S. III. THE PRESENCE OF EVIL. ROM. VII. 21. "When I would do good, evil is present with me." PAUL speaks of this as a law. Servant as he is " to God, striving as he does to rule himself by the will of God, and to cherish always the cross and the example of the Son of GOD, and to walk by the guidance of the SPIRIT of GOD, he yet is constrained to own the presence and the working of another poweranother self within himself-a law in his members, warring against the law of his mind, and resisting the grace of CHRIST. Eighteen hundred years of Gospel light have made a vast change in the aspect, and heart, and hopes, and bias of mankind, and have trained already "a great multitude which no man can number,"1 for the eternal glory of the redeemed, but they have not perfected human nature (for the simple reason that human nature is not a piece of machinery), nor are the individual Christians of this present time less hindered than those of the Apostle's day in running 1 Rev. vii. 9. the race that is set before them: nor can we expect to be free from such secret trials as these which pained a special saint of the LORD. We are here on different ground from that which we traversed before. We were dwelling then on the bitterness of remembered sin : now we are brought face to face, as indeed most of us have been, without any preacher, continually face to face, with the present conflicts of that daily warfare, in which there is no release till the soldier rests, in humble hope of the crown of life. One who is only a poor centurion in this grand army would yet desire to be of some help to others who have to endure hardness in the good fight. Yes! and is not a priest bound to do what he can for the sick and the wounded, instead of passing by on the other side? His work surely is for suffering souls, that he may bind up that which is broken, and strengthen that which is weak. May God enable His servant for this difficult ministration, and may He Himself give us words which may echo within, and comfort which may lift us up to Him, through His own ever-blessed SON ! 1. Now first, this trial, whereof we speak, must be felt to be a personal matter; and it is well to say this at the outset, so that no one may think of another, even of a priest, as his conscience-keeper, for that he must be himself, or as his mediator, for that only JESUS can be to him. Warning, exhorta tion, counsel, encouragement, sympathy, consolation, even absolution in CHRIST's Name from past misdeeds, all this we can obtain from those who are over us in the LORD; but the struggle, the march, the ascent, the peril, the suspense, the anxiety, the constant service and strife, all this must be our own. We belong, it is true, to the militant Church, and so are not engaged in a mere desultory contest, in which every man is for himself, without any aid from or duty towards his superiors and his fellows. But, for all that, we occupy a proper post, we fill a special place, in the ranks; nor is it merely that the King's enemies are our enemies; we have adversaries on that other side who are seeking our life and while we cheer one another on, and listen together to the word of "the Captain of our salvation," we must parry and thrust for ourselves. Many men and women are witnesses in part of the way in which we quit ourselves in the battle; but who, save our own souls and GOD, can tell the real difficulties? Who knows the surprises, the sudden wild alarms, the hopes and fears, the hair-breadth escapes, the anguish of our wounds, the faintness, the fever, the awful thirst, the bursting of the heart? The Christian life is a warfare, full of such things as these-you will have to know them for yourself; you are feeling some of them already; "the influx of the perilous fight" is around you now; evil is present with you. 1 Heb. ii. 10. 1 2. And this reminds us, next, that there are two modes of viewing evil-the one from without and the other from within: the one is like the painting of an artist, the other is the confession of a soul. We are very apt to look abroad upon the lives of others in order to understand the prevalence and the power of sin; but the advancing Christian—even though a Christian-draws his sad experience from his own home-field and his own secret chamber. It is "within my heart" that I learn the workings of evil, "the wickedness of the ungodly"-a meaning of the 36th Psalm, expressed by one of our English hymnwriters : "LORD! when my soul her secrets doth reveal, And as the honest review of conscience gives us this life-like portrait of sinful man, and shows us the unholy actions and habits of our by-gone days, and the many misdoings, shortcomings, and imperfections which God beholds in us at this present hour, so also do we find in ourselves, through this scrutiny, wrong principles which, but for His mercy, might have led us utterly astray, and deadly seeds, which only His grace has prevented from growing up into poisonplants and tainting our whole character. For the infection of nature, as we are taught not only by theoThe Book of Praise Hymnal (No. 295). 1 logy, but by self-knowledge, “doth remain even in them that are regenerate." What earnest person is there here who does not repeat the Apostle's sad complaint, "The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do?" You kneel down and pray for humility, but evil is present with you, and pride rises up as a flood. You read about "the meekness and gentleness of CHRIST," and wish to follow Him; but evil is present through a -sudden temptation, and you are angry in a moment. You draw nigh to JESUS in His Holy Communion, and form fresh resolutions to be temperate and pure; but evil is present in the weakness of your will and in your lack of vigilance, and at night you have to reproach yourself for a fall. You go away from society and shut yourself up in solitude; but evil is not kept out by bolts or bars, it is present with you; in a little while it has wrought in you manner of concupiscence," "all and you return for GoD called you to your life to the place where serve Him, beseeching Him to cleanse you from your secret faults, and to renew a right spirit within you. 3. Now it is just this which makes the trial so great and so real from the Christian's point of view -this inconsistency which he feels so often between his will and his deed; between his resolution and his 1 Article ix. 3 2 Cor. x. 1. 2 Rom. vii. 19. |