Adam's God must be a mass of feelings to which no exhaustive definition could be applied; for sometimes it may be— oftenest it is—a state of unconscious resting in Him in peace and happiness, that does not individualise its thoughts or feelings; and when it is conscious, it is a thinking in which there commingle in perpetually-varying life, and in mutual influence and nurturing, all the spiritual fruits and sources of that new-hearted thinking-"love, peace, gentleness, goodness, trust, meekness, temperance." This unifying living by faith in the Son of God will evidently have its diversities according to the feature of his Lord's manifested character, or the things of His history with which the believer feels himself most in union of heart. It will have its conditional changes, too, corresponding to the fluctuations of the feeble mind's and unstable heart's union of faithfulness to Him. 20. Does not this " new life" of union resulting in oneness, as the grafting of a branch into a tree makes what had been ate" of the separate not merely united but one, shed a light on what was death "in the day that he tree. God's im possibili ties and man's om nipotence. man's first life in his heavenly Father, and what the death was that he died "in the day" he ate the fruit of disobedience? He did not taste of bodily death for nine hundred years; but all his history shows that he was one with his Father no more, not near Him in possibility of loving Him or even of appreciating Him, but afar off, and having to be brought nigh by slow degrees and much painstaking, compassionate, forbearing nursing of the smoking flax to heat and flame through thousands of years-all things of the world's education, through multiform providence and revelation, working together to make him let his eyes observe his Father's ways, and his heart return to Him. This same death has never ceased to pass afresh-“an evil heart of unbelief” -"upon all men," every child of Adam's race who in like wilfulness "departs from the living God.” 21. The fact that union is the essential form of spiritual life in God sets in their true force of meaning the famous Scriptural expressions of faith's necessity and its efficacy— the impossibilities predicated of God, and the omnipotence offered to man: "Without faith it is impossible to please God;" "He could not do many mighty works there because to assur 22. If spiritual death was from the first disunion—the disunion Condition in which the evil heart of unbelief departed from the living ance of God, seeking to be independent of Him, to be a god to itself salvation. knowing good and evil-the death of family life which the prodigal son always suffers—it sets in a clear light the connection of never-suspended present faith with the assurance of life. All faith's forms of habitual thought, soul-possessing feeling of the Saviour's presence, conscious reasoning trust, and less conscious musing of Him in reveries of affection, spontaneous outgoings of joy in Him, or sorrow towards Him, or desire after Him—all are simply pulses, life-throbs, peaceful or agitated breathings of a new life of union to Him. And there can be no assurance of being His apart from this conscious union to Him. No first sufficient act of faith can be, in the sense assumed by some religionists-no act which, once done, assures all succeeding life in Christ to the human thinker. In the counsels, or active love, or whatever we may call it, of God, the act may be written in which the everlasting life of a human child of His began; but that is not our point of view, from which we are able to look, who know not these counsels and that book of remembrance; and in that child's comfort of faith, or sureness of God his Saviour's love, it is not any one introductory act of the heart's believing that is sufficient for his comfort, but acts of heart-faith repeated evermore in abiding continuity of union to Him—the new life, not the new birth-not Paul's one experience on the road to Damascus, but Paul's daily living unto Him who died and rose again for him. So the comfort and the conditions of faith are set down by that largely-experienced believer: "Let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which ye are called. in one body; and be ye thankful. Let the word of God dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one reasoning disuniting." another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by Him" (Col. iii. 15-17). When, like the great example of conscious faith, Peter walking on the sea to meet his Master, a believer's emotional thoughts of reliance or apprehension turn aside from Jesus, he loses hold of comforting assurance; and while he is looking with constraining feelings, not to Him, but at the things seen and temporal, he is one with Him no more, and he "begins to sink," Sceptical 23. Scepticism, as previously noticed, has its measure of primarily success partly accounted for by the psychological fact that 'believing in" Jesus has in it one element of union to Him— viz., constant beholding Him as He is-and that the "departure" in thought and inclination from that "occupation" of the mind, the suspension of that beholding, brings suspension of strength to resist evil thoughts of unbelief. Wiling away the thoughts from the facts of revelation as they are given in the Word of God, in the position, colours, proportion, shape, connection, and all that gives their real life to them in the narrative -to consider the possibility and the affirmed grounds of bold and disloyal metaphysical or other questions about some one or more of those facts taken out of connection with the whole, or about man's power to be sure about anything—all sceptical reasoning has as its first work, incidental or designed, but of exceeding importance, induced a habit of the thoughts which breaks that union of man's spirit with the things of his own Father, which is constitutionally natural to him to feel. By the suspension of that conscious contact with the things of God, the soul is put into a state in which its needed comfort of faith is withdrawn for the time, like Peter's; and, unlike his 'case, it may be the beginning of an evil heart departing from the living God. The continuity of the living by faith is broken-its consciousness is suspended—as when a child, who is to be seduced from faith in a parent, is first drawn away from that parent's presence, the sight of whom would be the answer to all insinuated doubts about him. life united alities. 24. We have before contemplated the individuality of the Heavenly life reserved for man in the inheritance of the sons of God. individuThe language of the 12th chapter of Hebrews, if not also such expressions as "the greatest and the least in the kingdom of heaven," and "the stars differing in glory," point to individual life in heaven, as well as in the preparatory spiritual life. The life being one life of all, even in its preparatory state-" as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us," is also an essential feature of it; the mystery of which is approximately comprehensible by the habits of human love's thoughts in the family life of united individualities, which is man's fullest life and best happiness, and the completest development of his nature. The education given by human relationships is to a life of united individualities, beginning with that of a child's life in his parents; followed by that of brothers in each other, of sisters together, and a varied development of their united life, when brother and sister each finds in the diverse sensibilities of the other an appreciated complement of his or her own; and culminating in the conjugal union of two separate lives making one life, which is quoted by Paul as illustrative of the one life of Christ and His Church. 25. A thought has arisen in various heathen religions, which Heathen is connected with the true faith of man's eternal union unto of a future thoughts oneness with God. It is the Hindoo thought that the end life. of good men is absorption into the being of Brahma. The notion appears in other religions as a retributive transmigration of souls, in which the good shall be elevated, as they continue good, to higher and higher states of being through a succession of lives, and the bad find themselves, unless they repent, passing through progressive degradations of existence. If we are to regard error in speculative thought as "the shadow cast by truth," we should be glad to recognise by this one the existence of a strong light upon human consciousness which could cast widely so well-defined a shadow of mistaken thought. Could the notion be regarded as a remnant of pristine true thought, it would be invaluable. Is it much less valuable regarded in the only alternative light of being a subjective necessity of our nature, that divine nature which God gave us some consciousness belonging to a being who was made in the image of God, that God is his, and he is God's, and, therefore, leading the soul to "feel after Him"? (Acts xvii. 27). Our revealed light of life and immortality-" the light which came into the world, the life of man"-assures us of a life which is oneness, and yet not absorption-a life one with God, yet contemplating Him—a life of the same well-ordered dependency of parts as we have experienced in human spiritual life under the same grace in our present state-a life of unity in individuality, of harmony in diversity-the sameness, yet variety, of all united human life, multiplying the emotions in which life consists, making them full and perfect, each filling the others with power and blessedness. |