Risen with Christ: Part II

tilf ye then or, since ye then be
risen with Christ, seek those are above” — COL. iii. i.

“^HE world once boasted of possessing seven wonders; but a greater than any or all of them is, a true Christian. His feelings, enjoyments, aims, and objects are such, that he is more than a wonder; he is a mystery which none but those initiated, like himself, in the mysteries of the faith, are ’ able to comprehend. Dying, yea, by nature “dead in trespasses and sins,” he lives; sorrowing, he rejoices; having nothing, he possesses all things; poor, he makes many rich; reversing the common proverb, that “seeing is believing,” he believes more firmly in what he does not see than in what he sees; contrary to the ordinary laws of nature, he is more powerfully attracted by distant objects than by near ones; his well, like Israel’s of old, is a flinty rock; his bread grows on barren sands; his homeward path is at the beginning through a tumultuous sea, and at the end through a dark, roaring flood. He is confident of wanting nothing, yet depends on the bounty of One who depended for His own bread on others, and had not a place where to lay His head; for his joys, he looks to One who was a Man of Sorrows; and expects a crown of glory from Him who wore no crown on earth but a wreath of thorns.

If the world is right in its judgment of what constitutes true greatness, the humblest believer is a great man. What discoveries in science so important or sublime as those he makes — in the study of the Bible and of his own heart? Neither David with his sling, nor Abishai with his sword, slew such giants as he conquers and slays — in his sins. What victories does history record, or triumphal arches celebrate, so grand in their nature and enduring in their effects as those He wins — over “principalities, and powers, and spiritual wickedness?” No laurels crown his humble brow; his name is unknown to fame. Yet, mortifying his affections, controlling his passions, keeping his body in subjection, and subordinating his will to God’s, this is what the wise man says of him: “He that is slow to anger, is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.”

No true greatness, there is no true faith, like a believer’s. One of the grandest characters in history is Christopher Columbus; but what the bold Italian did, when, leaving the shores of Spain, he sailed west, and still farther west, over an unknown and a boundless sea, seeking a world none had discovered, and hardly any but himself believed in, the Christian does. “He seeks a country” — and with stronger faith; since from that world in whose existence he firmly believes, and on whose happy shore he hopes one day to land, not one of the thousands that have gone to seek it have returned. Columbus appeared again in Europe, loaded with the strange fruits and golden spoils of his brilliant discovery: but, like barks that, foundering at sea, have never been heard of after they left the port, none have come back from the other world — to say, “Arise, we have seen the land, and, behold, it is very good!” Of boundless faith, whose aims and aspirations soar like the believer’s? The world which the Macedonian subdued by his arms has wondered less at his achievements than at his. ambition; nor has it ever ceased to regard as one of its strangest spectacles that man of universal empire sitting down to weep, because he could find no other world to conquer. And yet there burns a loftier ambition in that lowly cottage, where a sun-browned peasant sits reading his Bible, with a roof of thatch above his head, a rough clay floor beneath his feet, and no more of the earth to call his own than the graves where his fathers sleep. He is thankful for bread to eat, and raiment to put on; he is content to possess as much as will serve for staff and sandals to the end of the pilgrimage; yet he has a heart not one, nor a thousand worlds could fill. Nothing below, however it may gratify, can satisfy his longing soul. He sets his affections on things above, and turning from all created enjoyments to God, his language is the Psalmist’s — “Thou art my inheritance and the portion of my cup. Whom have I in heaven but thee? there is none in all the earth whom I desire besides thee.”

Nevertheless, naturally drawn like a falling stone to the earth, the best of God’s people often feel constrained, amid the attractions and distractions of this world, to cry with David, “Quicken me, O Lord, according to thy word, for my soul cleaveth to the dust;” and to help such as have risen with Christ to rise to things above, let me point out some earthly objects from which they should be careful to withhold, and withdraw their affections. Pope, the poet and moralist, has remarked, that to attack vice in the abstract, and not in persons, is safe fighting, but is fighting with shadows; and, instead of indulging in such general observations against the love of earthly things as would furnish an unhappy illustration of his remark, let us come to close quarters; and select some of those objects on which we should not, and yet on which we are prone to, set our affections.

One of these is the adornment of the body.

I have seen a child in ignorance of its great loss totter across the floor to its mother’s coffin, and, caught by their glitter, seize the handles, to look round and smile as it rattled them on the hollow sides. I have seen a boy, forgetting his sorrow in his dress, survey himself with evident satisfaction as he followed the bier that bore his father to the grave. And however painful such spectacles, as jarring our feelings, and out of all harmony with such sad and sombre scenes, they excite no surprise nor indignation. We only pity those who, through ignorance of their loss or inability to appreciate it, find pleasure in what should move their grief. When one is a child, as St Paul says, they speak as a child, and think as a child. Nor is it difficult also to understand how families which have lost their social position, either through injustice or misfortune, should retain, and take a pride in showing, the relics and memorials of their better days. These may secure the respect usually paid to fallen greatness; and if they do not exalt them in the eyes of others, they minister to self-esteem, and exalt them in their own.

The pride of dress, however, though excusable in those savage tribes who walk their forests daubed with paint and decked with feathers, is a passion in all other cases as strange as in some it is strong. Can a maid, says God, forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire? Yet, though this be an example of what is improbable, or indeed impossible, we might wonder that woman’s attire, though sparkling with costly gems, does not cover her cheeks rather with the blush of shame than the glow of pride. The history of dress is humbling; not flattering to our vanity. I do not refer to special cases, — the hardships they endure who thread their needles with the threads of life, and die early victims to the demands of fashion; nor to those who, more vain than honest, purchase what they cannot pay for, and assume an appearance as false as the flowers they wear — nor to those who are more proud of being gaily attired than ashamed of casting their parents on public charity; nor even to those who buy their wretched fineries with the wages of iniquity, and abandon the paths of virtue for the sake of gaudy attire. Associations belong to dress, when most honestly obtained and modestly worn, and altogether suitable to the rank and condition of the wearer, sufficient to prevent it becoming an idol. No doubt robes of snowy white may raise our minds by reminding us of the fine linen of the saints, the spotless garments of Jesus’ righteousness; and the spectacle of a queen at court or coronation, arrayed in jewelled crown and regal splendour, may recall the psalm where the graces of His Church are set forth under the imagery of a maiden’s beauty, raiment of needlework, and cloth woven with threads of gold and blazing with costly gems. Still the oldest associations connected with dress are those of sin and shame. Sin was its beginning, as it is often still its end. It dates from the fall of our first parents, and has led to that of many of their children: and surely there is nothing, either in its root or in its fruits, to justify us setting our affections on it, or giving it any measure of attention beyond what propriety demands, or comfort and health require.

Apart from these considerations, vanity of dress

v is, more than anything else, “vanity of vanities.”

Man’s soul is a spark struck from divinity; and with its expressive features and graceful symmetry, even his body presents a form of beauty worthy of the hand that moulded it; but in the matter of attire, man is as inferior to many other creatures as he is inferior in brute strength to an ox, or to a frog in the art of swimming. Let looms and needles do their utmost, the worm yield its silk, the rocks their gold, the mine its diamonds, the deep her pearls, and Nature all her treasures, to adorn the person and inflate the pride of a haughty beauty. The bird whose plume she wears, when it flashed a winged and living gem through tropic groves, was more gorgeously apparelled than she — the difference between her and it, that which lies between the Almighty’s hand and ours. Here the proudest beauty bends to the flower that bends its head to the wind, and is crushed by a passing hoof. How miserable the vanity that feeds on dress! How wicked, in practically regarding the question, Wherewithal shall I be clothed? as greater than this, What shall I do to be saved? How utterly contemptible, since, with taste as true as divine, our Lord, pointing to a bed of lilies whose graceful forms and glowing colours bedecked the meadow, said, “Solomon in all his glory was not like one of these!”

A story is told of one whose bosom swelled and heaved with pride as, standing before a mirror, she decked herself out for triumphs. Suddenly, though none had entered the chamber, another figure appeared in the glass. An awful form, it was wrapped in a winding-sheet, and dressed out in grave-clothes, and stared at her with pallid face and glassy eyes. And if, on recognising herself in that hideous vision, she started back, and horror seized her, and her pride was humbled in the dust, how should it wean our affections from these vanities, and secure much of our daily and all our Sabbath time for the study of ourselves in the mirror of God’s holy Word, to reflect that the fairest form which draws admiring eyes shall be wrapped in a shroud, and put away in a coffin, and thrust into the grave — for worms to hold riot on its damask cheek, and nestle their loathsome brood where the lights of life and love are flashing!

I have often wondered at the amount of precious time, at the eager attention, and at the vast sums of money lavished on vain attire, as on extravagant feasts. Where many have hardly rags to cover them, and shoeless children shiver on the winter streets, and cold and hunger banish sleep from the eyes of houseless wretches, and by the tongues of hundreds, Jesus, making their cause His own, being naked, beseeches us to clothe Him, one may wonder more to see Christians gay as butterflies — fluttering about in the very pride, and height, and extravagance of fashion. How unworthy such pride and pleasures of those who have in Jesus’ blood-bought righteousness a robe beside which silks lose their lustre, diamonds their brilliancy, the very snow its whiteness; and royal apparel seems filthy rags! It is enough to sadden one to think of the time, and thought, and conversation, and keen and lively interest that are wasted even by God’s people on the changes, and often absurd forms, of fashion. It almost makes one wish that our fashions were as fixed as the laws of the Medes and Persians; or the customs of the Arabs; or the colours of the flowers that are not ashamed to come out in the same robes year by year.

“Let our adorning,” as St Peter says, “be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible — a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price:” ours be the treasure which moth and rust cannot corrupt, and thieves break not through to steal. Having in salvation “the pearl of great price,” we possess a gem worth more than the costliest that ever topped kingly crown, or was fished from the dark depths of ocean. If we have put on Christ, what matters how homespun or humble our attire? What though no rings flash on fingers that shall ere long be mouldering bones, if the Father, accepting us in Jesus Christ, and regarding us as beloved for the Beloved’s sake, has kissed the tear of sorrow from our eyes, and, calling for music and the dance, given forth the glad command, Put a ring on his finger, and shoes on his feet, and bring forth the fairest robe and put it on him; and let us rejoice and be merry, for this my son that was dead is alive again, that was lost is found.

Another is money.

When swimming a river where the current runs strong, who, however powerful his strokes, does not find himself borne a long way down, ere he reaches the other bank? It is even difficult to make one’s way across a street along which a vast, eager, excited crowd is rushing, without being lifted off our feet and swept along — like a straw on the stream. Such are the contrary influences which impede, if they do not prevent, the heavenward progress of God’s people. God’s people are not the majority. The multitude goes the other way. And, since there is moral as well as material weight in masses, devout men and women in old times, to escape being carried away by the ungodly influences of those around them, fled to cloistered retreats; or, withdrawing altogether from the society of men, passed their days as hermits amid the silent solitudes of forest or desert. Let two musical instruments be placed on the same floor, within the walls of the same apartment, if a player sit down before one of these and strike its keys, the other instrument, as if some spirit’s finger had lightly touched its chords, unapproached and untouched by mortal hands, sounds out the self-same note. And such, but still more remarkable, is the influence which, by the laws of sympathy, men have in forming the opinions and moulding the manners of each other — on the side at least of worldliness and sin. Recognising the existence of this law, and the danger to which it exposes the godly in an ungodly world, the Bible says, “Evil communications corrupt good manners;” David resolves, “Mine eyes shall be upon the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with me;” Solomon declares, “He that walketh with wise men shall be wise, but a companion of fools shall be destroyed;” and the Book of Psalms opens its divine melodies with this grand beatitude, “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners,” It is not easy to walk on muddy streets and keep our garments clean; it is still more difficult to live in an infirmary, breathing its pestilential airs, and escape plague or fever; but it is most difficult of all to resist the immoral influences that surround us, — to live pure amid corruption, — to be in the world, and yet not of it, — while making and spending money, while enjoying the pleasures of possessing or suffering the serious inconvenience of wanting it, to walk the earth as they the Celestial city, who, walking on streets paved with gold, tread it beneath their feet.

We are neither to despise, nor refuse money. Honourably come by, or the reward of honest industry, this, like other gifts of God, is without repentance. Well employed, it affords much enjoyment; and, when applied to dry the widow’s tears, to fill the orphan’s cup, to help the deserving poor, yields one of life’s sweetest pleasures to its fortunate possessor — saving him from the pangs they suffer, who, with the inclination, but without the ability, to assist suffering and do the kind office of a good Samaritan, have, though neither priest nor Levite, to “pass by on the other side.”

Nor, however applicable to cases where wealth is found dissociated from worth, to scenes where, as in the parable, sin sits robed in purple and fares sumptuously every day, while saintship is clad in rags and fed on crumbs, is the remark one made so just as it is smart: “You may see how little God thinks of money by observing on what unworthy characters He often bestows it.” It is the law of a wise and holy Providence that the hand of the diligent maketh rich; God promises that riches and honour shall be in the good man’s house; and many are the instances in which He has bestowed great wealth on such as were persons of great worth. We have one in Abraham; and in his history a remarkable proof of that grand man’s superiority to the love of money. Entitled by the laws of war to the whole spoil of battle, he might have swept all into his own hand — enriching himself like those who, taking advantage of the laws of commerce, make fortunes out of speculations that involve others in ruin. But he refuses the gains which law puts within his reach; and out of regard to the honour of his God, the wants and the welfare of his fellow creatures, he abandons his legal claims, and, declining to grow rich on other men’s losses, leaves the spoil to its proper owners — saying, “I will not take from a thread to a shoe latchet, lest thou shouldst say, I have made Abraham rich.” We have a second instance in David, who did not forget on the throne Him who had taken him from the sheepfold, nor, when riches increased, set his heart on them. David was dead and buried before the temple was begun. It rose from its foundations to look on his tomb; but the house that bore Solomon’s name was a monument of his father’s piety. It was built with David’s money; and unlike such as never part with theirs for the best objects till death parts them from it, this good king, grieved that Jehovah should dwell in curtains while he dwelt in a house of cedar, would, but that God forbade him, have raised it with his own hands — in the fruits of peace and spoils of war, lavishing his treasures on the house of God. We have a third instance in Job. No man of his day was so perfect, and few men of any day so rich. Some there are who resemble the pestilential swamp that, poisoning the air and spreading disease around it, retains in its spongy bosom all the bounties of the skies. Not so the man of Uz. He resembled rather what imparts blessings and beauty to a landscape — the lake that with flowery verdure on its winding shores, life in its waters, and heaven reflected on its unruffled bosom, discharges at its outlet the full flood of streams that enter it; making glens and plains to smile. Their recollections of prosperity abused must exasperate, rather than alleviate, the misfortunes of many; but Job draws a picture of his days of prosperity which we look on with admiration, and he, amid changed and adverse fortunes, must have looked on with comfort: — “When the ear heard me, then it blessed me; and when the eye saw me, it gave witness of me; because I delivered the poor that cried, and the fatherless, and him that had none to help him. The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me: and I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy.”

But though, as these cases prove, money may be found in the hand where the love of it is not eating, like a cancer, into the heart, there is danger of gold stealing our affections from God — as was strikingly put by Richard Cecil to one of his congregation. This person had suddenly and unexpectedly succeeded to an enormous fortune. Cecil met him sometime afterwards, and inquired anxiously about his welfare. The other having expressed surprise, Cecil said, “I heard that you had been in great danger.” “In great danger,” replied his friend; “I never was better in my life.” “Have not you succeeded to a large fortune?” said Cecil, adding, as the other nodded assent, “Well, sir, I consider any man in your circumstances to be in circumstances of very great danger,” — there sounded the echo of Agur’s words, “nor riches, lest I be full, and deny thee.” The larger and more sudden the accession of wealth, the greater the danger — it being with riches as with rain. When showers fall slow and soft, they penetrate the soil, and refresh the ground without disturbing it; but, falling in waterspouts, descending in a deluge from the loaded air, they fill the river to the brim, and, bursting its banks, carry havoc and destruction along their tumultuous course.

But there are no circumstances under which we do not need to be on our guard against wealth. Its attractions are great to all, and seem to exert over some a resistless power. See what sad illustrations this sinful and suffering world presents of these words: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” How are woman’s virtue, and man’s honesty, the liberties of the slave, the dignity of rank, the purity of justice, the sacredness of the pulpit, the claims of Christ’s cause and of humanity, the love of God and of man, all sucked in and swallowed up by this roaring, devouring whirlpool! No doubt, this is the basest of passions; and one with which, amid all the faults recorded against them in the Bible, the saints are almost never charged. Still let none feel secure. Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall, and his fate resemble that of the almost invulnerable Greek, who, fearing neither the thrust of lance nor crash of battleaxe, fell by a wound in his least mortal and meanest part. Achilles was slain by an arrow that hit him on the heel.

To the love of money we trace the melancholy apostasy of Demas, the awful perfidy of Judas, the fatal lie of Ananias and Sapphira — all, and some of them distinguished, professors of religion. Be on your guard. Watch and pray. Their history is written for our instruction. Nor need any of His people who allow the love of money to entwine itself around their hearts, expect that in saving them God will do otherwise than the woodman who, seeking to save a tree, applies his knife to the canker that eats into its heart, or the ivy that has climbed its trunk and is choking it in its close embraces. He is a jealous God.

He will not give His glory to another. While then we have, and shall have so long as we are here, in some form or other to do with money, let us beware of setting our affections on it. There are better riches — those that take not to themselves wings and flee away — those that neither moth nor rust corrupt, and thief breaks not through to steal. In these, the riches of redeeming grace, seek the things that are above; saying with Bunyan, in these rude but expressive lines,

“Our drossy dust we change for gold,

From death to life we flee,
We let go shadows, and lay hold
Of immortality.”

Another is our living, or rather dying, fellow-creatures.

The gospel does not forbid us to give them a place in our hearts who have one in our houses. On the contrary, it teaches us by the voice of Christ to love even our enemies. “Ye have heard that it hath been said,” says Jesus,” an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; but I say unto you, that

ye resist not evil; and whosoever shall smite thee

on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you; that ye may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and his rain to fall on the just and unjust.” And what is thus written with sunbeams, and sounds audibly in every falling shower, is, more affecting still, seen in the blood and heard in the groans of Calvary; all forgiveness extended, love-felt kindness shown to enemies, being but a faint echo of Christ’s answer to the blows that sent the nails through his quivering flesh, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do!” Well, it stands alike consonant to reason and religion, that if it is right to love our enemies, much more should we love our friends; still more our families. God is not a God of confusion, but of order; and the language of the Bible is always in perfect unison with the best feelings of nature.

Duty to Christ may require a man to leave father and mother, wife and children, and to act — to use our Lord’s strong figure — sometimes as if he hated them; but the gospel is not calculated, as it certainly was not intended, to cool, to freeze, to blight our natural affections; and, like the influences of winter on smiling, singing streams, to lock them in chains of ice. They were not saints, but sinners, of whom the apostle said, “They are without natural affection;” and elsewhere than in those streets where you see mothers buying drink to debauch themselves with the money that should feed and clothe the skeleton infants they carry in their arms, the ragged, shivering, hungry children at their side, — everywhere, indeed, sin is found blighting the affections that cling like sweet wallflower to the ruins of humanity. Religion makes better, but sin worse, husbands, wives, parents, children, brothers, sisters — producing such an effect on the heart as a cancer on the bosom it attacks. It hardens it; and next destroys what it has hardened; and at length turns an object of love and beauty into foul and hateful loathsomeness. But piety, ever favourable to humanity, intensifies, while it purifies, the best affections of our nature. And so, did I wish to illustrate, and by examples enforce, generous friendships and domestic love, I would seek them in the Bible — there where the old man clings to Benjamin, saying, with a voice choked by emotion, “Joseph is not, and Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin away;” or there where their brother, within whose bosom the tide of affection had been rising till his heart is ready to burst, no longer able to restrain his emotions, cries, “I am Joseph:” or there where David pours forth in tears and touching numbers his sorrow over the fate of Jonathan, or melts all who hear him as he goes up to his house, wringing his hands at the death of Absalom, and crying, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” The natural affections found then, as they find still, their most congenial soil in pure and pious hearts.

But while we are encouraged, rather than forbidden, to hold them dear who are near to us, we are not to allow them to usurp the place of Him who says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Beware of turning household delights into household deities, household goods into household gods. The danger against which we are to guard is not such attachment to loved ones as that, when death lops off a branch, the poor tree, shaken by the blow, is left wounded and bleeding; but such as makes gods of them, and murmuring, not merely mourning, at their loss, feels as if with them all joy, and peace, and hope, and life were for ever buried. Pliny the younger tells us that when the eruption of Vesuvius, which buried Pompeii, had covered with a pall of blackness the whole heavens, and the earth, rocking beneath successive and tremendous earthquakes, had no other light at broad noonday than the blaze of the burning mountain and broad flashes of lightning that occasionally penetrated but added to the effect of the gloom, — Pliny the younger tells us that people thought not only that nature was dissolving, but that the very gods were dying. And if a god had died, the terror and grief could hardly have exceeded that I once saw in the case of a mother who had set her affections too exclusively on the child we had met to carry to the grave. Seated at the head of the coffin, she seemed a statue; the grand work of some master hand, to represent the deepest, blackest grief. No tears were on her bloodless cheek. Fixed on the coffin, her eyes never left it. She neither moved nor spake, as on her face one could read these words, “My heart is withered like grass,” Absorbed in sorrow, it mattered as little to her as to the dead who went out, or who came in. At length the moment came to remove the body. Then, as when the heavens that have been gathering blackness break out into a blaze of flame and roar of thunder, burst the storm. The form that had looked more like lifeless marble than one animate with life, now sprung up, threw itself on the coffin, clung to it with wails to pierce a heart of stone; and, when gentle force was employed to unloose her arms, she walked to the door — patting the poor coffin; and saw it borne out of her sight with an expression of agony, which, as she fell back fainting into the arms of kind neighbours, seemed to cry, Ye have taken away my god, and what have I more!

It is not so we are to love our loved ones. We are to love our children, for instance, as they are to obey their parents, “in the Lord;” never forgetting that He who lends may resume His gifts whensoever it pleases Him; never forgetting that the fairest flowers of the family may soon wither and die; ever striving as we keep our children in their own place in the house, nor allow them to usurp ours, to keep them in their own place in our hearts, nor allow them to usurp God’s: ever seeking in our nurseries to rear plants for heaven, and so train up our children in the faith, in the saving knowledge of Christ and the devout love of God, that we shall have the consolation of knowing, if death enters our house and plucks them from our arms, that our loss is their gain; that if a chair in the circle by our fireside is empty, a blood-bought throne is filled in heaven; that if there is one voice less in the psalm when we are assembled for worship, there is one more ringing sweet and clear in glory, praising Him through whose dying love and in whose blissful presence we shall join our lost and loved — to weep and to part no more.

To live thus, walking by faith and not by sight, touching the impalpable, seeing the invisible, living for eternity in time, and for heaven on earth, with our affections not where we are but where we hope to be — where Jesus is, is no easy work. But prayer, drawing down strength from the skies, makes difficult things easy, and impossible things possible. Through Christ strengthening me, said the apostle, I can do all things. So may we. Turn to that source of superhuman power. Trust to it; nor doubt but that, as those risen with Christ, you shall walk with Him, living realisations of this old, quaint, but beautiful picture: —

“Man of lofty nature looks up To heaven so calm, and pure, and beautiful. He looks below, but not contemptuously: For there he sees reflections of himself As a poor child of nature: and he feels A touch of kindred brotherhood: and pants To lead the weak and erring into heights Which he so joyous treads; nay, more, descends Into the smoky turmoil and the roar Of the rude world: his hands at work on earth, His soul beyond the clouds, dwelling with God, And drinking of His Spirit.”