The Young and Old Christian

“The good will of Him that dwelt in the bush.” — DBUT. xxxm. 16.

MOSES had been young and now was old. These words are taken from his benediction, which he pronounced upon the children of Israel as he stood with them on the borders of the promised land. There is something very touching in the reminiscence. The long journey through the desert is over. He has done God’s work nobly and successfully. Well may he be proud of this people that he has led up to the threshold of their inheritance. But now his mind is running backward. This crowning of his mission with clear success reminds him of the time when his mission started out in mystery and weakness. He sees again a bush which he once saw by a wayside. He is a young man again, a shepherd keeping his father-in-law’s flock on the back side of the desert, by Mount Horeb. He sees once more the bush on fire. He draws near again with unshod feet, and once more in his aged ears he hears the voice out of the bush commissioning him for the great work of his life. With that impulse which I suppose we all have felt, that brings up at the close of any work the freshened memory of its beginning, this old man sees the burning bush again as he saw it years before, only with deeper understanding of its meaning, and a completer sense of the love of God which it involved. He looks into the past, and all the mercy that had come in between, — all the miraculous food, and the wonderful victories, and the parted waters, and the constant guidance, — he sees now were all certainly involved in that first summons of God which he had once obeyed so blindly; and when he wants to give his people the benediction that represents to him the most complete and comprehensive love, it is touching to hear the old man go back and invoke “The good will of Him that dwelt in the bush.”

Religion delights both in reminiscence and in anticipation. Being full of the sense of God, it finds a unity in life which no atheistic thought can discover. The identity of God’s eternal being stretches under, and gives consistence to, our fragmentary lives. God’s eternity makes our time coherent. And so it was God in the old bush that made it still visible to Moses across the eventful interval. He saw that bush when all the other bushes of Egypt had faded out of sight, because that bush was on fire with God. And as Christianity is the most vivid of all religions, with its personally manifested God, there is a more per feet unity in a Christian life than in any other. It keeps all its parts, and from its consummations looks back with gratitude and love to its beginnings. The crown that it casts before the throne at last is the same that it felt trembling on its brow in the first ecstatic sense of Christ’s forgiveness, and that has been steadily glowing into greater clearness as perfecting love has more and more completely cast out fear. The feet that go up to God into the mountain, at the end, are the same that first put off their shoes beside the burning bush. This is why the Christian, more than other men, not merely dares but loves to look back and remember.

But I wish to-day to call up this picture of Moses only in order to suggest a certain topic. We have the beginning and the ripening of an experience brought close together. Let us think of the young Christian and the old Christian: the same man in his first apprehension, and in his ripened knowledge, of Christ. What is the difference between the two? What is the growth which brings one into the other? Everybody claims that the Christian experience ripens and deepens. What is there riper and deeper in the full existence that there was not in the incipient life? This is the question which I want to study; or, in other words, we may call our subject, — The nature and method of the growth of Christian character. I know that every Christian, old or young, will welcome such a study if it can unfold to us any of the rich and mysterious laws of the spiritual life.

One general and obvious law of all true growth suggests itself at once, which we will just point out before we go on to particulars. It is that every healthy growth creates the conditions of new growth, makes new growth possible. The illustrations are numberless everywhere. Every ray of sunlight that gives some ripeness to an apple makes the apple opener to more sunlight, which shall ripen it still more. Or, think of a nation; every advance in liberty makes new advances not merely possible but necessary. Or, think of man; the powers which develop either the physical or the mental nature from fifteen years old to twenty open the mind and body to new influences which are to feed it from twenty to twenty-five. Every summer is also a spring-time. Indeed we may make this a test of growth. Every ray of sun which does not open the ground to new sunlight, is not feeding it but baking it. This is the true test of growing force. It opens the beautiful reactions between itself and the growing thing, and creates an openness for yet more of itself.

Now see how this is the method of all Christian growth. A child becomes a Christian. He learns, that is, to understand and claim the love of Christ. u I know that Christ loves me, and wants to train me,” the glad young heart says. That consciousness makes the child’s soul purer and more Christlike. Into that soul, become more Christly, a yet deeper sense of the love of Christ can enter to work a yet greater change. Then, to this still renewed soul, opens some newer vision of what Christ can do. This new work done unfolds some new capacity of loving and receiving love. And so, in this continual reaction between Christ and the soul, — every new openness fed with a new love that opens it still more, — the life-long, the eternal work goes on. Heaven will be only the fuller, prompter, more unhindered pulsing back and forth, between Christ and the soul, of this sublime and sweet reaction. This was the foundation of the certainty which Paul felt for his Philippians when he told them that he was “confident of this very thing, that He who had begun a good work in them would perform it unto the day of Jesus Christ.” He foresaw for them what he had felt in himself, — that love would mean receptivity, that every new love would bring a fuller knowledge, and every knowledge lay the soul open to a completer love.

But, just suggesting this, let us go on and try to particularize some of the sorts of difference between the young and the maturer Christian, and so see what sorts of growth this law of growth, which we have pointed out, will produce.

And, for one thing, I should say that as every Christian becomes more and more a Christian, there must be a larger and larger absorption of truth or doctrine into life. We hear all around us now-a-days a great impatience with the prominence of dogma — that is, of truth abstractly and definitely stated — in Christianity. And most of those who are thus impatient really mean well. They feel that Christianity, being a thing of personal salvation, ought to show itself in characters and lives. There they are right. But to decry dogma in the interest of character, is like despising food as if it interfered with health. Food is not health. The human body is built just so as to turn food into health and strength. And truth is not holiness. The human soul is made to turn, by the subtle chemistry of its digestive experience, truth into goodness. And this, I think, is just what the Christian, as he goes on, finds himself doing under God’s grace. Before the young Christian lie the doctrines of his faith, — God’s being, God’s care, Christ’s incarnation, Christ’s atonement, immortality. What has the old Christian, with his long experience, done with them? He holds them no longer crudely, as things to be believed merely. He has taken them home into his nature. He has transmuted them into forms of life. God’s being appears now filling his life with reverence. God’s care clothes every act and thought of his with gratitude. Christ’s incarnation is the inspiration of his new, dear love of all humanity. The atonement is the power of his all-pervading and deep-rooted faith. And immortality! He no longer thinks of that as a doctrine, which has become a great, constant flood of life, ever resting over and illuminating the far-off hill-tops — now grown so near, so real — of the eternal life. The young dogmatist boasts of his dogmas. The old saint lives his life. Both are natural in their places and times, as are the unripe and the ripened fruit. How soon you can tell the men whose soils have tugged at the roots of their doctrines and taken them in, and left them no longer lying on the surface, but made them germinate into life.

And in the second place, as a consequence of this feature of growth, there will come a growing variety in Christian character as Christians grow older. I think we should expect a uniformity and resemblance in younger Christians, and a diversity in older ones, because life is more various than doctrine. Each young Christian has his doctrine, crude and dogmatic still. The maturer Christians have not merely worked those doctrines into life, but each has worked them into his own sort of life. The truth is the same for all; the life it makes is infinite. The more deeply it has been digested, the more strongly the individuality comes out. The truth which God gives us is like the wheat that a bounteous country sends into the city. It is all the same wheat; but men go and buy it and eat it, and this same identical wheat is turned into different sorts of force in different men. It is turned into bartering force in one, and thinking force in another, and singing force in another, and governing force in another. It is made manifold as soon as it passes into men. So I think every minister finds that, as his disciples grow older, if he has really succeeded in getting the truth to be their truth, they grow into more various forms of Christian charity and usefulness. Each grows more evidently to be not merely a Christian, but the Christian that God intended him to be. They think more. They think differently. The pure white light breaks itself to each in different colors. Often the minister is alarmed. His confirmation classes, which took the truths he taught them out of the Bible all alike, and went out all to the same work, — see how they have scattered; see how different they are! What does it mean? Merely this: it is doctrine passing, growing, into life. Those twelve disciples must have seemed very much like one another, as they all followed Jesus on the road, or sat around Him in the temple, drinking in His words. But see, after His words had become their life, how clear, distinct, and individual they are — John, Peter, James, Matthew. The seed looks the same; the flowers are so different. Let us rejoice in the clear individuality of maturing Christian life. Its one principle is still identical; and so it already prophesies heaven, where we are sure we shall be all different illustrations of the one same grace, showing different characters, set to different works but all moved by one spirit, all illustrations of the one same grace still.

And as individuality is developed with the deepening spiritual life, so I am sure that the willingness to recognize and welcome individual differences of thought and feeling and action increases, too, as Christians grow riper. Seeing ourselves made more ourselves as our faith grows richer, we are glad to see other men made more themselves too. This is true charity. It is your undeveloped, crude, commonplace Christian who is uncharitable. He expects other Christians to be like himself. He has never felt that divine, deep movement of Christ in his own soul, telling him that from all eternity there has been one certain place for him to fill, one certain thing for him to be, and summoning him to come and fill his place and be himself; and so when some brother rises out of the crowd of un distinguishable believers, and goes out to stand upon his outpost, this other soul rebukes him, calls him arrogant, radical, wise beyond what is written, and foolish names like those. I can well understand that the seeds in a sower’s basket might be very uncharitable to one brother-seed that had dropped out of the basket and taken root and grown to be a stalk of corn. It is too unlike them. It is too original and singular. But let them all fall together and take root, and then, with life in all of them, they will not compare their ears and tassels, each being so busy in growing to the best that its separate bit of earth can bring it to. The true Christian charity is that which life teaches. It is the tried and cultured souls that understand each other’s trials and cultures, though they be wholly different from their own. And no sight is more beautiful than to see this grace growing in a body of believers.

It helps us much, I think, if we can recognize the fitness of this progress. Narrowness of view and sympathy ‘i’HL YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN. 47

is not unnatural in a new believer. It is very unnatural in the maturer Christian life. In the one it is the sourness of unripe fruit, showing only unripeness; in the other it is the sourness of a ripe apple or of an apple that ought to be ripe, and proves cramped and stunted life. The figures which most naturally suggest them selves are these of vegetable life, when we are talking of growth of any sort. I do not say that it is best for the young Christian to be illiberal. Far better certainly if he could leap at once to the full comprehension and the wide charity which the older Christian gathers out of the experience of life. But, as a fact, it is too apt to be the case that only by experience does the Christian reach this breadth of sympathy, which comes not from indifference, but from the profoundest personal earnestness. It is something wholly different from the loose toleration which some men praise, which is negative, which cares nothing about what is absolutely true or false. This is positive. It holds fast to its certain truths, well proved, long tried. Just because those truths have laid intense hold upon its deepest soul, and become its truths in its own shapes, it expects and rejoices to see them, the same truths still, becoming other men’s in their own shapes. This is the only true Christian charity, the only charity that rejoiceth in the truth.

And here comes in another noble characteristic of the growing spiritual experience, its ever-increasing independence. This is the best personal result of charity. There is an independence which is arrogant and defiant, and there is a dependence that is weak and fawning. Both come of narrowness. Both are the signs of immature and meagre life. One man arms himself against his brethren because he holds them to be wholly wrong and himself wholly right. Another man yields to his brethren because he fears that he is wrong and they are right There is a man of mellow strength who, deeply conscious of the work the Lord has done in him, made sure of it by long feeling the very pressures of God’s hand kneading the truth into his nature, stands by that work; will let no man cavil it away from his tenacious consciousness; is so perfectly dependent upon Christ that he can hang upon no fellow-man; respects himself by the same reverence for the individuality of the divine life that makes him also respect his brethren.

The analogies between a man’s life and the world’s life are so continually suggested that one often wonders whether there be not some analogy here; whether some such progress into charity by the very positiveness of faith, may not be possible, may not be coming as the final solution of all these problems which keep the world so full of jealousy and strife. At present it seems to be assumed that narrowness is essential to positive belief, and that toleration can be reached only by general indifference. Not long ago I read this sentence in what many hold to be our ablest and most thoughtful journal: “It is a law, which in the present condition of human nature holds good, that strength of conviction is always in the inverse ratio of the tolerant spirit.” If that is so, then the present condition of human nature is certainly very much depraved. But if human nature ever can be rescued by a personal salvation, if mankind can ever become possessed by the Spirit of God, lifting the mass by filling the individuals each with his own strong manifestation of its power, then the world may still see some maturer type of Christianity, in which new ages of positive faith may still be filled with the broadest sympathy, and men tolerate their brethren without enfeebling themselves. Such ages may God hasten.

Let us pass on. I think another sign of the growth of Christian character is to be found in what we may call the growing transfiguration of duty. See what I mean. To every young Christian the new service of Christ comes largely with the look of a multitude of commandments. They throng around his life, each one demanding to be obeyed. He welcomes them joyously. He takes up his tasks with glad hands still, because they are his Master’s tasks. But as he grows older in grace, is there no difference? Tell me, you who have long been the servants of our dear and gracious Lord, has there come in your long Christian life no change in the whole aspect of your service? Has not your more and more intimate sympathy with Him let you in behind many and many a duty which once seemed dark and hard, and allowed you to see the light of His loving intention burning there? Have you not grown into a clearer and deeper understanding of what Jesus meant by those sweet and wonderful words, “Henceforth I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doeth; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you”? In every opening Christian life there is something Mosaic, something Hebrew. The order of the Testaments is somewhat repeated in the experience of every believer. At last, in the fulness of time, the New Testament has perfectly come. The law is given first, and then grace and truth come by Jesus Christ. It is no sudden transformation. It cannot be, because it cannot come otherwise than by the gradual teaching of life. But when it has wholly come, then, full of the complete consciousness of Christ, duty is done not simply because Christ has commanded it and we love Him, but because Christ has filled us with Himself, transformed our standards, recreated our affections, and we love the duty too, seeing its essential beauty as He sees it, out of whose nature it proceeds. I am sure that such a change does come both in our active and our passive duties. The fight that we must fight, or the sickness that we must bear, both change from tasks, to be done because He commands them, into privileges which we embrace because we love them. Do we not all feel the change that had come between Paul crying submissively “Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?” looking to an outside Christ for commandment, and the same Paul crying “Not I live but Christ liveth in me!” rejoicing in the inspiration of an inward Savior? This was the perfect victory after which Paul was always longing so intensely. It did not come perfectly to him in this world. It cannot to any of us. Dependent as it is upon the knowledge of Christ by the soul, it can not be perfect till the soul’s knowledge of Christ shall be perfect in heaven. Here we must always see duty, like God, “in a glass, darkly;” only there “face to face.” But as it begins to come here, duty already begins to be transfigured before us. It puts on its divinity. Its face shines as the sun. Its raiment, which seemed cold, becomes white as the light. Already we see its beauty.

Already we see how we shall love it some day; and we cry out like the apostles, “Lord, it is good for us to be here. Let us stay here where duty is seen to be nothing but the glorious atmosphere of Thy personal will.”

But this brings us to what after all we must hold to be the profoundest and most reliable sign of the maturing spiritual life. All these of which we have been speaking are only secondary symptoms of the great privilege of the Christian, which is deepening personal intimacy with Him who is the Christian’s life, the Lord Jesus Christ. All comes to that at last. Christianity begins with many motives. It all fastens itself at last upon one motive, which does not exclude, but is large enough to comprehend all that is good in all the rest, “That I may know Him.” Those are Paul’s words. How constantly we come back to his large, rounded life, as the picture of what the Christian is and becomes. If I could set before you the young man at Damascus and the old man at Rome, and bid you compare the two, this sermon I am preaching need not have been begun. “That I may know Him.” We have all seen, I am sure, if it has been our privilege to watch true Christians growing old, the special and absorbing way with which the personal Christ, their knowledge of Him, and His knowledge of them, comes to be all their religion. You hear them talk of Him, and it seems already as if their lives had entered into that heaven, which, as we read the mystic description of it in the book of Kevelations, seems to consist in His personality. He is its temple; He is its sun; His name is written on the foreheads of its happy saints. Indeed Christ, to the Christian growing older, seems to be what the sun is to the developing day, which it lightens from the morning to the evening. When the sun is in the zenith in the broad noon-day, men do their various works by his light; but they do not so often look up to him. It is the sun light that they glory in, flooding a thousand tasks with clearness, making a million things beautiful. But as the world rolls into the evening, it is the sun itself at sun set that men gather to look at and admire and love. So to the earlier and middle stages of a Christian life, Christ is the revealer of duty and truth; and duty and truth become clear and dear in His light. The young Christian glories in the way in which, under his Master’s power, he can work for humanity, for truth, for his nation, for society, for his family. But as the Christian life ripens into evening, it is not these things, though they are not forgotten, that the soul dwells on most. It is the Lord Himself. It is that He is the soul’s, and the soul is His. It is His wondrousness, His dearness, and His truth, that fill the life as it presses closer to where He stands, — as the setting earth rolls on towards the sun.

And this is philosophical. It is strictly in accordance with the whole nature of our religion that it should thus grow. It cannot be perfect all at once. For Christianity is knowing Christ, and personal knowledge can come only by experience; and experience takes time. A truth you may embrace, and embrace completely, so soon as you understand the terms of its statement and have learned its evidence. But you cannot bring a person, as you can a proposition, up to a man, and say “Here, know him!” as you say “Know this!” and be at once obeyed. “I cannot,” he replies. “However thoroughly you vouch for him, I cannot know him till he shows himself to me. I thank you for bringing him to me. I thank you more than if I could know him all at once, for if he is really all you say, then there lies before me a long career of gradual knowledge that shall be all delight to me till I shall know him perfectly.” This seems to me one difference of Christians. Make Christianity a doctrinal system, and when your new disciple has learned his catechism, he is all done; and pretty soon you will find him sitting with his hands in his lap, complaining that there is nothing more to learn, and either finding his well-learned faith dull and uninteresting, or supplementing it with dogmatic speculations of his own. Make Christianity a personal knowledge of Christ, and then, with ever new enticements, each little that he knows opening to him something more to know of the infinite personal life, obedience feeding love, and love stimulating obedience, he presses on in the never stale, never weary ambition of “knowing Christ.”

Far be it from me to think or talk as if there were two religions, one for the young Christian and one for the older; as if the power of the personal Christ were not present to waken the first good desire of the new life, as it is at last to crown the victorious well-doer kneeling on the steps of the throne. I pointed out, in opening, that just this — the continuous presence of a manifested God — is what makes the unity of the Christian life. Do not misunderstand me then. I turn to the youngest child just beginning to try to do right, and I see the little hand clasped in the hand of a Savior who is holding it close, who is watching the feeble feet, who is bending over and listening to his prayers. But just because that child has already tasted the power of a present Christ, he is able to comprehend the beauty of the life you offer him when you tell him that it is all to be the development of that relationship in which he finds himself already, the deepening of that friendship between him and his Lord.

There is as yet no culture, no method of progress known to men, that is so rich and complete as that which is ministered by a truly great friendship. No natural appetite, no artificial taste, no rivalry of competition, no contagion of social activity, calls out such a large, healthy, symmetrical working of a human nature, as the constant, half-unconscious power of a friend’s presence whom we thoroughly respect and love. In a true friendship there is emulation without its jealousy; there is imitation without its servility. When one friend teaches another by his present life, there is none of that divorce of truth from feeling, and of feeling from truth, which in so many of the world’s teachings makes truth hard, and feeling weak; but truth is taught, and feeling is inspired, by the same action of one nature on the other, and they keep each other true and warm. Surely there is no more beautiful sight to see in all this world, — full as it is of beautiful adjustments and mutual ministrations, — than the growth of two friends’ natures who, as they grow old together, are always fathoming, with newer needs, deeper depths of each other’s life, and opening richer veins of one another’s helpfulness. And this best culture of personal friendship is taken up and made, in its infinite completion, the gospel method of the progressive saving of the soul by Christ.

When we get this idea of Christianity, there is nothing strange in the halo of clearness which, to every Christian, hangs around the scenes with which the beginning of his new life is associated. The place where two friends first met is sacred to them all through their friendship — all the more sacred as their friendship deepens and grows old. It is the same sort of feeling which sent the heart of Moses back to the bush. And to how many a saint the day and place where he first heard God’s voice will be earth’s one sacred memory, even long after earth’s life is over. Do you think that Moses will not speak of the bush, and Samuel of the little temple-chamber, and Peter and John of their boats on the still lake, and Paul of the Damascus road, and Matthew of his tax-table, and the poor woman of the wayside well, when they are met above? Only the last day shall tell how much of earth is hallowed ground. This is what makes the old churches holy with an accumulated sacredness which surpasses their first consecration. Who can tell how many this church of ours will find among the blessed to honor and treasure her forever, that she may not be forgotten when the birth places of souls are remembered? This has always been the feeling of the world about Palestine, the land where the world first knew Christ, — sometimes breaking out into a crusade for its recovery; sometimes cheering the weariness of pilgrims who were struggling on to see Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives before they died; sometimes showing itself in the mystical transfer of the names of Palestinian geography to the hills and valleys, the heights and depths of the spiritual life. A recent English scholar has pointed out how often St. Paul’s religious thought looked back to the scene of Stephen’s t56 THE YOUNG AND OLD CHRISTIAN.

martyrdom, where, as he stood by and held the mur derers’ clothes, his own first earnest interest in Christianity was blindly stirred. Paul’s speech at Antioch reminds us throughout of Stephen’s defence before his judges. Paul’s address at Athens uses some of Stephen’s very words. Several of Paul’s most difficult and deepest phrases in his Epistles seem to correspond with forms of thought which the martyr had uttered years before, and which had sunk into the mind of the thoughtful young Jew. It is indeed a goodly spirit that treasures its past miracles, that goes down the gracious avenues of life to find the bushes out of which it first heard God’s voice.

But come back for a few moments to our thought about the personal presence of Christ becoming clearer to us as we grow riper in the Christian life. Let me point out, in a word or two, three or four of the effects that it must produce, which are the noble characteristics of the maturest Christians:

First, it must give us a more infinite view of life in general, or, in other words, must make us more unworldly. To be always living with One whose kingdom is not of this world; to be constantly conversant, as we hold intercourse with Him, with the thought that there are other worlds also over which He presides, and with which we have something to do through our union with Him, — how this breaks up and scatters the littleness of life, the bondage of the seen. How it lets us out, free to trace the course of every action, the career of every thought, as it seeks vast untold issues in other spheres. More and more terrible appears to me the crowding in of life, its inability to scale and grasp the things that it was made for. Even our religion busies itself with little temporal duties, with church machineries and observances. What is there that can lift it all, and enlarge it and let it free, except the constant known presence of One who is infinite and who lives in infinity — the God of eternity made known to us as our be loved Christ?

And, if we get this, then something else must come, namely, more hopefulness. St. Paul has a noble verse which says that “experience worketh hope.” It must, if it is full of Christ. The soul that is getting deeper and deeper into the certain knowledge of Him must be learning that it has no right to fear; that however hopeless things look there can be nothing but success for every good cause in the hand of Christ. It is a noble process for a man’s life that gradually changes the cold dogma that “truth is strong and must prevail” into a warm enthusiastic certainty that “my Christ must conquer.” It is terrible to see a man calling him self a Christian who despairs more of the world the longer that he lives in it. It shows that he is letting the world’s darkness come between him and his Lord’s light. It shows that he is not near enough to Christ.

And with the growing hopefulness there comes a growing courage. How timid we are at first. I be come a Christian, and it seems as if just to get this soul of mine saved were all that I could dare to try; but as the Savior’s strength becomes more manifest to me, as I know Him more, I see that He is able to do much more than that. I begin to aspire to have a little part in the great conquest of the world in which He is engaged. And so the Soldier of the Cross at last is out in the very thick of the battle, striking at all his Master’s enemies in the perfect assurance of his Master’s strength.

And then, as the crown of all these, there comes to the maturing Christian, out of his constant companionship with Christ, that true and perfect poise of soul which I think grows more and more beautiful as we get tired, one after another, of the fantastic and oneo ’

sided types of character which the world admires, and which seem to us very attractive at first. Expectant without impatience; patient without stagnation; waiting, but always ready to advance; loving to advance, but always ready to wait; full of confidence, but never proud; full of certainty, but never arrogant; serene, but enthusiastic; rich as a great land is rich in the peace that comes to it from the government of a great, wise, trusty governor, — this is the life whose whole power is summed up in one word — Faith. “Here is the patience and faith of the saints.” This is the life to which men come who, through long years, “follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.”

“The good-will of Him that dwelt in the bush.” I have tried to depict what comes between the Bush and the Mountain, what it is on which the aged follower of Christ looks back; what it is to which the young follower of Christ looks forward. Some of you are stand ing as Moses stood, — the desert crossed, the promised land almost entered, the work done lying back behind you. I know not where it was, — in some church-pew, in some closet’s privacy, in some stillness or some crowd, — years ago the fire came; the common life about you burned with the sudden presence of Divinity;

God called you, and you gave yourself to God. I bid you look back and see the mercy that has led you ever since, and strengthen your hope and courage and charity and faith as you remember the long, long good- will of Him that dwelt in the bush. And some of you I hope, I know, are standing just by the bush-side still, the shoes off your feet, the voice of God in your ears, lifted up with the desire for the new life of Christ. You are determined to be His, for He has called you. Well, till the end, life here and hereafter will be only the unfolding of this personal love which seems to you so dear and so mysterious now. Christ will grow realler, nearer, more completely your Master and your Savior all your life. That is the whole of your religion. But as you go on you will find that that is enough, that it is more than eternity can exhaust. The mercy which takes you into its bosom at last in heaven, will be still the old familiar good-will of Him that dwelt in the bush.