SELECTED BY CHANCELLOR J. H. VINCENT, D.D.

[November 2.]

We read of Payson, that his mind, at times, almost lost sense of the external world, in the ineffable thoughts of God’s glory, which rolled like a sea of light around him, at the throne of grace.

We read of Cowper, that, in one of the few lucid hours of his religious life, such was the experience of God’s presence which he enjoyed in prayer, that, as he tells us, he thought he should have died with joy, if special strength had not been imparted to him to bear the disclosure.

We read of one of the Tennents, that on one occasion, when he was engaged in secret devotion, so overpowering was the revelation of God which opened upon his soul, and with the augmenting intensity of effulgence as he prayed, that at length he recoiled from the intolerable joy as from a pain, and besought God to withhold from him further manifestations of his glory. He said, “Shall thy servant see thee and live?”

We read of the “sweet hours” which Edwards enjoyed “on the banks of Hudson’s River, in secret converse with God,” and hear his own description of the inward sense of Christ which at times came into his heart, and which he “knows not how to express otherwise than by a calm, sweet abstraction of soul from all the concerns of this world; and sometimes a kind of vision … of being alone in the mountains, or some solitary wilderness, far from all mankind, sweetly conversing with Christ, and rapt and swallowed up in God.”

We read of such instances of the fruits of prayer, in the blessedness of the suppliant, and are we not reminded by them of the transfiguration of our Lord, of whom we read, “As he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistening?” Who of us is not oppressed by the contrast between such an experience and his own? Does not the cry of the patriarch come unbidden to our lips, “Oh, that I knew where I might find Him?”

The scriptural examples of prayer have, most of them, an unutterable intensity. They are pictures of struggles, in which more of suppressed desire is hinted than that which is expressed. Recall the wrestling of Jacob: “I will not let thee go except thou bless me;” and the “panting” and “pouring out of soul” of David: “I wail day and night; my throat is dried: … I wait for my God;” and the importunity of the Syro-Phoenician woman, with her “Yes, Lord, yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs;” and the persistency of Bartimeus, crying out, “the more a great deal,” “Have mercy on me;” and the strong crying and tears of our Lord, “If it be possible—if it be possible!” There is no easiness of desire here. The scriptural examples of prayer, also, are clear as light in their objects of thought. Even those which are calm and sweet, like the Lord’s prayer, have few and sharply-defined subjects of devotion. They are not discursive and voluminous, like many uninspired forms of supplication. They do not range over everything at once. They have no vague expressions; they are crystalline; a child need not read them a second time to understand them. As uttered by their authors, they were in no antiquated phraseology; they were in the fresh forms of a living speech. They were, and were meant to be, the channels of living thoughts and living hearts.—Phelps.

[November 9.]

It is the highest stage of manhood to have no wish, no thought, no desire, but Christ—to feel that to die were bliss if it were for Christ—that to live in penury, and woe, and scorn, contempt, and misery, were sweet for Christ. To feel that it matters nothing what becomes of one’s self, so that our Master is but exalted—to feel that though like a sear leaf, we are blown in the blast, we are quite careless whither we are going, so long as we feel that the Master’s hand is guiding us according to his will; or rather, to feel that though like the diamond, we must be exercised with sharp tools, yet we care not how sharply we may be cut, so that we may be made brilliants to adorn his crown. If any of us have attained to this sweet feeling of self-annihilation, we shall look up to Christ as if he were the sun, and we shall say within ourselves, “O Lord, I see thy beams; I feel myself to be—not a beam from thee—but darkness, swallowed up in thy light. The most I ask is, that thou wouldst live in me—that the life I live in the flesh may not be my life, but thy life in me; that I may say with emphasis, as Paul did, ‘For me to live is Christ.’” A man who has attained this high position has indeed “entered into rest.” To him the praise or the censure of men is alike contemptible, for he has learned to look upon the one as unworthy of his pursuit, and the other as beneath his regard. He is no longer vulnerable since he has in himself no separate sensitiveness, but has united his whole being with the cause and person of the Redeemer. As long as there is a particle of selfishness remaining in us, it will mar our sweet enjoyment of Christ; and until we get a complete riddance of it, our joy will never be unmixed with grief. We must dig at the roots of our selfishness to find the worm which eats our happiness. The soul of the believer will always pant for this serene condition of passive surrender, and will not content itself until it has thoroughly plunged itself into the sea of divine love. Its normal condition is that of complete dedication, and it esteems every deviation from such a state as a plague-mark and a breaking forth of disease. Here, in the lowest valley of self-renunciation, the believer walks upon a very pinnacle of exaltation; bowing himself, he knows that he is rising immeasurably high when he is sinking into nothing, and, falling flat upon his face, he feels that he is thus mounting to the highest elevation of moral grandeur.

It is the ambition of most men to absorb others into their own life, that they may shine more brightly by the stolen rays of other lights; but it is the Christian’s highest aspiration to be absorbed into another, and lose himself in the glories of his Sovereign and Savior. Proud men hope that the names of others shall but be remembered as single words in their own long titles of honor; but loving children of God long for nothing more than to see their own names used as letters in the bright records of the doings of the Wonderful, the Counselor.—Spurgeon.

[November 16.]

The peace of Christ, then, was the fruit of the combined toil and trust, in the one case diffusing itself from the center of his active life, in the other from his passive emotions; enabling him in the one case to do things tranquilly, in the other to see things tranquilly. Two things only can make life go wrong and painfully with us; when we suffer or suspect misdirection and feebleness in the energies of love and duty within us or in the providence of the world without us; bringing, in the one case, the lassitude of an unsatisfied and discordant nature; in the other the melancholy of hopeless views. From these Christ delivers us by a summons to mingled toil and trust. And herein does his peace differ from that which “the world giveth”—that its prime essential is not ease, but strife; not self-indulgence, but self-sacrifice; not acquiescence in evil for the sake of quiet, but conflict with it for the sake of God; not, in short, a prudent accommodation of the mind to the world, but a resolute subjugation of the world to the best conceptions of the mind. Amply has the promise to leave behind him such a peace been since fulfilled. It was fulfilled to the apostles who first received it, and has been realized again by a succession of faithful men to whom they have delivered it.

The word “peace” denotes the absence of war and conflict; a condition free from the restlessness of fruitless desire, the forebodings of anxiety, the stings of eternity.… The first impulse of “the natural man” is, to seek peace by mending his external condition; to quiet desire by increase of ease; to banish anxiety by increase of wealth; to guard against hostility by making himself too strong for it; to build up his life into a future of security and a palace of comfort, where he may softly lie, though tempests beat and rain descends. The spirit of Christianity casts away at once this whole theory of peace; declares it the most chimerical of dreams, and proclaims it impossible even to make this kind of reconciliation between the soul and the life wherein it acts. As well might the athlete demand a victory without a foe. To the noblest faculties of the soul, rest is disease and torture. The understanding is commissioned to grapple with ignorance, the conscience to confront the powers of moral evil, the affections to labor for the wretched and oppressed; nor shall any peace be found till these, which reproach and fret us in our most elaborate ease, put forth an incessant and satisfying energy; till instead of conciliating the world, we vanquish it; and rather than sit still, in the sickness of luxury, for it to amuse our perceptions, we precipitate ourselves upon it to mould it into a new creation. Attempt to make all smooth and pleasant without, and you thereby create the most corroding of anxieties, and stimulate the most insatiable of appetites within. But let there be harmony within, let no clamors of self drown the voice which is entitled to authority there, let us set forth on the mission of duty, resolved to live for it alone, to close with every resistance that obstructs it, and march through every field that awaits it, and in the consciousness of immortal power, the sense of ill will vanish; and the peace of God well nigh extinguish the sufferings of the man. “In the world we may have tribulation; in Christ we shall have peace.”—James Martineau.

[November 23.]

God is love; he who does not love him does not know him; for how can we know love without loving?… God who made all things in fact creates us anew every moment. It did not follow necessarily that because we were yesterday, we should exist to-day; we might cease to be, we might relapse into the nothingness from whence we came, if the same all-powerful hand who called us from it did not still sustain us. We are nothing in ourselves; we are only what God has made us to be, and that only while it pleases him. He has only to withdraw the hand which supports us in order to replunge us into the abyss of our nothingness, as a stone which one holds in the air falls from its own weight, as soon as the hand is unclosed which supports it. Thus do we hold existence only as the continual gift of God.…

It is not to know thee, oh God, to regard thee only as an all-powerful being who gives laws to all nature, and who has created everything which we see, it is only to know a part of thy being, it is not to know that which is most wonderful and most affecting to thy rational offspring. That which transports and melts my soul is to know that thou art the God of my heart. Thou doest there thy good pleasure.… Oh God! man does not know thee, he knows not who thou art. “The light shines in the midst of the darkness, but the darkness comprehendeth it not.” It is through thee that we live, that we think, that we enjoy the pleasures of life, and we forget him from whom we receive all these things.

Universal light! it is through thee alone that we see anything. Sun of the soul, who dost shine more brightly than the material sun! seeing nothing except through thee we see not thee thyself. It is thou who givest all things, to the stars their light, to the fountains their waters and their courses, to the earth its plants, to the fruits their flavor, to all nature its riches and its beauty, to man health, reason, virtue, thou givest all, thou doest all, thou rulest over all; I see only thee, all other things vanish as a shadow before him who has once seen thee. But alas! he who has not seen thee, has seen nothing, he has passed his life in the illusion of a dream; he is as if he were not more unhappy still, for as we learn from thy word, it were better for him if he had not been born.

For myself I ever find thee within me. It is thee who workest with me in all the good I do. I have felt a thousand times that I could not of myself conquer my passions, overcome my habits, subdue my pride, follow my reason, or continue to will what I have once willed. It is thou who gavest me this will, who preservest it pure; without thee I am like a reed, agitated by the wind. Thou hast given me courage, uprightness, and all the good emotions which I experience. Thou hast created within me a new heart which desires thy justice, and thirsts for thy eternal truth. I leave myself in thy hands; it is enough for me to fulfill thy all-beneficent designs, and in nothing to resist thy good pleasure, for which I was created. Command, forbid, what willest thou that I should do? What that I should do? Lifted up, cast down, comforted, left to suffer, employed in thy service, or useless to every one, I still adore thee, ever yielding my will, I say with Mary, “Be it unto me according to thy word.”—FÉnelon.

[November 30.]

Remember what St. Paul saith, “Our life is hid with Christ in God.” … Five cordial observations are couched therein. First, that God sets a high price and valuation on the souls of his servants, in that he is pleased to hide them; none will hide toys and trifles, but what is counted a treasure. Secondly, the word hide, as a relative, imports that some seek after our souls, being none other than Satan himself, that roaring lion, who goes about seeking whom he may devour. But the best is, let him seek, and seek, and seek, till all his malice be weary (if that be possible), we can not be hurt by him whilst we are hid in God. Thirdly, grant Satan find us there, he can not fetch us thence; our souls are bound in the bundle of life, with the Lord our God. So that, be it spoken with reverence, God must first be stormed with force or fraud, before the soul of a saint sinner, hid in him, can be surprised. Fourthly, we see the reason why so many are at a loss, in the agony of a wounded conscience, concerning their spiritual estate: for they look for their life in a wrong place, namely, to find it in their own piety, purity, and inherent righteousness. But though they seek, and search, and dig, and dive never so deep, all in vain. For though Adam’s life was hid in himself, and he intrusted with the keeping of his own integrity, yet, since Christ’s coming, all the original evidences of our salvation are kept in a higher office, namely, hidden in God himself. Lastly, as our English proverb saith, “He that hid can find;” so God (to whom belongs the issues from death) can infallibly find out that soul that is hidden in him, though it may seem, when dying, even to labor to lose itself in a fit of despair.…

Surely as Joseph and Mary conceived that they had lost Christ in a crowd and sought him three days sorrowing, till at last they found him, beyond their expectation, safe and sound, sitting in the temple; so many pensive parents, solicitous for the souls of their children, have even given them up for gone, and lamented them lost (because dying without visible comfort), and yet, in due time, shall find them, to their joy and comfort, safely possessed of honor and happiness, in the midst of the heavenly temple and church triumphant in glory.—Fuller.