Shadow and Substance

“Which are a shadow of things to come, but the body is Christ.” — Cot. ii. 17.

ProFEssor William James, in a glowing eulogy of Miss Jane Addams, used the phrase, ‘‘ She inhabits reality.’”? He meant, I suppose, that she does not spend her energies in merely vaporous enterprises. Her life is not frittered away in one prolonged dream about things. She is not always about to do something: she gets things done. She is not satisfied to merely study the railway time-table as to how places can be reached: she makes the journey. She is not for ever theorising in seclusion about humanity: she gets among men and women. She does not live and move in a phantom world, a filmy kingdom of abstractions: she inhabits reality.

This eulogistic phrase, which Professor James so uses about Jane Addams, may wisely be given a more inclusive application. In the urgent concerns of religion, how prone we are to live in the shadows, and not in the substances of things! We remain in the unsatisfying phantoms: we do not abide in reality. We do not pass through the shadow into the substance. For, in the realm of religion, material things are the shadows. The visible and the tangible and the transient thoroughfares lead into the glorious temple of the Unseen, the holy sanctuary of the real and eternal. We take the bread and the wine at the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, but the material emblems are only the shadows of the heavenly feast, If our journeying soul tarry with

these we do not inhabit reality, we are in the realm of phantoms, however seemingly impressive the service may be. The substance is Christ, and it is only as our soul reverently presses forward to the spiritual bread and wine that we pass into the august realities of the Sacrament. And so it is with all external ministries, and with every ecclesiastical and devotional ordinance and institution. We must distinguish between the shadow and the substance, or leanness will come into our souls.

Indeed, in the only truly vital sense of the words, we never inhabit reality until we abide in Christ. And yet, how we do dwell in the shadows, and how we pursue them! But when at last we do enter into our Dwelling-place, there is a strange and wonderful sense of home. It is not that our quest is ended when we make our home in the Lord: it has only just begun. We are at rest for quest; we are like mineral explorers who have found the precious location, and who have just sunk their shaft into the buried wealth. We too have found our Mine, and there stretch before us the endless veins of the unsearchable riches. of Christ. We have discovered Reality. Everything else is a shadow — this alone is Substance. ‘*‘ Thou, O Christ, art all I want!”;