over self and circumstance and sin! “Be not slothful.” Too surely all nerveless living induces disease. Slothfulness is a plague-spot; soon it spreads into unbelief, grows into indifference, eats inward until it become apostasy, and at last, reaching the vitals, it becomes spiritual and eternal death. Well indeed may the Son of man say, “I would thou wert cold or hot.”
“Who would share Abraham’s blessing
Must Abraham’s path pursue;
A stranger and a pilgrim,
Like him, must journey through.
The foes must be encountered,
The dangers must be passed;
Only a faithful soldier
Receives the crown at last.”
III. The dishonour which Christian slothfulness puts upon those saints and heroes who have gone before us, and who seek to live again in us.—“Them who, through faith and patience, inherit the promises.” We are not sure that hero-worship, or the inspiration of heroic examples, is as mighty in our day as in some past times. Pride in one’s own age was perhaps never carried to such an extreme as it is now. Men can speak lightly and even disdainfully of the grandest men that have ever lived, and we think ourselves quite competent to criticise the greatest productions of human genius. We often notice a failing reverence for God; there runs along with it a failing reverence for good and great men, and these are surely bad signs of the times. This age deals more with things than with persons, and it is as an antidote to this tendency that we persist in setting forth the person of the Son of God: not first His doctrine, not first His work, but first Himself. True greatness in every age is a response to the influence of sublime human examples. “The real interest of the Scripture books centres about persons, who reproduce and exhibit in their human lives the purposes of the Father of all.… The lives of the saints are always in some form a chief part of the spiritual food of every generation. Their experiences are assimilated by us, and enter into our own lives. The pious propagate their piety, the brave man propagates his courage, there is a spiritual descent and inheritance more sure than that of the race” (Ll. Davies, “Gosp. Mod. Life,” p. 173). The power of heroic examples has perhaps never been so forcibly illustrated as in the case of the great French Revolution. Men were, indeed, terribly mistaken in their modes of action, and borne beyond all sobriety in the enthusiasm of a great national hope; but the leaders were for the most part grand men, men of heroic soul, and it is instructive to observe that their heroism was fed by reading Plutarch’s Lives of the Great Romans. Luther cultured his brave, courageous spirit by constant fellowship with the great Israelite prophets, reading them till their ardour burned in his own breast. But there is also an unsurpassed humbling in the influence of heroic and saintly examples. They will cure us, as nothing else will, of our self-confidence and self-sufficiency. That which is true of the ministers is true of the people. If we find conceit growing, and we are beginning to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think, we take down the Life of John Howe, who pressed near to the fountains of God’s truth till he felt that he drank right from the fresh spring. Or of Edward Payson, or R. M. McCheyne, men who lived in the secret place of the Most High. Or of Norman McLeod, broad as the world in heavenly, Divine charity, but gentle, humble, simple, playful as a child, and knowing on earth no joy but serving—serving God and his fellow-men. It is one of the characteristics of our religion that it presents to us, and keeps ever before us, a galaxy of heroes, of noble men and women, like a great sky full of various stars, circling about that wondrous light, that central pole-star, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Bible and the Christian ages do not give us so much a record of achievements as a record of men. And no man can know the Lord, the Lord Jesus Christ, by any critical estimate of His works; He must be apprehended in His person; He must make the impression of a living man. Think of that roll of heroes given by the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews with an eloquence that makes it come to us like the swell of some grand organ-note, pealing forth, until it fills the whole place with its thrilling tones. What is the thing which we especially observe in that great cloud of witnesses? They lived their lives in the world with energy. Their religion was their glory. They were godly “men in earnest.” Watch them as they pass in panoramic order before you—Abel, and Enoch, and Noah, and Abraham, and Jacob, and Joseph, and Moses, and Gideon, and Barak, and Samson, and Jephthah, and Samuel, and David, and Elijah, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and Daniel. Nay, this is but the beginning of the splendid muster-roll of the godly; add the “glorious company of the apostles,” and the “noble army of martyrs,” and the foremost men of the Christian ages—Augustine, and Bernard, and Luther, and Calvin, and Latimer, and Cranmer, and Loyola, and Knox, and Baxter, and a host of others. Come down into our own passing years, and add the names of such as have come within our own spheres of thought—Wilberforce, and Martyn, and Lincoln, and Hedley Vicars, and Havelock, and Arnold, and Robertson, and Chalmers, and Guthrie, and many more. Add, still again, those whom we have known and loved, with intensity because with reverence, in personal relationship and friendship. Think of those “holy souls and meekly who the cross of suffering bore.” Think of the noble souls who stood well in the front of God’s great war—earnest souls whose life-joy was the service they rendered to the Master whom they loved. What a splendid crowd of witnesses! Oh the glorious vision of the saints of God! Sainted fathers, sainted mothers, sainted pastors, sainted heroes. They have inherited the promises, and now they rest. But how? Through “faith,” which is but another name for energy—energy seen on another side; and through “patience,” which enabled them, amid all their toils and discouragements and failures, to keep up their energy. They live again in us. What dishonour do we put upon such men, then, if our Christian living is faithless and weak, self-indulgent and restless and fretful! How we disgrace our fathers and our grandfathers, our sainted mothers and grandmothers, and all the Christian dead, if we sink down so low as to make our lives a mere response to the questions: “What shall we eat? What shall we drink? And wherewithal shall we be clothed?” Brethren, surely this ought not so to be! They live again in us. They were the Church of Christ for their time, and we are for ours. Would to God that in earnest, energetic Christian lives we could be worthy of them! Nay, would to God that we might be worthy of Him whom they and we alike should imitate, who hath called us by His grace unto His kingdom and glory. I know of no promises to cheer the self-indulgent. I know of no high words of hope to speak to those who are at ease in Zion. But there are words of thrilling inspiration for those who will fight and toil. Do you say, “No cross”? Then the King will surely say, “No crown.” If you will but take up that cross brightly, cheerfully, lift it on your shoulder, go forth to life with it a brave, earnest man, full of energy for Christ, then He shall speak a “Well done, good and faithful servant,” and crown you with the crown of “full, and everlasting, and passionless renown.” Be earnest. Be earnest for Christ. Be earnest for holiness. Be earnest for souls. “To him that overcometh” ease, and sloth, and disposition, and pleasure, and the age, and circumstances, winning them all for Christ—“to him,” saith the Master, “will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of My God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of My God, and the name of the city of My God … and I will write upon him My new name.” Would it surprise you to find that name just meant this: the Unslothful—a man earnest unto death?
The Lives of the Saints.—“All saints” are the great cloud of witnesses by whom we find ourselves compassed about when we move backwards in thought through the ages of Church history. To remember those who have gone before us, who have trodden to the end the path we are treading, who have fought in the honourable conflict in which we also are fighters, seems a kind of spiritual obligation; but it is also one of the best exercises for spiritual training. The crown of all that the Bible has to reveal to us is the life of the Son of God in our flesh. In every age of the Church attention has been paid to the lives of good men. There has been no difference in this respect between Roman Catholics and Protestants. All sects and schools have had their lives of the saints. In the New Testament “the saints” are all the members of the Church, and their sanctity or holiness was regarded as depending not on their personal character, but on their calling. The ecclesiastical use of the word is not precisely the same as this. The saints we are to follow were men of faith and of patience. By faith they overcame the world; by patience they stood fast under the trials of their conflict. Whatever their opinions may have been, whatever their imperfections and lapses even may have been, men of eminent faith and of eminent patience are witnesses of the best things to us, and worthy leaders in the onward march of humanity. Such men have been the living heart of the Church, the salt of the earth. They have not always been honoured and promoted in their lifetime. The true saints have encountered difficulties which were mountains requiring all their faith to remove; they have undergone tribulations, such as neglect, persecution, contempt, which proved their Divine gift of patience to the uttermost. It is a good thing that we should try to obtain a closer acquaintance with the good Christians who have been in some way nearer to ourselves—with those, for example, of our own race and country, whose circumstances and trials and achievements we may be better able to understand. There is a continuous national life which is enriched by every faithful life that is thrown into it, and the contribution is more valuable when such a life is made the subject of an interesting record. Instances: W. Wilberforce, Ab. Lincoln, Hedley Vicars, Arnold of Rugby, Robertson of Brighton. These are lives that have become public property, by being led in conspicuous stations. But there have been lives of faith and patience known to us individually which never drew the eyes of the public upon them. There is always “the world” to be overcome; and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Every example of persevering loyalty to the will of God, and of confidence in the ultimate dominion of that will, is an addition to the blessed company of the saints. In every life there are frequent calls for exercising patience. There has been no high Christian virtue, no eminent nobility of life, without patience. Where patience of the true quality has been shown, a patience sustained by hope, a sweet and kindly patience, there we ought to recognise the true saintship. The innumerable company of the saints is not a distant body of another nature than ours; it includes those who, whether they be still with us or have gone before us, have displayed the like faith and patience. These beckon to us to follow them in hope. When we commune with ourselves most sincerely, which kind of life seems really the noblest and most to be preferred, that of men who strove and suffered in faith and patience, whether they were happy in this world or not, or that of those who have selfishly steered their course so as always to get the most pleasure, and to avoid the most pain?—J. Llewellyn Davies, M.A.