Peter’s Type of the Enduring

“The impcrishahlcness of a meek and quiet spirit.”

I Peter iii. 4.

I HAVE translated the words as they ought to be rendered. Peter is contrasting the things which are showy with the things which last. He says that such ornaments as silver and gold are perishable things. He says that if we want to get something which is imperishable we shall need to seek it among things which are not showy. And certainly he selects a most unshowy specimen as the type of immortality! A meek and quiet spirit — that seems a very humble thing! If the nations of his day had been asked to select their symbol of imperishableness, not one of them would have chosen this. They would all have chosen symbols which expressed the loud and flaring. Egypt would have brought her pyramids; Greece, her flowers; Rome, her soaring eagle;

Jutlah, a stone of her great temple. But none would have said “My emhlem of immortality is a meek and quiet spirit.” He who first said that was the Divine Man who preached the Sermon on the Mount; He it was that promised the permanence to the meek. Peter got his ideal from Him. Peter was speaking against his own nature. His was not a meek and quiet spirit. He was very loud, very showy, very eager to display himself. He had been captivated by a mind the opposite of his own. Originally, he would have promised immortality to the powers that could walk upon the sea; under the influence of Jesus, he predicts it for the quiet deeds of home.

My soul, despise not thy moments of silence! Despise not the hours of thy self-restraint! Is it not written in the Apocalypse that the Book of Life is the Lamb’s Book! And what does that mean? Just that thy most lasting colour is thy most quiet colour. Bethink thee! what has been the most imperishable thing in the most changeful years? It is a deed of self-restraint; men call it Calvary. All else of the far past has vanished from thy sight. Thrones have tottered, dynasties have faded, fashions have changed. But this silent deed of self-surrender, done in an obscure corner of a captive town, is as fresh as the memory of yesterday. The old world has gone from thee — its faces and its phases. Rome has let fall her eagle from the air; Greece has lost her flowers in the field; Judah has seen her temple in the dust. But still to thee one spot remains green — the little hill of Calvary. There it stands undimmed, undying — outliving cohort and legion, surviving Senate and Caesar! Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas, are gone; Priest and Levite tread the spot no more; but the Green Hill keeps its verdure to thy view, and its message is ever the same — ‘’ The imperishableness of a meek and quiet spirit.”

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