V.

Self-surrender to God.

ROMANS vi. 13.

"Yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead."

IN a certain sense it is the tendency of advancing knowledge to place God in our thought at a greater distance from the realities of life, and to render impossible that simple faith in his occasional intervention on the scene, which belongs to an early stage of human culture. The times, the places, the histories in which we had imagined his special presence and distinctive agency, become more and more difficult to keep apart as sacred islands in the sea of wonder: they disclose, on nearer search, manifold relations, in their structure and products, to the main continent of time and place and history from which they had long lain quite detached in our belief; and if, in order to the clear perception of God's activity, it be necessary to reserve for him some exceptional sphere, where sudden starts of power take place of quiet evolution, or law and order have not yet commenced, he must then undoubtedly recede from

us as our minds advance, and hide himself in the outer darkness that environs all our knowledge. "The third heaven" into which Paul was "caught up we too have visited, and found to be a region of space and stars. At the mouth of many a great river there is a geologic sand-glass by which we count back some twenty times past the interval at which we had supposed the creation week to stand. And the more we lay our minds open to the broad history of mankind, the migration of their tribes, the affinities of their languages, the development of their religions, the less can we distinguish any lonely path of divine march through the complicated throng, and find children of God only in one clan and his prophets only in one tongue. The realm of Law, it cannot be doubted, spreads and will ever spread, as our apprehension enlarges. Knowledge, in its very essence, is a growing perception of kinship and unity in things: it brings the scattered groups of fact into the parts of a higher organism; and in proportion as we insist on identifying the divine with the exceptional, obliges us to go out wider and more into the dark to find it. Those (and they are many) with whom the spread of light and order and beauty and life through the whole web of things is equivalent to the banishment of God, must assuredly feel as if the tent of Abraham at whose door He stood had expanded to the radius of the starry sphere, and left him still outside.

Yet is there an inverse tendency of our nature which

counteracts this estrangement from the Living God, and disappoints the predictions of those who say that he is but a morning visitant of our humanity and will never abide with us till even. Religion, with the progress of moral experience and intellectual gifts, assumes more and more inwardness and spirituality; and this, not as a mere escape from the outer world which science disenchants, but by an involuntary change of taste and feeling inseparable from all higher culture, and affecting poetry, philosophy, morals, not less than religion. All our life as it reaches its higher stages,as it speaks a more refined language and exchanges richer thought,-necessarily becomes more reflective, communes more with itself, and takes the external Universe more into the colours of the atmosphere within. God, in short, who is ever at the summit of our thought, occupies at all times whatever sphere seems at the moment to be highest; and as the education of men begins with the senses and ends with the conscience and affections, it is certain that divine intimations must first be seen and heard without, and only at last be felt and read within. Accordingly, it is acknowledged by every one that a ritual worship, addressing itself chiefly to the senses, is naturally prior to a faith that appeals to the will by hope and fear; as this again gives way to the pure piety of love and trust. So far is this from being a mere imaginary progress, that its stages are broadly marked on the history of the

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world. Every religion seeks for something that may be offered to God and be acceptable to him, and may set the worshippers at one with him; and according as our offering is more or less an external thing do we find our place in one of three great classes that divide mankind. To give him something that we have is Heathen ; to offer him what we do, is Jewish; to surrender to him what we are, is Christian. Take my goods and cease to be angry with my sin,' was the cry of the first; 'Accept my righteousness, and remember thy promise, for I have served thee,' speaks the character of the second; I am not my own, but thine, O Lord; live thou in me, or else I die,' is the prayer of the third. To buy off displeasure by sacrifice; to deserve favour by obedience; to attain similitude and communion by loving self-abandonment; are the three aims that make the ascending scale of faith. As we pass up from step to step, God draws nearer and nearer to close relation with us; first, asking for some of our possessions, and leaving us still owners of the rest; next, imposing his Law upon our will, and appearing within us as a restraint and negation on something which else would be; finally, coalescing with our highest nature to subdue and mould it all into sympathy with his own perfectness. And so does heaven come nearer to us in one direction at the very time that it goes further from us in another. While our early mode of thought follows his retiring shadow out into the night that em

braces nature, his warm light is stealing inwards on us by the lines of an inverse pulsation; and whilst we are looking for him afar, in sadness at the cold distance, his living beams close in upon the heart and claim us for his own.

The sentiment of utter self-surrender to God is not only distinctively Christian, but is everywhere, in the writings of St. Paul, fixed, as to its very focus, on the central act of Christ's existence, his death upon the cross. That act, regarded as the free acceptance of a lot possible but not holy to escape, as the giving of himself away, as the yielding of the divinest humanity to the deepest humiliation, is held up by the Apostle as the very type and image of the Christian mind, and as spreading the blessed contagion of self-sacrifice through the disciples' band; who are to feel at one with him in his choice of the anguish and his rising into life; for whom all other and more shrinking course is not less closed than if they had hung with him on the cross, and whispered in his words "It is finished," and left all mortal lingerings like the grave-clothes in his tomb, and with him ascended into the unreluctant affections of a saintlier world. Do they call themselves by his name,-the Crucified? Then the plunge is taken, and self is gone! As the water of baptism closed over them, in that moment their past was sunk to rise no more; and the figure that then emerged was a new creation, the personal form alone the same, but