Sonship and Communion
“SonsHIP being founded on resurrection, stands com: nected with perfect justification — perfect righteousness — perfect freedom from everything that could in anywise be against us. God could not have us in His presence with sin upon us. The Father could not have the prodigal at his table with the rags of the far country upon him. He could fall on his neck and kiss him in those rags. It was worthy and beautifully characteristic of his grace to do; but then to seat him at the table in the rags would never do. The grace that brought the father out to the prodigal reigns through the righteousness which brought the prodigal in to his father. It would not have been grace, had the father waited for the son to deck himself in robes of his own providing; it would not have been righteousness to bring’ him in, in his rags; but both grace and righteousness. shone forth in all their respective brightness and beauty when the father went out and fell on the prodigal’s neck, and yet did not give him a seat at the table until he was clad and decked in a manner suited to that happy position. God in Christ has stooped to the very lowest point of man’s moral condition, that by stooping He might raise man to the very highest point of blessedness in fellowship with Himself.” — C.. AZ.
V.
SONSHIP AND COMMUNION.
T is all-important that we should understand the exact relationship of these two facts. Sonship is not acquired through communion with God; but communion with God is the issue and fruit of sonship. So many persons reverse the divine order, and think to secure a standing with the Father by the intensity of their spiritual exercises, and the consistency of their Christian walk, that it is needful to make this point very clear. “But as many as received Him to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.” * “For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.” + Thus speaks the Scripture, and thus are we taught that it is faith in Christ, and not feeling in ourselves, that constitutes us the sons of God. ‘ Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.” £
* John 1: 14 t Gal. 3: 26. $s Johns: x.
This relation of sonship being once established, through our personal faith, it becomes a fixed fact. Communion varies; sonship is unchangeable; communion is a thing of degrees; sonship is absolute. The most exalted saint is no more a child of God, than the weakest and most imperfect believer. The difference between the two is a difference of fellowship, and not a difference of birthright. Our acceptance with God does not lie along a sliding scale of frames and feelings, but is grounded on the unchangeable life and love of Him who is “the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever.’’ Those who savingly believe therefore are the sons of God without condition, and all stand on exactly the same plane of acceptance and privilege in the household of faith. A child may be disobedient, but he does not thereby cease to be his father’s son; and a Christian may lose his joy and his assurance, but that does not cancel his birthright and throw him back into spiritual orphanage. But we must add, lest we should seem to lean towards Antinomian license, that there will be a vast difference in the rewards of the children of God, both as to their present joy and their future glory; and this difference will depend upon
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the fellowship and faithfulness which they matntain in their walk with God.
Let us clearly discern the exact connection of these two facts therefore, and lay a strenuous emphasis on each. “Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.”’* If sons of God we certainly have the indestructible life of God. And so in spite of the plausibility of the arguments for the contrary view, we must still hold fast to the doctrine of ‘‘the perseverance of the saints;” or as it might be more justly expressed, of the perseverance of the Saviour. Not because faith has the tenacity to hold fast to the end; but because faith makes us partakers of the eternal life which holds us fast unto the end. For how can the eter- - nal life perish, and if that life has become our life how can we perish? Adoption may be annulled but birth cannot be; and hence those who have been begotten of God cannot die so long as God lives. Is there such a thing as becoming unborn for those who have been newborn? “TI give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand,”
cee
1 John 3: 1.
—-s a ee ean
is Christ’s promise. And incarnation and regeneration are the two bonds by which he has secured this promise. For through the first he has become partaker of our human nature, and carried it up into heaven; and through the second we have been made partakers of the divine nature, which, could we be lost, we should have to carry down into hell. *
But next to the gift of sonship, which calls out the apostle’s exultant thanksgiving, is that of fellowship. ‘And truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” In sonship we have life; in fellowship we have more abundant life; in the one we ‘get our place as “accepted in the Beloved;” in the other we get our power as anointed with the Holy Ghost; on the one depends our salvation; on the other depends our sanctification. Now communion or fel-
* Tauler, the mystic, tells of a poor peasant from whom he gained deep instruction in spiritual things. To his searching question, ‘‘ But what would you say if (sod should damn you?”’ ‘‘If God would damn me?” said the poor man; ‘‘ verily if he would use me so hardly, I have two arms to embrace; the one whereof is a deep humility by which I am united fo his holy humanity; the other is faith and charity which joins me to his Divinity, by which I would embrace him in such sort that he should be constrained to descend with me into hell, and I had rather without comparison be in hell with God, than without him in Paradise.”
Tauler, 1290 — 1361.
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lowship implies a reciprocal intercourse with God. By it we not only abide in Christ, but Christ abides in us; we not only ask, but we receive; we not only give ourselves to God, but God imparts himself tous. And the Holy Spirit is the medium of this communion. As the atmosphere stands between us and the sun, the transparent element through which we behold its brightness, and through which its warmth is transmitted to us, so the Holy Ghost mediates between us and Christ. “He shall take of mine and shall show it unto you,”* says Jesus. Here is one side — the communication of the life and love and joy of the Lord to us. “The Spirit maketh intercession for us.” + Here is the other side — the communication of our needs and sorrows, our praises and confessions to the Lord. And both these ideas are involved in full communion with Christ.
To establish this fellowship we make use, first of all, of the Scriptures which are the inspired organ of the Holy Ghost. And it is very important for us to see that the most direct and intelli-
gible means of communion is the word of God. Meditation, contemplation, aspiration — these are
<a
* John x6: 15. ¢t Rom, 8: 26.
very vague and unsatisfactory exercises when attempted alone. Thought, like the vine, needs a trellis on which to climb, in order to mount up into the sunlight. We require God’s word as a support and uplift in order that we may think Goa’s thoughts after him. And we are sure that the most substantial and most satisfactory intercourse which we can have with the Lord is attained in this way.
Rev. William Haslam, the well-known evangelist, in referring to that remarkable crisis in his ministry when he gained the power of the Holy Ghost as he had never known it before, says: —
“A book came into my hands which interested me greatly. This I read and re-read, and made an abstract of it. It was the ‘Life of Adelaide Newton.’ What struck me in it so much was to find that this lady was able to hold spiritual communion with God by means of a Lible only. Is it possible, I thought, to hold such close communion with the Lord apart from the church and her ministrations? I do not hesitate to say that thts was the means under God of stripping off some remaiis of my grave clothes, and enabling me to walk in spirttual liberty.” *
* From Death Unto Life, p. 5g.
The lady to whom he refers was one of the excellent of the earth, in whom we may believe the Lord delighted. Her expositions of Hebrews and of the Song of Solomon are among the best specimens of devotional study with which we are ac. quainted. Here we find affection and meditation climbing up to the Lord along his promises and precepts. And as we read, we learn the true secret of communion. Unsustained contemplation soon tires; but that which mounts up to God along the scala sancta of Scripture renews its strength at every step. It has such secure foothold that it never falters or grows dizzy; and thus it escapes the peril of fanaticism and pious dreaming. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts,’ * saith the Lord. We cannot reach God’s thoughts therefore by meditation or reflection alone. We may tarry all night in the fields like Jacob, but unless we know the Scriptures we have not the ladder whose top reaches unto heaven, along which our thoughts like angels may ascend and descend.
And next to God’s recorded thoughts, the high-
* Isaiah 4: 8.
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est aid to communion will be found in the spiritual contemplations of his saints. Each believer needs the help of every other in order to any measure of apprehension of God. ‘That ye may be able to comprehend wth all saints what is the breadth, and length and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge,” * is the fervent prayer of the apostle. Each son of God has some vision and apprehension of the Father’s will and glory which another may miss. And we require the sum of all Christian knowledge to help us toward the beginning of that which “passeth knowledge.”
It has sometimes struck us as being one of the saddest fruits of schism in the church, that it has begotten a kind of covetousness of truth and love. Christians hold their favorite doctrines as a sort of spiritual monopoly; loving truth for the distinction it may give to them, as the miser loves his gold, instead of loving it for the blessing and joy it may bring to others when imparted. To find the highest help in communion we must be willing to give all we have without stint; and to take from a’l who have acquired any riches of truth, however
* Eph. 3: 18, remote and out of ecclesiastical fellowship with us they may be. We make good our suggestion by borrowing from one whom we must own as a true saint, though found within the pale of an apostate body. Fenelon, shut up within the bounds of a narrow and exclusive church, deprecated what he calls “the avarice of prayer,” and not less the avarice of communion. With a most comprehensive charity he exclaims: —
“Oh! how blessed it were to see ‘all goods in common,’ both of mind and of body, and that every one no longer regarded his thought, his opinions, his science, his light, his virtues, his noble sentiments, as his own. It is thus that the saints in heaven have all in God,and nothing for themselves alone. ‘Theirs is a beatitude infinite and common to all, of which the ebb and flow cause the abundance and satiety of all the blessed; each receiving his measure, each giving out all he has received. If men here below entered into this poverty of spirit and this community of spiritual gifts, we should see all disputes and all schisms come to an end. We cannot reform the church except by thus reforming ourselves; then all would be only one spirit; the spirit of love and truth would be the soul of the members of the body of the church, and would re-unite them in closest bonds. It would be a commencement of the new creation; of the paradise reserved for the world to come.”
Probably it is the very highest attainment in prayer to gain real and sensible communications from the Lord. How few of us know very much of such experiences! We ask, and having soon exhausted the list of our requests, we give over asking. We know little of that importunate “I will not let thee go except thou bless me.” And when we read, for example, of Bishop Andrewes spending the greater part of five hours every day in prayer and devotion; or of John Welsh who thought that day ill spent which did not witness eight or ten hours of closet communion, we ponder with: amazement, if not with incredulity; and we ask ourselves how such prolonged praying could be possible without falling into an endless routine of vain repetition. So far as we can know, that which these men sought was communion. They were not merely begging something of God, and persisting in their suit, till they should overcome his reluctance. They were seeking contact, fellowship, oneness of mind and will with the Lord; they were gazing into the face of the Holy One, that so the divine transformation into his likness might go on; they were striving by patient endurance to apprehend that for which they were apprehended of Christ Jesus; laying hold of God and giving themselves to be laid hold of by God. It is good for us to search for the secret of such communion, or at least to be quickened by it to a more prayerful life. How our careless intercessions are rebuked by a passage like this from the life of that excellent Covenanter, Robert Bruce. Says John Livingstone: —
‘“‘Upon one occasion I went to Edinburgh to see him in company with the tutor of Bonnington. When we called at eight in the morning, he told us he was not inclined for company; and on being urged to tell us the cause, he answered that when he went to bed he had a good measure of the Lord’s presence, but that he had wrestled about an hour or two before we came, and
had not yet got access ;* and so we left him.”
Here is a bit of spiritual history so antique and strange, that we almost need an interpreter to translate it into the dialect of common experience. How many Christians have prayed for years with-
* Scots Werthies, p. 139. out ever having striven to get “access,” or even known that such a thing were possible.
A communion, we have observed, in which some- thing is imparted from God to us as well as something asked of God by us, should be constantly sought. Is it possible for the Lord, through the Holy Spirit, to make direct and intelligible communications to our spirits, instructing us in regard to duty, and clearly enlightening us respecting his will? Certainly, Christians who have sought to read God’s handwriting from the tablet of consciousness, have often been deceived and led into grievous mistakes. This fact should be admitted and marked for our warning and admonition, as should also the supplementary fact that the Holy Scriptures are the great and principal manual of instructions for Christian duty. But there are emergencies when we need more minute and specific directions, than could possibly be contained in so general a book. And certainly the Holy Spirit does give these to those who wait upon him. But how? We should say generally by a providential guidance. If we seek submissively and humbly to be directed by the Spirit we shall be so led, though we may not know the way beforehand. That is to say, the Spirit within the believer will rather incline him to go in the right way, than say distinctly to his inner ear “this is the way, walk ye in it.” The author of the 7heologia Germanica states this idea truly though somewhat extremely, when he says that one who is led by the Spirit is “so possessed by the Spirit of God that he does not know what he doeth or leaveth undone, and hath no power over himself; but the will and spirit of God has the mastery over him, and works and does and leaves undone with him and by him as God would.” Besides this we must believe that to obedient and humble souls the Master does sometimes speak in distinct tones, through the Spirit. But it is only to “a mind inwardly retired before the Lord” that this privilege is given; it is only ears made divinely sensitive by long communion with Christ, that.can-catch his still’ small: voice as: it speaks in the depths of the heart.
For instruction on this point let us refer to a single teacher. Catherine of Siena, that pearl of piety and purity shining so conspicuously among the corruption of the 14th century, has left us several chapters of her “Dialogue” with God. She explains that the Saviour did not communicate with her by words, but by impressions so distinct and unquestionable that she was able afterwards to write them down. To those who question the reality of such communications her biographer well says: “Go and make the attempt to live a life of prayer such as she lived, and then, and then only, can you have any shadow of a right or any power to judge of this soul’s dealings with God.” Reading the story of her saintly life, of her consecration so simple and so free from the superstitions of her age, we are inclined to think that God would be as likely to speak to her as to any whom we could name. And interposing again a warning against trusting to mere impressions, we may still ask: il “the Spirit said to Philip go near and join thyself to this chariot;” if “the Spirit said separate me Saul and Barnabas,” why may not the same Spirit speak to Christians to-day who are living under the same dispensation?
Catherine had at one time spent three days ina solitary retreat, praying for a greater fullness and joy of the divine presence. But instead of this, it seemed as though all the legions of darkness had been let loose in her soul, filling her with blasphemous thoughts and evil suggestions. The
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battle waxed desperate, and she was sore pressed with fear, till at last the Saviour appeared to her and scattered the hosts of darkness and gave her deliverance: —
“Now a great light seemed to descend from above, filling the place where she kneeled with heavenly brightness. ‘The devils fled and the Lord Jesus conversed with her. Catherine asked him, ‘Lord, where wert thou when my heart was so tormented?’ ‘I was in thy heart,’ he replied. ‘O Lord, thou art everlasting truth,’ she replied, ‘and I humbly bow before thy word; but how can I believe that thou wast in my heart when it was filled with such detestable thoughts?’ ‘Did these thoughts give thee pleasure or pain?’ asked the Lord. ‘An exceeding pain and sadness,’ she replied; to whom the Lord — ‘Thou wast in woe and sadness because I was in the midst of thy heart. My presence it was which rendered those thoughts insupportable to thee. ‘Thou didst strive to repel them, because they filled thee with horror, and because thou didst not succeed thy spirit was bowed down with sorrow. When the period I had determined for the duration of the combat had elapsed, I sent forth the beams of my light, and the shades of hell were dispelled, because they cannot resist that dishit,<” *
* Catherine of Siena, 1347-1380.
Here is a most vital lesson for believers. For we have not only a vivid illustration of the tender and gracious intercourse, which 1s possible between the saint and his Saviour, but we have also a salutary warning. The hour of holiest communion is not unlikely to be made the “hour and power of darkness,”’ by the incursions of the Evil Spirit. The sleepy and stupid Christian, baptized with “the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience,” and living in fellowship with the God of this world, will not be greatly lable to assaults from the Evil One. It is those who strive for the highest consecration, who will encounter the sharpest temptations. How instructive a lesson for us it is, that the first chapter in the Saviour’s experience after his baptism by the Holy Ghost opens with these words, ‘‘ And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, dezng forty days tempted by the devil,’ * Let not the Christian be surprised therefore to find his still hour disturbed by intruding thoughts and impudent suggestions of evil. The closet is the Thermopylae of the kingdom of heaven; and he who with prayer and fasting at-
an
* Luke 4: 2.
tempts to take the kingdom by force, will find the spirits of evil massed there in strong array to resist him. Bunyan never penned words of deeper significance than when he wrote, ‘“‘ Then I saw that there was a way to hell even from the gates of heaven.” But he whom we meet in the closet is faithful, “who will not suffer us to be tempted above that we are able; but with the temptation will also make a way of escape, that we may be able to bear it.” *
With the closest access to God, will come the ‘joy of the Lord, filling and overflowing the soul. This is the true reward and fruition of earnest communion, — a reward which is not to be sought as an end, but which will be certain to follow as a result. How difficult it is to persuade even Christians that joy in God is the only enduring and really substantial happiness. Many who truly love the Lord plead their right to temper and season their Christian exercises by worldly entertainment. We urge no ascetic rule here; only we wish to remind the Christian that the love of God is the only love that can never be inordinate — the only love in which there can be no hurtful
* 1 Cor. 10: 13.
excess. In this respect it stands in total and unchangeable contrast to worldly affection. Read this confession of the brilliant Madame de Maintenon, which she makes to a friend in the acme of her splendor: ‘ Do you not see that Iam dying with melancholy, in a height of fortune which once my imagination could scarce have conceived? I have been young and beautiful, have had a high relish of pleasure, and have been the universal object of love. In a more advanced age I have spent years in intellectual pleasures; I have at last risen to favor; but I protest to you, my dear madame, that every one of these conditions leaves in the mind a dismal vacuity.” Turn from this beautiful court favorite to another French lady of the same period. Madame Guyon was the most despised and persecuted woman of her time — hunted, derided, imprisoned, exiled. But writing of her spiritual joy at this period, she says: —
“The love of God occupied my heart so constantly and strongly that it was very difficult for me to think of anything else. So much was my soul absorbed in God, that my eyes and ears seemed to close of themselves to outward objects, and to leave the soul to the exclu. sive influence of the inward attraction. ‘This immer-SONSHIP AND COMMUNION. Fi7
sion in God so absorbed all things, that it seemed to place all things in a new position relating to God. I could behold naught out of God; I beheld all things in Him.”
Let us mark what the Scriptures say concerning those who are sealed — ‘“Ourselves also which have the first fruits of the Spirit.”* “Sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise which zs the earnest of our inheritance.” This signifies that those who are filled with the Spirit already have foretastes of heaven, prelibations of the “pleasures forevermore” which are at the Lord’s right hand. If so, we need not speculate concerning the blessedness of the redeemed. He who has the handful of first fruits, knows what the harvest will be just as well as he will know when the grain has been reaped and gathered into the garner. The hearts of the redeemed above and below beat with the same impulse, and keep time to the same heavenly harmony. Why stand ye gazing up into heaven therefore, — speculating with curious wonder concerning the bliss of the glorified? Put your ear to the heart of the saint in full commu-
* Rom 8: 23. Eph. 1: 13.
nion with God, if you would know what the beatific joy is. Heaven is perfectly miniatured, wherever you find a soul in perfect fellowship with the Lord.
We have spoken in another chapter of the gracious visitations of the Spirit enjoyed by President Edwards. These were attended by experiences of the most seraphic delight — experiences in which the weight of glory was such as to cause him “to break forth into a kind of loud weeping,” while he contemplated the character of God. Let us hear his description of this divine enjoyment: —
‘IT found from time to time an inward sweetness that would carry me away in mycontemplations. This I know not how to express otherwise than as a calm, sweet abstraction of the soul from all the concerns of the world; and sometimes a kind of vision or fixed ideas and imaginations, of being alone in the mountains, or some solitary wilderness, far from all mankind, sweetly conversing with Christ, and wrapped and swallowed up in God.” *
But let it be carefully observed that these exercises came from no idle dreaming, no luxurious
* Edwards’ Works, Vol. I, p. 16.
spiritual reveries. It was, he tells us, while reading the Scriptures that his soul so mounted up; and it was while his eye was fixed on God that his heart was kindled with holy delight. Men of this world talk about enjoying themselves; the believer’s happiness is most intense when he is out of himself, so that he can “joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Edwards has given an extended and glowing narrative of high religious joy in another person with whom he was intimate; and who, though no name is mentioned, has been ascertained since his death to have been his own wife. We can give only a few snatches from this wonderful record of blessedness. If we wished for a living commentary upon John Howe’s lofty discourse on ‘“Delighting in God,” we should select this. It is the theologian’s argument set to heart-music; and it is: especially interesting as being the manifest fruit of earnest consecration, and definite sealing by the Spirit. ‘“Deszre zs love in motion, love ts desire at rest,’ says Howe. Here was a soul who desited God above all other things. This desire expressed itself in the most searching self-surrender; and the delight which followed was this desire finding rest in its supreme object. These exercises begun, he says, “near three years ago in a great increase, upon an extraordinary self-dedication and renunciation of the world.” The person had been formerly subject to great unsteadiness in grace and frequent melancholy. But, says the narrator : —
“Since that resignation spoken of before, made near three years ago, everything of that nature seems to be overcome and erushed by the power of faith and trust in God and resignation to him. The person has remained in a constant uninterrupted rest and humble joy in God, and assurance of his favor, without one hour’s melancholy or darkness from that day to this.
These things have been attended with a constant sweet peace and calm and serenity of soul, without any cloud to interrupt it; a continual rejoicing in all the works of God’s hands — the works of nature and God’s daily works all appearing with a sweet smile upon them; a wonderful access to God by prayer, as it were seeing him, and sensibly and immediately conversing with him, as much oftentimes as if Christ were here on earth, sitting on a visible throne, to be approached to and conversed with; frequent, plain, sensible and immediate answers to prayer; all tears wiped away; all former troubles and sorrows of life forgotten, and all sor-SONSHIP AND COMMUNION. a ape
row and sighing fled away, excepting grief for past sins, and for remaining corruption, and that Christ is loved no more and that God is no more honored in the world, and a compassionate grief towards fellow creatures; a daily sensible doing and suffering everything for God, for a long time past, eating for God and sleeping for God, and bearing pain and trouble for God, and doing all as the service of love, and so doing it with a continual, uninterrupted cheerfulness, peace and joy.” *
We have given but a brief extract from this incomparable narrative. The reader must study the whole, if he would learn how sober, how orderly, how balanced with the most practical service all this exalted communion was.
We have no need to seek for any higher. altitudes of spiritual delight than those here pictured. And yet to show the wonderful manifestations which God sometimes makes to his obedient children we may go still further. The experience of Mrs. Edwards seems to have been a continuous one, and to have constituted when attained an habitual state rather than an exceptional transport. But there are loftier peaks looking down upon the most elevated table lands of commu-
* Edwards’ Works, Vol. III, pp. 302-306.
nion — spiritual Pisgahs and Tabors into which God sometimes calls up his servants that he may show them his glory. It will not harm us to listen to the favored few who have been summoned up thither, though we may have to discourage others from attempting to scale such heights. That sublime experience of the apostle Paul, when he was so entranced that he knew not “whether in the body or out of the body,” and when he “heard unspeakable words which it is not lawful to utter,” was not an attainment, but a rapture. He evidently did not climb to it, but was lifted to it, by a sovereign and gracious act of the Lord. He was “caught up to the third heaven,” he did not go up; and from this eminent height he could stretch out no beckoning hand to his brethren below. But even these anomalous experiences have their lesson, especially to an age which is so inclined to discredit all supernatural intervention. To those who are blind and cannot see afar off, they open glimpses of the glory to be revealed, which may at least give a momentary uplift to the eyes that are cast down.
John Flavel was by temperament and habit as remote from enthusiasm as President Edwards.
But here is a passage which he gives from the experience of ‘a minister,” well understood to have been himself. He was alone on a journey, his mind greatly occupied with self-examination and prayer. He thus describes what befell him: —
“Tn all that day’s journey he neither met, overtook or was overtaken by any. Thus going on his way, his thoughts began to swell and rise higher and higher, like the waters in Ezekiel’s vision, till at last they became an overwhelming flood. Such was the intention of his — mind, such the ravishing tastes of heavenly joys, and such the full assurance of his interest therein, that he utterly lost the sight and sense of this world, and all the concerns thereof; and for some hours he knew no more where he was than if he had been in a deep sleep upon his bed.” Arriving in great exhaustion at a certain spring, “he sat down and washed, earnestly desiring if it was God’s pleasure that this might be his part: ing-place from this world. Death had the most amiable face in his eye that ever he beheld, except the face of Jesus Christ, which made it so; and he does not remember, though he believed himself dying, that he ever thought of his dear wife or children or any earthly concernment. On reaching his inn, the influence still continued, banishing sleep. Still, still the joy of the Lord overflowed him, and he seemed to be an inhabitant of the other world. But within a few hours he was sensible of the ebbing of the tide, and before night, though there was a heavenly serenity and sweet peace upon his spirit, which continued long with him, yet the transports of joy were over, and the fine edge of his delight blunted. He many years after called that day one of the days of heaven, and professed he understood more of the life of heaven by it than by all the books he ever read, or discourses he ever entertained about it.’ *
Not less exalted is an experience of Pascal, which he describes in a paper which he long carried about his person. Dr. Alexander calls it “one of the most seraphic productions of human language.” Indeed the visitation described seems to have been so unutterable as to defy full expression. It is joy and rapture breaking through the bounds of speech and expressing itself in tears. So resistless is the tide of love and ecstacy that he can only describe it in such broken phrases as, joy — joy — tears — tears; “Joie — joie — pleurs! pleurs!”
But these illustrations are sufficient to set before us the exalted possibilities of communion with the Lord. The degree of our joy and fellowship will
* Flavel’s Works, Vol. I, p. 502.
vary; but whatever the degree let us be assured, that such intimate contact with the Lord is of priceless value. Communion with the Sinless One ig the only sure method of excommunicating sin. Gazing into the face of Christ, and beholding the light of the knowledge of the glory of God which shines there, will surely disenchant our hearts from worldly objects. ‘Ephraim shall say, what have I to do any more with idols? J have heard Him and observed Him.’ * Dannecker, the German sculptor, spent eight years in producing a face of Christ; and at last wrought out one in which the emotions of love and sorrow were so perfectly blended that beholders wept as they looked upon it. Subsequently being solicited to employ his great talent on a statue of Venus, he replied, ‘“After gazing so long into the face of Christ, think you that I can now. turn my attention to a heathen goddess?” Here is the true secret of weanedness from worldly idols, ‘the expulsive power of a new affection.”
“I have heard the volce of Jesus,
Tell me not of aught beside;
I have seen the face of Jesus,
All my soul is satisfied.”
* Hosea 14; 6,
Separation from the world, and separation unto Christ, and unto the goodly fellowship of all. saints in all ages who are in Christ, this is the fruit of true communion.
“O Almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in. one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord; grant us grace so to follow thy blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys, which thou hast prepared for those who unfeignedly love thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”