The Soul's Refuge in God

“Thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy presence from the pride of man. Thou shalt keep them secretly in a pavilion from the strife of tongues.” — PSALM xxxi. 20.

TPESE are great words surely. They are an expression of David’s confidence in God’s power and will to hide His people in HimSeif; They are a promise of per feet security in God for the man who fears and trusts in Him. He is to be hid from “the pride of men,” and from “the strife of tongues.” I suppose that by these phrases we may understand the whole of that cruel and disturbing interference of one man’s life with another’s, which may take such an endless variety of forms. As it troubled David, it took the form of violent opposition, of malignant persecution; but it would limit our Bible far too much, if we thought that that was the only form of man’s inhumanity to man from which it was promised that man might find refuge in his God. “From the pride of man,” David says. Whenever the arrogance and selfishness of one man crowds and tramples upon the rights or the growth of another; whenever one man’s despotic nature overrides the people about him and seems to leave them no chance, the crowded and wronged nature may flee to God and find a refuge there. And “the strife (f tongues” — whenever the mere turmoil and confusion of the world become intolerable; whenever a man’s own personal life and conscience are being swamped and lost in the ocean of debate and quarrel, for him, too, the life of God is open, and he may go and hide himself there and be safe from it all. It is a great promise, for as we go on in life are we not often conscious that instead of getting the best out of our fellow-men we are really getting the worst? Instead of the continual activity of their life around us feeding our life and nourishing it with its own vitality, this tumult of living, this strife of tongues, is always drowning and deadening and dissipating our personal faith and character and peace. Again I say, the form of the intrusion, the invasion of our lives, differs continually. We need not wait till some Saul is hunting us up and down the land before we take the Psalm of David to ourselves. To him it represented daily perplexity and fear. He was always insulted and in danger. He was always watching from the hill-tops to see whether his enemy was in sight. He was always listening to hear the voices of his enemies borne on the wind, and running like a frightened deer to hide himself in some dark ravine. We know nothing of all that. Our life is peaceable enough; but yet everywhere there is the arrogant presence of the pride of man, and the disturbing tumult of the strife of tongues. The abuse and fault finding and frivolousness, the foolish quarrellings, this everlasting touching of one life upon another, this putting up of artificial standards and then watching to see how everybody meets them, this continual criticising and keeping account of another’s conduct, all this waste of force and time that comes of the perfectly unmeaning strifes of social ambition, of business rivalry, of foolish sensitiveness, into which we throw all our soul, and which is always tossing about in distress, and trying to drown the soul that we throw into it, — from these we need a refuge as strong as David needed from his enemies. Who of us can look back over his life and not feel that in some form or other these words, “the pride of man and the strife of tongues,” describe forces which have been disturbing and hindering the peace and growth of his own character and life? Of how much of our best society they seem to be the exact description; of how many heartless houses filled with a poor pretence of social life, David’s words tell the whole story. “The pride of man and the strife of tongues,” the lack of humility, the lack of love, the lack/of peace! To live in such a world, and yet to keep a soul in us at all, is very hard. We must have something under and beyond

such a world to flee to to renew our life, to really recreate ourselves. That security and recreation of our life cannot come except in the source from which our life first came. We must go back to God. Let us speak to-day of this resort of the human soul to God when it feels its danger of be ing swamped and lost in the tumult of the world and the strife of tongues. The secrecy and safety of the life of the believer who is kept in God.

But first, before we speak of the refuge which God offers, let us see what man tries to do for himself. There are two different attitudes which almost all men take towards this tendency of the life about us to swallow up and drown our personality. It is strange to see how, long before they come to middle age, almost all men, except the lowest and the highest, all men of strong character who have not reached some religious conception of their true relations to the world, have either become defiant of the world, setting themselves in obtrusive independence against its claims, or else have tried in some way to withdraw themselves from it and let the world go its way, determined that they will not be sacrificed to its importunate demand. Surely we know both kinds of men. One man, seeing how the conventionalities of society and the tumult of the world are always trying to break him down, to compel him to fall into the mill of its routine, and to crush his personal character between its wheels, rebels, defies the world, becomes some kind of social outlaw, and does outrageous things to show that he will not be crushed, that he keeps, and means to keep, his independence and originality unbroken. Another man, equally weary and impatient with the world’s endeavors to absorb him, draws himself back, shuts himself in, attempts some of those forms of hermit life which our civilization still leaves possible, and affects to give up all relations to a world whose life seems to him all emptiness and noise. We have all seen both kinds of men. Nay, who of us has not felt in himself the temptation to do both these things at different moments of his life. The impulse to be defiant and the impulse to withdraw our selves, both come to us in different moods. We will dare the world to its face and tell it to do its worst, for we are not afraid of it with all its wretched prescriptions, and false standards, and endless clatter of gossiping criticism. That is one spirit. We will let the world go its way, and we will go ours. We will live a life of our own out side of the quari-els and contentions of men. That is the other spirit. We know them both, and we know that both are bad. We know that the first makes a man hard and brutal, and the second makes a man sefish and self-conceited. We know good human material that has been ruined in each of these two ways, and so we want to beg any young man who seems to be getting into the power of either spirit, to stop and see if there is not something better than either, some nobler refuge than himself from “the pride of man and the strife of tongues.”

It is good to see how God comes and offers Himself, just here, to the human soul. We do not see yet how lie can help us, but instinctively we are sure that if He really is God, He must Lave some help to give us here. He says, “In the secret of my Presence I will hide you.” Have you not seen often how jealous a father can be of the privileges of his o w»“Tove? Would not any of you be angry if a child of yours went about asking other people for the bread which it was your place to provide for him, begging at other men’s doors when your table was spread with his dinner? That is just the feeling with which, all through the Bible, God is always chiding men for going to others to ask, or for seeking in themselves that refuge and peace which it is the prerogative of His Fatherhood to bestow. It is one of the most touching presentations of the Deity. It is the one which Christ, the God incarnate, made most manifest. “How can you, my children, be in trouble and want,” He says, “and not first of all, instantly, turn to your Father?” “Ye will not come to me that ye might have life.” It appeals to us very closely when we learn that God is even more jealous of His love than of His honor.

Christianity is the bringing of God to man, and of man to God. We shall go on then, after these general suggestions, to see how it is that in Christianity the refuge of God is thrown wide open to men who are tired with, and who feel the danger of the world. Thousands of Christians have found the refuge who never asked the question, who simply were drawn into the open door by irresistible attraction; but if we can see how it is that Christianity gives us what we want it will make it more real, and so more useful to us. I think there is a three fold answer to our question. I think that the release and refuge of Christianity consists in the way it brings the soul first into communion with God, second into consciousness of itself, and third into a just value of the world. Let us look at each of these.

1. We will try first to understand how the soul finds refuge in communion with God. Of all the deep phrases in the Bible, where can we find one deeper or more beautiful than this of David in my text, “Thou wilt keep him in the secret of thy presence.” The very words are full of peace before we hardly touch them to open their meaning. But their meaning is deeper the more we study it. They mean that when a man is spiritually conscious of the presence of God it secludes and separates him from every other presence. Can we understand that? You go into a room full of people, and the tumult of tongues is all about you. You are bewildered and distracted. In the ordinary language of society, which sometimes hits the truth of its own condition rightly, you “feel lost.” You lose yourself in the presence of so many people. They all seem to take hold of you, and claim some part of you, whether they speak to you or not. You are lost in the crowd. You are merely part of the tumult. But by and by you meet your best friend there; somebody whose life is your life; somebody whom you sincerely love and trust; somebody who thoroughly satisfies you, and, by the contact of his nature, makes your taste and brain and heart and conscience work at their very best. As you draw near to him it seems as if you drew away from all the other people. As he takes hold of you, he seems to claim you and they let you go. The worry and vexation of the crowd sink away as he begins to talk with you, and you understand one another. By and by you have forgotten that all those other men are talking around you. You have escaped from the strife of tongues. You are absorbed in him. He has hid you in the secret of his presence. Suppose that St. Johjn should come and talk with you, or be at your side without a word in the midst of the wildest of our social Babels. Would he not bring his peace with him? Would you not let every one else go, and be alone with him, even in all the crowd? Would he not hide you in the secret of his presence? And now if it is possible, instead of your best friend, instead of the great disciple, for God Himself to be with you, so that His presence is real, so that He lets you understand His thoughts and lets you know that He understands yours, so that there is a true sympathy between you and Him, if mere vision and hearing are not necessary to the Diyine company, and as close to you — nay, infinitely closer — than the men who crowd you round, and whose voices are in your ears, the unseen God is truly with you, what then? Can any tumult of those men distress you? Can their unfairness anger you? You hear them blaming you; you hear them praising you. Does either make a tumult in your soul? They ask you flippant questions; they give you flippant advice. Does either distress you? You are with them, and yet you are alone with Him. They parade their foolish vanities before you, and you hardly see them. It is as if a bright fly fluttered its impertinent finery between you and the west, when you were looking at a gorgeous sunset. He has blinded you to all besides Himself. He has “hid you in the secret of His. presence from the pride of men.”

This gives the very simplest notion of the meaning. Now we suppose that this becomes habitual, the constant temper and condition of a life. We suppose this friendly meeting with one who interests you thoroughly to pass into a friendship, pure, continual, devoted. If not in bodily presence, still in thought and sympathy, our friend is always with us. We always judge ourselves by his standard. We think what he would like or what he would condemn; we appeal even in his absence to his approbation. Is not the protection which we saw given to a man by his friend’s company for an hour while they talked together, extended now over all his life. He has always a refuge from the cavils and fault-findings, the ridicule and misunderstanding of his fellows. There is one who understands him and who does not laugh at him. There is one whom if he pleases and satisfies, the rest may go their way. Across his life now may blow the most cruel winds of slander and they cannot touch him. His friend has hid him in the secret of his unseen presence, and there he grows up into fearlessness and conscientiousness and peace. This is the separating and liberating power of a truly great friendship. Happy is the young man to whom it is given early in life! happy because of the safety and growth which it brings to him, happy because of the manifold petty slaveries from which it frees him. The most perfect picture of such a hiding of one being in the presence of another is in the serenity of a child’s life, held and comprehended, as it were, in the father’s. How fearless a child is. How he goes among men looking them bravely in the face as if they could not harm him, so easily superior to the anxieties which are fretting away their lives. It is because his life rests so completely on his father’s life that he is able to be so supremely independent of other people. The orphan child is timid and distrustful and servile. He has no anchor, and so every wave is a thing to fear and he runs before it. His poor little unprotected life is exposed without the blessed hiding of the secret of that presence which God mercifully closes around almost every life that it may grow its earliest growth in peace.

Do not these illustrations, then, at least suggest, — for it is almost impossible to tell many of the highest things except by mere suggestion, — do they not suggest how that which we saw occasional in the Christian’s life may there, too, become constant, and a man live in such continual consciousness of God, such a constant desire to please Him, such a constant study of what will please Him: in a word, how a man may live so continually in God’s presence that the presences of other men may be shut out, their vexing voices may not vex him? right in the midst of all the strife of voices there may be perfect peace with him. There is something very striking in seeing how this same feeling has attached to the event of these Christmas Days, the coming of God into the world’s life when Christ was born. What is the whole idea of peace that is so clearly associated with that event from the time that the angels sang of it to the shepherds? Is rt not this same thought of the absorption of all the world in its present God? Is it not the promise that when that presence shall be perfectly, spiritually, realized, men shall be so taken up in serving Him that they shall have no time or wish to fight with one another? and in the farthest distance we can see no other hope of universal peace but that. This is the spiritual truth which lay at the bottom of that old idea, which is not wanting either in historical truth, the idea that at the time of the nativity there was a wonderfully wide-spread peace throughout the world, and that the Temple of War was shut. This is what Milton sings so splendidly: —

“No war or battle’s sound

Was heard the world around,
The idle spear iind shield were high up hung;
The hooke’d chariot stood
Unstained with hostile blood,
The trumpet spake not to the armcM throng,

And kings sate still with awful eye As if they surely knew their sovereign Lord was nigh.”

It was the typical and prophetic keeping of the world secretly in God’s pavilion from the strife of tongues.

When we seek for individual illustrations of what we are describing, I think we understand it perfectly by looking at our Lord’s apostles. Those men who left their boats to follow Him must have heard many an angry and scornful word in their old haunts, along the streets of Bethsaida, and among the boatmen on the Lake, many a flippant discussion of their Master’s character, many a contemptuous comment on their own delusion. Can you conceive of their minding it as they walked with Jesus? He hid them from it in the secret of His presence. Not merely at the last when He came in upon them where the door was shut, and held out’His scarred hands in benediction. Not only then, but during all His life with them, He really had been saying, “My peace I give unto you.” We cannot picture to ourselves those first disciples living in Christ’s presence and yet forever vexed and worried at the foolish things men said about Him. But with us modern disciples how different it is. We too believe in Jesus and try to live with Him. How is it that a flippant toss of skeptical smartness about Him, or a sneer at our folly in making Him our Master, lays hold of and stings us so, sends us home anxious, puzzled, and worried? We are not wholly hidden from the strife of tongues. It must be that we are not completely in the secret of His presence. We are not there constantly enough. There are moments, times when we are praying, times when in sorrow His sympathy is like life to us, when there is not the tongue so rude and bitter that it could ruffle the rest of our souls in Him; times when nothing that man could say would frighten or depress us. At such times we learn what it is to be thoroughly with Him, and understand what a guarded and safe life it must be to be hidden there always. Such times are like the Transfiguration, and we feel as Simon Peter felt.

2. This, then, is the directest meaning of our text. We have all sometimes felt, I think, a sense of safety and seclusion, as if a great thick door shut between us and the ordinary frets and misunderstandings of our life, when we appealed to the secret knowledge of one an other that lay between our soul and God’s in those great words of our Communion Collect: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” We have felt, when we said those words, as Noah must have felt when, in the phrase of Genesis, God “shut him in” to the Ark, and he heard the deluge roaring outside and was safe. This is what I wanted especially to speak of, but I mentioned two other elements in the work which Christianity does to secure the safety of the soul from the pride of man and the strife of tongues, besides this great work of making God more real, more really present to it. One of these was the work of a true Christian faith in developing and strengthening individuality in each of us. The reason why the talk of people about us, their pride and arrogance, their intrusion upon our life hurts us so, gives us so much pain, and does us so much harm, is the weakness of our own sense of personality. We go about exposed like those unhappy creatures that have no shell, and are soft and open to wounds on every side. Take your ordinary man to whom no clear idea of himself has ever dawned, no notion of something specific that he is to do, something clear and peculiar that he is to be, and is not that poor creature, the sort of man whom you see by the hundred all around us, too plentiful for us to think how pitiable they really are, — is not he just the man to be the victim of the strife of tongues? With no strong personal convictions he is always listening anxiously to hear what the crowd says is right, or what society says is manly. He is forever trying to make out in the hubbub of voices who it is that the majority are cheering for. If he hears any of the great voices find fault with what he has done, it stabs him like a dagger. If he hears somebody idly laugh at what he calls his creed it throws him off his unstable standing ground and he is floundering in skepticism. His weak jelly-like life is torn by everything it touches as it drifts. Now the first thing that a Christian faith does for such a man is to emphasize his individuality. I mean, of course, a real true Christian faith and not the conventional counterfeits of Christianity, which often deaden instead of quickening the sense of personality. A true Christian faith starts with the truth of a personal redemption and leads the man up to personal duties. It takes this poor indistinguishable atom and says to him: “God knows you. To Him you are not only one of the race; He knows you separately; He made you separately. His Son died for you, and there is in you that which, in some Tray which belongs to you alone, can glorify Him. What are you doing in this feeble unconscientious life? Have you never heard of such a thing as responsibility? Get up; repent. Come to God. Get the pattern of your life from Him, and then go about your work and be yourself.” If the man is really a Christian he hears that summons, and it is the birth of a true personality, of the real sense of himself in him. It is a revelation. Behind him opens the long vista of God’s care, back to the eternity in which God bore in His infinite knowledge the thought of such a life as his. Before him opens the destiny of a soul for which all through eternity its own character must freely decree its life. And then both past and future pour down their light on the present, and he sees what there is for him to be doing right here and now; and when he takes up his work and does it, he can no

more be frightened out of it than the man to whom Jesus had given his bed to carry from Bethesda up the street to his own house could have been scared by all the curious gaping of the crowd, and driven back to the dreary place under the porches where lie had lain for thirty-eight long years. This is the way in which men come to do their own works. This is the way in which men come to take up unpopular tasks and do things which everybody about them misunderstands and depi*eciates, with a perfectly undisturbed complacency and quiet. There are duties lying around us undone now, — things which men call quixotic and laugh if anybody suggests that they may be done some day; but as sure as it is desirable that the thing should be done, some day a man will come to do it, a man who will say with Jesus,” For this cause was I born and for this

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cause came I into the world;” and that assurance will make it very easy for him to disregard the ridicule and j’tolid criticism that is sure to greet him when he comes and undertakes his task. It will be as if there had been dug up in some old land a broken arm of marble which would fit nothing and lay about neglected and despised; but some day or other men digging a little deeper found the statue that the arm belonged to, and immediately the statue claimed it, and it became intelligible and beautiful when it was set in its true place.

3. The third element of the freedom which Christianity gave to its servants was in the value that it taught them to place upon the talk of the world, upon what David culls the “strife of tongues.” I have already suggested this, but it has one or two other points of view which seem to me helpful. I think one of the strangest things to a man who has really come to a knowledge and service of the Saviour is to look back to his own old life, and see how superficial it appears. He used to be forever passing off-hand opinions about what people all around him did, and used to expect, in his easy way, that those opinions of his would really have some weight with the men upon whose conduct he made his comments. Now he sees how superficial all those judgments were. Now he sees how utterly destitute he was of any of that serious sympathy which is the only thing that can really justify us in forming judgments about one another, or giving one another advice. Nay, he sees more than this: he sees that he really cared very little when he pronounced those opinions in such judicial style, and that the most profoundly foolish thing that any neighbor of his, who had really considered thoughtfully a plan of action, could have done would have been to put his well-considered plan aside because of such cheap and thoughtless criticism as he poured out upon it. Now it seems to me that this sight of the superficialness of our own judgments of others, the way in which we have often pronounced solemn-sounding verdicts which really meant nothing, and uttered cheap ridicule which we should have despised the man if he had minded, gives us very often a startling sense of what a superficial thing this criticism is that comes to us from our brethren of which we make so much and to which we are always trimming our action. I am just going to do something which I have clearly made up my mind to do, and some friend passing by catches sight of me, standing with the tools all in my hands, and on a mere momentary impulse he cries out, “What a fool you are to do that!” and so passes on, and has forgotten me and my plan in a moment. And yet it is just that sort of taunt, or the fear of it, which has blighted many a sweet and healthful impulse in the bud. I have only to think how often I have said such things, and meant nothing by them. I have only to remember how often I have seemed to think that my friend’s doing a certain thing was the most ridiculous action in all the world, when really I was speaking only from the instant’s whim, and cared very little whether he did it or not, to understand that this man’s sneer means probably no more than mine meant; that he does not really care, and would, no doubt, be much surprised if he should know that his small jeer had turned me from my purpose. It is good for us often to know how superficial, how lightly made, how soon forgotten are the judgments of our brethren which sound so solemn, and which tyrannize over us so. Such a feeling sets us free, and makes us independent. Be sure that you may feel that about any cruel criticism that is ham pering you, and may cast it aside and forget it and go your way. The man who made it has probably forgotten it long ago.

There is one other thing more helpful than this, and that is the way in which Christianity, by putting us into true relations to our fellow-men, saves us from falling into false relations to them. This seems to me to be the principle on which Christianity works for the redemption of society. If I wanted to save a young man from being a mere slave of other people’s opinions, trying to win their applause, trying to escape their censure, I should be sure of succeeding if I could make him really go to work for those people’s benefit, really desire to do them good, and really desire to avert harm from them. There is no escape from the slavery of other men like that which comes of the intelligent and earnest service of other men.

Jesus said, “Call no man your master,” and yet he said, “Let him that is chief among you be your servant.” And, think of it! Who is the man that you have known who most completely served the community he lived in? Kemember the man who in the magistrate’s chair, or in the teacher’s desk, in the council room, or in the court room, or in the church, labored most earnestly for the people’s good. Was not he the very man who was most independent of the people’s whims? Was he not the last man to be softened by their applause, or vexed or frightened by their anger? Think of Paul. Did not his very toil for men’s salvation lift him above, and make him indifferent to men’s easy praise or blame? And I am sure of this, that any man of you who finds in himself an over-sensitiveness to what people say of him will find no escape from such a painful life so perfect as in setting himself busily to work to help those very people’s best good in what way he can. The study of their wants will make him care less of their judgments. A healthy interest in them will crowd out the morbid interest which is always ser vilely hanging on their opinions and afraid of their sneers. Between the man who is afraid to go his own simple way, for fear that his brother will laugh at him, and that same man nobly resolving with Paul, that if meat cause his brother to offend he will eat no meat while the world stands, what a vast difference! What slavery in the one condition! What true servantship and freedom in the other! And if a true faith in Christ does indeed take all men up into His humanity, and, because we are His servants, make us the servants also, the willing servants, of all men, as His brethren, and for His sake; if when I am really Christ’s, the man by my side whom I have feared and flattered becomes changed into a brother of my Lord for whom. I am to work as if I worked for Him, then does not Christianity save a man from the low servitude by introducing him into the higher service? Entering into Christ, I find there my brethren as His brethren; and while I devote myself to them as earnestly as I can, I cease to care for their idle criticisms and foolish quai’rels. Once more He has hid me in His pavilion from the strife of tongues. And yet you see how very far this picture of Christian security is from easy self-indulgence and idle rest. It is all alive with work, only it is a work that is full of peace.

These are the elements, then, of the Christian’s security. These are what Christ’s religion does for us all to lift us up above and separate us from the pride of men and the strife of tongues. It does not take us away out of the world, but right here in the world it surrounds us with God’s presence, it brings out our own personality, and it teaches us the value of the things we used to fear, so that we can despise them. Again I turn — as I have turned so often in describing any aspect or power of the Christian life — to see a perfect manifestation in the perfect Christian life of Christ. As we look over His career, how can we describe its serenity and composure except in these words: “God hid Him in the secret of His presence from the pride of man, and kept Him secretly in a pavilion from the strife of tongues.” How the strife of tongues /aged about Him all his life! From the time when Herod and the scribes debated where He was to be born, that they might murder Him, down to the day when the people cried, “Crucify Him,” and mocked Him as He hung upon the cross; in the days when the crowded synagogue at Nazareth rose up and clamored for His blood; in the day when the Pharisees gathered around Him in the temple and poured their subtle questions fast upon Him to try to drive Him to a foolish word; in the day when the disciples came to a quarrel in His very sight about their poor ambition to be greatest: in these, and countless days like them, He lived right in the midst of the strife of tongues. But, close to His Father always, clear in His own duty always, and always trying to help men so earnestly that He was not capable of being provoked by them, He was completely apart from all the strife, He was hid in the secret of His Father’s presence. We cannot but be struck with awe when we think what that phrase, whoso beauty and significance we have partly understood as it applied to us, must have meant to Jesus. Our closest communion with God is so distant compared with the perfect oneness between Him and His Father. We run into the shelter of the divine life, just creep across the threshold where no trouble can pursue, and stand thankful and trembling there. We hide ourself behind the robes of the Eternal Mercy, and thence look out in an assurance, that is fearful still, upon the danger which cannot touch us there. But He, from the very heart of the Eternal Being, looks out on sin and sees its weakness, looks out on goodness and sees its strength. We cannot know His peace. It must have been so absolute. There must have been such a pity in His heart when they tormented Him, when they tied Him to a column and scourged Him, when they nailed Him to the cross at last, and all the while were looking to see Him give way and tremble, and all the while the soul which they thought they were reaching and torturing was far off, beyond their reach, hid in the secret of God’s presence, hid in God. It was as if men flung water at the stars and tried to put them out, and the stars shone on calmly and safely and took no notice of their persecutors, except to give them light.

And this brings up to us that verse of Paul’s, which is the very verse we need to close with. He talks of the life that men might live, that some men do live, and he says, “Your life is hid with Christ in God.” If we are really Christ’s, then back into the very bosom of His Fa ther where Christ is hid, there He will carry us. We too shall look out and be as calm and as independent as He is. The needs of men shall touch us just as keenly as they touch Him, but the sneers and strifes of men shall pass us by as they pass by Him and leave no mark on His unruffled life. It will be just as impossible, when that time conies, for us to work ourself into a passion about yesterday’s gossip, as it was for Jesus to become a partisan in the quarrel about the undivided inheritance. And yet for us, just as for Him, this will not mean a cold and selfish separation from our brethren. We shall be infinitely closer to their real life when we separate ourself from their outside strifes and superficial pride, and know and love them truly by knowing and loving them in God.

This is the power and progress of true Christianity. It leads us into, it abounds in peace. It is a brave, vigorous peace, full of life, full of interest and work. It is a peace that means thoroughness, that refuses to waste its force and time in little superficial tumults which come to nothing, while there is so much real work to be done, so much real help to be given, and such a real life to be lived with God. That peace, His peace, may Jesus give

to us all.