Yet Possessing all Things

All things are yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; and ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.—1 Corinthians 3:21-23.

1. The Corinthian Christians seem to have carried into the Church some of the worst vices of Greek political life. They were split up into wrangling factions, each swearing by the name of some person. Paul was the battle-cry of one set; Apollos of another. Paul and Apollos were very good friends, their admirers bitter foes—according to a very common experience. The springs lie close together up in the hills, the rivers may be parted by half a continent.

These feuds were all the more detestable to the Apostle because his name was dragged into them; and so, in the first part of this letter, he sets himself, with all his might, to shame and to argue the Corinthian Christians out of their wrangling. This great text is one of the considerations which he adduces with that purpose. In effect he says, “To pin your faith to any one teacher is a wilful narrowing of the sources of your blessing and your wisdom. You say you are Paul’s men. Has Apollos got nothing hat he could teach you? and may you not get any good out of brave brother Cephas? Take them all; they were all meant for your good. Let no man glory in individuals.”

That is all that his argument required him to say. But in his impetuous way he goes on into regions far beyond. His thought, like some swiftly revolving wheel, catches fire of its own rapid motion; and he blazes up into this triumphant enumeration of all the things that serve the soul which serves Jesus Christ. “You are lords of men, of the world, of time, of death, of eternity; but you are not lords of yourselves. You belong to Jesus, and in the assure in which you belong to Him do all things belong to you.”

2. There is a fine wholesome exultation about the words, considering from whom they come and to whom they were addressed. We do not like to hear a rich man boasting of his wealth; but when a poor man tells us how rich he feels, that seems wholesome, and it gives us a glimpse into the deeper fact of what being “well off” really is. And that is what we have in this word of St. Paul’s to his Corinthian converts. Poor men they were, every one of them, with little enough of this world’s gear. What different ways of looking at things there are! If we could have gone to any one of the great merchants at Corinth, and asked him about the standing of the score or two of men who were beginning to be known as the followers of the new religion there, his answer would probably have been something like this: “Standing, my dear sir? They have not any! Why, there is hardly a man among them worth his fifty ounces of silver. You might buy up the whole lot of them for five talents of gold. The only man among them who has anything is that sailmaker, Agrippa, and he was almost ruined by having to break up and leave Rome on that edict of the emperor, expelling the Jews.” That was one way of looking at them. St. Paul looks at them differently. “You have everything,” he says. “I am yours, and Apollos is yours, and so is Cephas. And this world is yours, and the next world is yours, things present and things to come—‘all things are yours.’ ” It was a right royal setting forth of their position, if they could only feel it so. And they did feel it so in the main. Take that early Christian life as a whole; there is very little whining in it, very little about their poverty, or difficulties, or hardships. They rise up before us—St. Paul and his fellows, and those humble, nameless folk who gathered round them—they rise up before us out of the shadows of the past, not as weary and sorrow-laden men, treading painfully along, but as soldiers marching with firm ringing steps, and singing songs of triumph as they go.1 [Note: B. Herford, Courage and Cheer, 235.]

3. “All things are yours,” says St. Paul, and he goes on with an enumeration which has been called, not without reason, “the inventory of the possessions of the child of God,” and in which death itself figures. He sums up his enumeration by reproducing the bold paradox with which he had begun, “Yea, I tell you, all are yours.” Then he adds the ground or basis of this possession. “Ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” “All things are yours,” he says, “but ye are not your own, ye are Christ’s, and it is because ye belong to Christ and depend on Him that all things belong to you.”

I

All Things are Yours

There are days in the year when merchants take account of their stock. It is well sometimes for a Christian disciple likewise to stop and take an inventory of his possessions. The Apostle Paul here gives us such an inventory. “All things are yours.” There cannot be anything left when you have said “All things.” That is an expression which sweeps round the whole universe and takes in everything. “All things are yours.” And now the thought strikes the Apostle’s mind, “They will hardly understand how much that includes, unless I begin to specify,” and so he adds: “Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas,” representing all that ministered in word and doctrine; but that is only one department of this great possession. “Or the world.” “The world” is one of the most universal terms of which we have any knowledge. It includes the whole human family; it includes the whole of human history; it includes the whole of the habitable earth. Yet even that will not do. “Or life.” That covers the term of our existence both in this world and in the hereafter; it is all yours with all its experiences. “Or death.” If there is anything that seems to have both “all seasons” and all men for its own, it is death. “Things present”; these include whatsoever is and whatsoever has been, because whatsoever has been belongs to the present as the property of memory, just as whatsoever is belongs to the present as the property of actual daily experience. But all this will not suffice. “And things to come.” That reaches into the illimitable ages of eternity. St. Paul has been trying to make specifications, to give the items in this stocktaking. But as though discouraged with the attempt to enumerate, he has only succeeded in giving a very few of the things possessed by the disciple, but those are the most comprehensive terms possible. And—like a man who has begun taking stock in a great manufactory, and has noted five or six great articles that one shelf contains, but, as he sees the vast accumulation of goods before him, gives up in despair in the effort to complete his work—St. Paul returns to the original sentence with which he began: “All things are yours.”

What does this statement of the Apostle mean?

1. It is worth our while first to recall something of what it does not mean. It does not mean licence, the parody and libel of liberty. It does not mean selfishness, the mind which grasps or which withholds at the dictate of self-will; this is not possession, but theft; this in its effect is nothing but the hard bondage and poverty of the being. It does not mean the faintest shadow of a slur over moral distinctions—the bad dream that you can be so spiritual as to be, even for one fraction of a moment, emancipated from conscience; the lying whisper that you shall not surely die of permitted sin, because Christ died for you.

2. It does not mean a relaxation of the Divine rule of self-sacrifice. It is not spoken in order to throw the halo of the Gospel over a life which, professing godliness, is yet secretly, perhaps almost unconsciously, making itself as comfortable as possible for its own sake. It is not spoken to help us to minimize the call to bear the cross, and to serve the Lord in others, while we multiply and magnify excuses for indulgences and enjoyments which, however cultivated and refined, terminate in ourselves. The words are not given us to insinuate that, if we will but say “Lord, Lord,” with a certain fervour, we may live as those who think that a man’s “life” does “consist in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.”

3. But then, most certainly, the words have a meaning, positive and beautiful—“All things are yours.” They are spoken indeed to those, and to those only, who are not their own but their Lord’s possession; but they do not merely restate that side of truth. They give its contrast and its complement; they turn the shield quite round, to show its other face—and it is another. “You are not your own”; be sure of that, it is an immovable fact. “All things are yours”; be sure of that also; it is meant to carry to you a magnificent message, affirmative, distinct ive altogether its own. Now as then, now and for ever, the man who belongs to Christ in truth is “a child of God.” And his Father will do anything for him. Nothing of his Father’s resources shall be grudged to him. Wisdom and love may, and will, sort and sift, and in that sense limit, the things which shall be put actually into the child’s hands. But the whole wealth of the great home is his, in the sense that he is the child for whom anything shall be done, on whom no resources are too great to spend. His utmost good is watched for, always and everywhere. His Father delights exceedingly to meet his wishes, and limits the meeting of them only by the interests of the child; and He has made those interests identical with His own.

Adolphe Monod, great saint, great teacher, great sufferer, lying on a premature couch of anguish and death at Paris, collected in his bedchamber, Sunday by Sunday, a little congregation of friends; Guizot was sometimes of the number. There he addressed them, like Standfast in the Pilgrim’s Progress, as from the very waters of the last river, speaking always on his life-long theme, Jesus Christ. The pathetic series of these Adieux à ses Amis et à l’Église was gathered after his death into a volume. Late in its pages comes a discourse with the title ‘All in Jesus Christ.’ From this let me quote a few sentences: “Be it wisdom, be it light, be it power, be it victory over sin, be it a matter of this world, or of the world to come, all is in Christ. Having Christ, we have all things; bereft of Christ, we have absolutely nothing. All things are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. Well, then, what is the result for me? I am poor, it may be. Yet all the fortunes of this world are mine; for they are Christ’s, who Himself is God’s, and who could easily give them all to me, with Himself, if they would serve my interests. The whole world, with all its glories, with all its power, belongs to me; for it belongs to my Father, who will give it me to-morrow, and could give it me to-day, if that were good for me. I am very ill, it may be. Yet health is mine, strength is mine, comfort is mine, a perfect enjoyment of all the blessings of life is mine; for all this belongs to Christ, who belongs to God, and who disposes of it as He will. If He withholds these things from me to-day, for a fleeting moment, swift as the shuttle in the loom, and for reasons wholly of His own; it is because these pains and this bitterness conceal a benediction worth more to me than the health so precious, than the comfort so delightful.… I challenge you to find a thing of which I cannot say: This is my Father’s; therefore it is mine; if He withholds it to-day, He will give it me to-morrow. I trust myself to His love. All is mine, if I am His.”1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, The Secret of the Presence, 56]

A distinguished American politician in a heated campaign is said to have telegraphed to his friends: “Claim everything.” That, in a much profounder sense, is precisely the summons which Christianity makes on life.… All things are yours. The whole of life is holy. Religion is not a province but an empire. It comprehends both the church and the world, both life and death, both the present and the future. The world is one, and all of it is sacred, and it is all yours, if ye are Christ’s, as Christ is God’s.2 [Note: Peabody, Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 231.]

Amidst all my hurry, however, I had five minutes alone by my little Lena’s grave. The beautiful white coral was blackened, but the grass and shrubs had grown, and the lemon branches with their bright fruit were bending over and shading it beautifully. How naturally one looks up to the blue sky above, and wonders where the spirit is, or if she can see the mourning hearts below. She would have been running on her own little feet now, had she been on Earth; but though my heart aches for her still, I would not have it otherwise, for she was not sent in vain, and oh, what a little teacher she has been! When John took Dr. Steele to see the grave, he said: “You have thus taken possession”; and I felt we had taken possession of more through her than that little spot of ground on Aniwa.3 [Note: John G. Paton, ii. 296.]

O wealth of life beyond all bound!

Eternity each moment given!

What plummet may the Present sound?

Who promises a future heaven?

Or glad, or grieved,

Oppressed, relieved,

In blackest night, or brightest day

Still pours the flood

Of golden good,

And more than heartfull fills me aye.

My wealth is common; I possess

No petty province, but the whole

What’s mine alone is mine far less

Than treasure shared by every soul.

Talk not of store,

Millions or more—

Of values which the purse may hold—

But this divine!

I own the mine

Whose grains outweigh a planet’s gold.

I have a stake in every star,

In every beam that fills the day;

All hearts of men my coffers are,

My ores arterial tides convey;

The fields, the skies,

The sweet replies

Of thought to thought are my gold-dust;

The oaks; the brooks,

And speaking looks

Of lovers, faith and friendship’s trust.

Life’s youngest tides joy-brimming flow

For him who lives above all years,

Who all-immortal makes the Now,

And is not ta’en in Time’s arrears:

His life’s a hymn

The seraphim

Might hark to hear or help to sing,

And to his soul

The boundless whole

Its bounty all doth daily bring.

“All Mine is thine,” the Sky-Soul saith;

“The wealth I Am must thou become;

Richer and richer, breath by breath—

Immortal gain, immortal room!”

And since all His

Mine also is,

Life’s gift outruns my fancies far,

And drowns the dream

In larger stream,

As morning drinks the morning-star.1 [Note: David Atwood Wasson.]

i. Paul, Apollos, Cephas

1. Each of these names stands for a distinct species of teaching the argumentative, the eloquent, the hortatory. Let us not rely of them by; from those with whom we have least only we may glean something. Each disciple brings some bits of bread and fish. Each stone flashes some colour needed by the prism to effect the beam of perfect light. Each flower may furnish some ingredient for the common store of honey.

2. Not in vain have martyrs suffered, and fathers taught, and saints prayed, and philanthropists laboured, and reformers preached. All these too are ours. It is ours to note the martyr Ignatius weighed down with years but undaunted in heart, with a spirit soaring higher than the courage of a hero and bowing lower than the humility of a child, not daring yet to count himself a disciple, but setting his face stedfastly towards the Roman amphitheatre, thirsting to become food for the wild beasts, that haply while finding them he might also find Christ. It is ours to observe the kingly spirit of Athanasius, who through nearly half a century, resolute and unswerving, defied obloquy and persecution, maintaining with no less clearness of vision than stedfastness of purpose the faith of Christ alone against the world. It is ours also to take to heart the example of Francis of Assisi, the most gentle and loving of saints, who delighted to claim kindred with all the works of creation and all the dispensations of providence, as the sons and daughters of the one beneficent father, greeting even fire as a brother and death as a sister; who preached to a literal age in the only language which that age could understand, by a literal obedience to the precept of Christ, and went out into the world taking with him absolutely nothing, casting in his lot with the poor whom men despised, and the leper whom they abhorred! So we may go on through all the ages, feeding the fires that are within us with the fuel of these bright examples of Christian faith and heroism and love. And we shall do this without fear. We shall use these examples without abusing them. We shall not say, I am of Martin Luther, or I am of Francis Xavier, or I am of John Wesley; for Luther and Xavier and Wesley are all ours. Brilliant though their lives may have been, they are after all only broken lights of Him who is the full and perfect light.

3. Not only are all Christian teachers ours to serve us after their own kind, but the whole world of men is ours to do the same. If there is a man anywhere with a thought in his mind worth having, whether he be a historian, or a poet, or a romancer; if there is a man anywhere who has a practical idea to communicate, whether he be a statesman, or a political economist, or a sanitarian; if there is a man anywhere who knows something valuable about the earth or the heavens, we should listen to that man with all gratitude. For the whole world of such men is ours—men of thought, men of imagination, men of inventive genius men of character; all are ours, and we should not despise any one of them. They have all their place in the economy of human nature. We should not favour the historian and neglect the poet, or welcome the scientist and spurn the romancer; we should look upon each as a valuable servant ready to render us a service peculiar to himself.

Literature may almost be called the last stronghold of paganism for the cultivated classes all over the Empire. It is hard for us to sympathize with the feelings of Christians in the fifth century for whom cultivated paganism was a living reality possessed of a seductive power; who could not separate classical literature from the religious atmosphere in which it had been produced; and who regarded the masterpieces of the Augustan age as beautiful horrors from which they might hardly escape. Jerome had fears for his soul’s salvation because he could not conquer his admiration for Cicero’s Latin prose, and Augustine shrank within himself when he thought on his love for the poems of Vergil. Had not his classical tastes driven him in youth from the uncouth latinity of the copies of the Holy Scriptures when he tried to read them? Christianity had mastered their heart, mind and conscience, but it could not stifle fond recollection nor tame the imagination.1 [Note: Cambridge Medieval History, i. 115.]

ii. The World

By “the world” St. Paul here means the existing order of material things, the world we live in, the physical universe. “The world,” he says, “is yours.” The world, the cosmos, the Divine order of the created universe, with all its intricate harmonies and all its manifold glories, is ours. Our Lord is not only the Head of the Church, the spiritual creation; He is also the Centre of the Universe, the material creation. This He is, as the Eternal Word of God by whom all things came into being, in whom they are sustained, through whom they are governed. In our modern theology we almost wholly lose sight of this aspect of Christ’s Person; and the loss to ourselves is inestimable. Science and religion, in the Apostle’s teaching, have their meeting-point in Christ. There is no antagonism between them; they are the twofold expression of the same Divine energy. And therefore science, not less than theology, is the inheritance of the Christian. It is ours to roam through the boundless realms of space with the astronomer, and to plunge into the countless ages of the past with the geologist: ours to enter into the vast laboratory of nature, and to analyse her subtle processes and record her manifold results. It will be no intrusion into an alien sphere. It is a right which we can claim as Christians. It is ours because we are Christ’s.

This is our school, hung with maps and diagrams and simple lessons. There is not a single flower, not a distant star, not a murmuring brooklet, not a sound sweet or shrill; there is not a living creature, or a natural process, that may not serve us; not only by meeting some appetite of sense, but by teaching us such deep lessons as those which Jesus drew from the scenes around Him, saying, “the kingdom of heaven is like.”1 [Note: F. B. Meyer.]

1. That man owns the world who remains its master. There are rich men who say they possess so many thousand pounds. Turn the sentence about and it would be a great deal truer—the thousands of pounds possess them. They are the slaves of their own possessions, and every man who counts any material thing as indispensable to his well-being, and regards it as the chiefest good, is the slave-servant of that thing.

My friends, do you remember that old Scythian custom, when the head of a house died? How he was dressed in his finest dress, and set in his chariot, and carried about to his friends’ houses; and each of them placed him at his table’s head, and all feasted in his presence? Suppose it were offered to you in plain words, as it is offered to you in dire facts, that you should gain this Scythian honour, gradually, while you yet thought yourself alive. Suppose the offer were this: You shall die slowly; your blood shall daily grow cold, your flesh petrify, your heart beat at last only as a rusted group of iron valves. Your life shall fade from you, and sink through the earth into the ice of Caina; but, day by day, your body shall be dressed more gaily, and set in higher chariots, and have more orders on its breast—crowns on its head, if you will. Men shall bow before it, stare and shout round it, crowd after it up and down the streets; build palaces for it, feast with it at their tables’ heads all the night long; your soul shall stay enough within it to know what they do, and feel the weight of the golden dress on its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown-edge on the skull;—no more. Would you take the offer, verbally made by the death-angel? Would the meanest among us take it, think you? Yet practically and verily we grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure; many of us grasp at it in its fulness of horror. Every man accepts it, who desires to advance in life without knowing what life is; who means only that he is to get more horses, and more footmen, and more fortune, and more public honour, and—not more personal soul. He only is advancing in life, whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of the earth—they, and they only.1 [Note: Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (Works, xviii. 99).]

We shall never learn from our Lord to look with an unloving and cynical eye upon the common sights and ordinary ways of nature and of men. Who, if not He, has enabled us to read Divine philosophy in the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, in the transactions of the market, in the work of the farm, in the casting of a net, and the sweeping of a room? Where, if not in His school, have we been taught that it was a good God who made the world, and sent us into it, not to withdraw ourselves from it, not to feel scorn for it, but to study it, toil in it, and help one another to profit by our stay in it? Are they not His lessons which have redeemed the life of the peasant from dulness, as they have deepened the insight of the artist, and strengthened the heart of the philanthropist? It is inconceivable, wholly inconceivable, that He who lived and taught thus, could have meant us to understand that His truest followers were to be those who should pass through this earthly life unoccupied, uninterested, unstirred spectators, unfriendly critics, or active foes of its development and progress.2 [Note: A. W. Robinson, The Voice of Joy and Health, 109.]

2. He owns the world who turns it to the highest use of spiritual nourishment. All material things are given, and were created, for the growth of men; or at all events their highest purpose is that men should, by them, grow. And therefore, as the scaffolding is swept away when the building is finished, so God will sweep away this material universe, with all its wonders of beauty and of contrivance, when men have grown by means of it. The material is less than the soul, and he is master of the world, and owns it, who has got thoughts out of it, truth out of it, impulses out of it, visions of God out of it, who has by it been led nearer to his Divine Master. If I look out upon a fair landscape, and the man who draws the rents of it is standing by my side, and I draw more sweetness, and deeper impulses, and larger and loftier thoughts out of it than he does, it belongs to me far more than it does to him.

Hazlitt, relating in one of his essays how he went on foot from one great man’s house to another’s in search of works of art, begins suddenly to triumph over these noble and wealthy owners, because he was more capable of enjoying their costly possessions than they were; because they had paid the money and he had received the pleasure. And the occasion is a fair one for self-complacency. While the one man was working to be able to buy the picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy the picture. An inherited aptitude will have been diligently improved in either case; only the one man has made for himself a fortune, and the other has made for himself a living spirit. It is a fair occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the event shows a man to have chosen the better part, and laid out his life more wisely, in the long-run, than those who have credit for most Wisdom 1 [Note: R. L. Stevenson, Ordered South.]

Read that touching book, The Story of a Scotch Naturalist; or the life of Hugh Miller—only a workman in the Cromarty stone quarries, yet to whom that “Old Red Sandstone” belonged more than ever it did to the men for whom he worked. Or think of Thoreau, one of that little group, with Emerson at their head, who made Concord famous—Thoreau, in his little shanty in the Walden woods, cultivating just enough for life’s barest needs, and meanwhile making the wisdom and beauty of Nature and of books and men his own; loving everything around him and loved by all—the birds perching upon him as he hoed his garden, the squirrels nestling up to him as he sat reading in his woodland nooks; taking all that country-side into his mind and heart, and making it curiously his own. So that to-day, as people drive by it, they say “that is Thoreau’s wood”!2 [Note: B. Herford.]

3. He owns the world who uses it as the arena, or wrestling ground, on which, by labour, he may gain strength, and in which he may do service. Antagonism helps to develop muscle, and the best use of the outward frame of things is that we shall take it as the field upon which we can serve God.

First, then, behold the world as thine, and well

Note that where thou dost dwell:

See all the beauty of the spacious case;

Lift up thy pleased and ravisht eyes;

Admire the glory of this Heavenly place,

And all its blessings prize.

That sight well seen thy spirit shall prepare

To make all other things more rare.

Men’s woes shall be but foils unto thy bliss:

Thou once enjoying this:

Trades shall adorn and beautify the earth;

Their ignorance shall make thee bright:

Were not their griefs Democritus’s mirth?

Their slips shall keep thee right;

All shall be thine advantage; all conspire

To make thy bliss and virtue higher.1 [Note: Thomas Traherne.]

iii. Life, Death

Of the powers acting, in the world there are two, of formidable and mysterious greatness, which seem to decide the course of the universe—life and death. The first comprehends all phenomena which are characterized by force, health, productiveness; the second, all those which betray weakness, sickness, decay. From the one or the other of these two forces proceed all the hostile influences of which the believer feels himself the object. But he knows also that he is not their puppet; for it is Christ his Lord who guides and tempers their action.

1. “Life is yours.” Life is a very inclusive term. Think of the vastness of its meaning. It means here, as always, more than existence. Life has its dimensions: length and breadth, and depth and height. It is not enough to count the years that you live if you would measure your life. “The days of our years are threescore years and ten.” That is simply a line from the cradle to the grave, reaching over seventy years of length. A man may broaden out his life by broadening out his sympathy, his love, by taking into the embrace of his thought and his affection things that are outside the narrow line of self-interest. As he thinks of his neighbour; of a dying world; of the destitute and the widowed and the orphan and the oppressed; as he thinks of the Kingdom of God in all its vast out-reachings, the little narrow line of self-interest is crossed, and the territory of life broadens out to cover a vast continent of affection and of thought. When a man begins to cultivate his own nature, when he goes down into the depths of his own soul to find out what is there of sin, and by the grace of God expel it; what is there of weakness, and by the grace of God strengthen it; and what is there of selfishness, and by the grace of God displace it; when he learns, like a man who occupies uncultivated land on a farm, to plough it up, and subsoil it, and enrich the ground, so that he may yet get out of his own being the utmost possible yield for himself and his family and humanity—that man is discovering the depth that is possible to life. And when he looks beyond the present and the transient and the temporal, when he casts his eyes upward to God, when he reaches up after God, His likeness, His honour, His glory, then he is learning the height that is possible to life.

How is this abundant life ours?

(1) The world of human life is most his who knows it best, and loves it best. How shall we appropriate this world of man to ourselves and make it ours? The common idea has been to get some kind of lordship or kingship or mastership over it, or over as much of it as we can. In the old feudal times, the vassal used to kneel at the feet of the lord of the manor and swear to be “his man.” But that is a poor notion. Let us go forth into the busy world and love it; interest ourselves in its life; mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows; try what we can do for men rather than what we can make them do for us, and we shall know what it is to have men ours, better than if we were their king or master. If we look through history, whose, most of all, is the world? Not Alexander’s or Napoleon’s, but Christ’s, who made men His because He knew them and loved them. He whom we bind to ourselves by love becomes, as far as it is possible, ours. A friendship is more truly a possession than a slave. Shakespeare’s plays become ours not by our owning a handsome copy of them, but by our knowing them and loving them. Beethoven and Mendelssohn are theirs who love and understand them. So true is this, that Ruskin has pleaded that in works of art it is wrong to claim any private property or ownership. Such things belong to humanity. Would we allow that any money purchase could give a man any real right to make a bonfire of Raphael’s pictures or to break up the Laocoon into paperweights? So of character and the deep qualities of life itself. We cannot buy these things; we cannot pay a master even to teach us goodness, or uprightness, or purity. This does not mean that the teacher can do nothing—knowing here too goes for something, but it is loving that does infinitely the most. The quality we love becomes a part of us. Our friend’s nobleness, if that is what we really love in him, gives us also some touch of nobleness. We may never have much opportunity for heroism; but if, as we read of some brave, heroic deed, our heart throbs with deep loving admiration, that love by subtle chemistry transmutes the deed into our character; not the whole of it, but some touch of it, becomes a part of what we are.

(2) Life in its pleasures is ours; there is no bright or helpful pleasure that is not ours. There is no place on earth which a Christian man cannot transform and transfigure to be the very gateway of heaven. All mirth is ours, all laughter is ours, all amusements are ours. Amusement in our hands will turn to spiritual help, and to the making of manhood and womanhood. All music is ours, all poetry is ours, the drama is ours. Pleasure in its noblest, best, sweetest, truest sense belongs only to the Christian. It is only when we are really armed in Christ for the shocks and storms of life that we are safe to remember that we are made fit in Christ for a double enjoyment of its joys.

Life is really so wondrous; this fibrine, iron, sinew, bone, flesh, and colouring substance is so miraculous when alive, walking about and thinking, and the eye is so expressive, the tone so eloquent, the brain so active, and the heart so full of love and feeling, that the mere gift of life is a largess so grand and utterly magnificent that the dry bones breathed on should indeed rejoice. Man is king of the world, monarch of the air, which is his circumambient servant and puts colour in his cheeks and brightness in his eye; of the earth, which on her brown bosom bears him corn and wine and oil of gladness; of the sea, which scatters its treasures at his feet and conveys him from land to land; of the sky, which is peopled with winged servants of his; of the caverns and hollows under the earth, which yield iron and copper and lead and gold to serve him, and give him precious stones to glitter in his sight, and the treasures of antediluvian woods, laid up as coal to warm him in the winter. Of the other inferior life that shares the earth he too is master. Yoked to his chariot the swift steed bears him; and all animals, from the lion to the lamb, minister to his recreations, sports, desires, or wants.1 [Note: J. H. Friswell, This Wicked World, 269.]

(3) Life in its disciplines is ours. To say that life is pleasurable is also to say that life is sad. To say that life is full of beauty is also to say that life is full of sorrow. There are minor as well as major chords in our life. There are none of us without our struggles, none of us without our failures, none of us without disappointments, none of us without bereavements, none without our sorrows. The old theologians and prophets used to look upon life as a probation. Life is not a probation; life is something nobler than that, it is an education. If we struggle, if we fight, if we are foiled, if we are down, let us not call it our sad destiny—let us call it God’s educating force to make us perfect men or women in Christ Jesus.

Blaspheme not thou thy sacred Life, nor turn,

O’er joys that God hath for a season lent—

(Perchance to try thy spirit and its bent,

Effeminate soul and base!)—weakly to mourn!

There lies no desert in the land of Life;

For e’en that tract that barrenest doth seem,

Laboured of thee in faith and hope, shall teem

With heavenly harvests and rich gatherings rife.2 [Note: Frances Kemble.]

(4) Life in its possibilities is ours. John Stuart Mill once said that no man could think of the heights of feeling that were possible to him. Do we not believe that; do we not believe with all the future before us, and with all the love of God on our side, there are scarcely any stages which we cannot reach? There are heights of purity to climb, valleys of humility to go through, all the magnificent possibilities of service, of self-sacrifice, and of life for others, a new start, and prospects which the grace of God alone can give. When we look back upon our life, the saddest thing is not that we have been dishonest, not that we have been impure, perhaps; but the saddest thing is that our life has been so meagre when it might have been so grand, that it has been so petty when it might have been so sublime, so poor when it might have been so rich.

From the first Christianity had proclaimed that the whole life of man belonged to it. This meant everything that made man’s life wider, deeper, fuller; whatever made it more joyous or contented; whatever sharpened the brain, strengthened and taught the muscles, gave full play to man’s energies, could be taken up into and become part of the Christian life. Sin and foulness were sternly excluded; but, that done, there was no element of the Græco-Roman civilization which could not be appropriated by Christianity. So it assimilated Hellenism or the fine flower and fruit of Greek thought and feeling; it appropriated Roman law and institutions; it made its own the simple festivals of the common people. All were theirs; and they were Christ’s; and Christ was God’s.1 [Note: Cambridge Medieval History, i. 96.]

Thank God for life: life is not sweet always,

Hands may be heavy-laden, hearts care full,

Unwelcome nights follow unwelcome days,

And dreams divine end in awakenings dull.

Still it is life, and life is cause for praise,

This ache, this restlessness, this quickening sting,

Prove me no torpid and inanimate thing,

Prove me of Him who is of life the Spring,

I am alive!—and that is beautiful.2 [Note: Susan Coolidge.]

2. “Death is yours.” We had forgotten that; or we had not realized it. We had thought that we belonged to death, not death to us. We knew that we had some feeble hold upon life, but death was not thought to be a possession, desirable or undesirable. We had not added that to the catalogue of our wealth. We had never reckoned it among our treasures—among our resources. We had not realized that death is one of our opportunities.

The writers of the Epistles make little or nothing of physical death. They bear two great points in mind, (1) our present standing, and (2) our ultimate standing in the day of the Lord. We persist in walking by sight and esteeming this existence Life, and the end of this existence Death; whereas, rightly viewed, this existence is but a stage in mortality, and so-called Death a step onwards to the fulness of immortality. Each one of us is, as it were, a limb of God, with the potentiality of perfection, and gradually, through the experience of multiform error, to be developed into the full exercise of spontaneous and joyous activity.1 [Note: R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 20.]

There are two very striking engravings by a great, though somewhat unknown, artist, representing Death as the Destroyer, and Death as the Friend. In the one case he comes into a scene of wild revelry, and there at his feet lie stark and stiff corpses in their gay clothing and with garlands on their brows, and feasters and musicians are flying in terror from the cowled Skeleton. In the other he comes into a quiet church belfry, where an aged saint sits with folded arms and closed eyes, and an open Bible by his side, and endless peace upon the wearied face. The window is flung wide to the sunrise, and on its sill perches a bird that gives forth its morning song. The cowled figure has brought rest to the weary, and the glad dawning of a new life to the aged, and is a friend.2 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

Lo! all thy glory gone!

God’s masterpiece undone!

The last created and the first to fall;

The noblest, frailest, godliest of all.

Death seems the conqueror now,

And yet his victor thou:

The fatal shaft, its venom quench’d in thee,

A mortal raised to immortality.

Child of the humble sod,

Wed with the breath of God,

Descend! for with the lowest thou must lie—

Arise! thou hast inherited the sky.3 [Note: John Banister Tabb.]

(1) To the believer death is not a step into the dim unknown, but a step into a region lighted by Jesus. Death is not the end of something; it is not an enemy that crushes us; it is not a loss, a defeat, a calamity; it is a possession, a weapon in our armoury, an opportunity, a resource. It is not a putting off, but a putting on.

At end of Love, at end of Life,

At end of Hope, at end of Strife,

At end of all we cling to so—

The sun is setting—must we go?

At dawn of Love, at dawn of Life,

At dawn of Peace that follows Strife,

At dawn of all we long for so—

The sun is rising—let us go.1 [Note: Louise Chandler Moulton.]

(2) Death is not the cessation of activity, but the introduction to nobler opportunities, and the endowment with nobler capacities of service. To become dead is an experience which is part of life. It is an experience in life’s upgrowth and development. There are many whom we know, who always seem to have been thwarted; who seem to be disinherited; who do not seem to have come into their rightful place or possession. If we look at their lives, from the cradle to the certain grave, we cannot understand them. There seems no accomplishment; there seems no real purpose; there seems no achievement worth the travail. But we are not to look at any one, viewing him merely from the cradle to the grave. Death is our interpreter. It alone gives the true perspective; and when death comes to such as we have spoken of, it is seen to be the endowment of the disinherited. Life, its meaning, its purpose, its wealth, is for them beyond the grave. It is beyond the grave for all of us; but it is clearly seen to be so for them. Death is the endowment of the disinherited.

The shutters are drawn and the people talk in whispers and walk softly, an immortal soul is passing out of time into eternity. His has been a commonplace life, but he has been faithful, and now he has reached the end of the journey. The sunset has come and the shadows of evening are thickening. Between two worlds hangs the veil which separates time from eternity. On this side the veil it is a house of sorrow. Loved ones are in tears and speak to each other in broken sobs and cry out to God for comfort.

But on the other side of that thin veil the scene is far different. It is the hour of coronation. There are no tears, no sobbing grief and heart-broken prayers, but the chant of victory, for a faithful soul is coming to its own. All the pomp and circumstance of heaven centre there. The face of the pilgrim has lost its death pallor and the eyes shine with the light of expectant immortality. God is once more placing the crown of life on the brow of death.1 [Note: J. I. Vance, Tendency, 229, 233.]

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—

He hath awakened from the dream of life—

’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep

With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife

Invulnerable nothings.2 [Note: Shelley, Adonais, xxxix.]

(3) Death does not separate and isolate us, but unites us to Jesus and all His lovers. Those we have lost—we have not lost them. Death is the guardian of our treasures. Here they would have faded, faded, faded. Do we ever think, that if friendship were to last for ever on this earth of frailty, the last horror would come—the hearts even of friends would get worn out? This mortal must put on immortality before life can stand its own strain and the glory of its meaning; the life we learn on earth is too high for earth; death alone can release it to its fit dominion. And death is the guardian of your hidden treasures and the keeper of your secret wealth, of all the unknown that lies beyond the veil for us—not only those whom we have let go, but those we have never known, whom God has made and is keeping for us. Our treasures, some of them, are here; but we will not know how rich we are till we have passed beyond.

I cannot think of them as dead

Who walk with me no more;

Along the path of life I tread

They have but gone before.

The father’s house is mansioned fair

Beyond my vision dim;

All souls are His, and, here or there,

Are living unto Him.

And still their silent ministry

Within my heart hath place,

As when on earth they walked with me,

And met me face to face.

Their lives are made forever mine;

What they to me have been

Hath left henceforth its seal and sign

Engraven deep within.

Mine are they by an ownership

Nor time nor death can free;

For God hath given to Love to keep

Its own eternally.1 [Note: Frederick Lucian Hosmer.]

I have no fear lest my Saints should be far from me in their upper heaven; God’s hierarchy is the hierarchy of conjoining love, and His great ones have their place in power to draw near even to the very least. The heights of heaven must be close to every lower place, as close as heart and heart may be.2 [Note: A Modern Mystic’s Way.]

iv. Things Present, Things to Come

All things are yours, says the Apostle, in the spiritual order (whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas) and in the terrestrial order (the world); the great powers of the world are yours (life and death); now he adds a third pair in relation to time (things present, and things to come). “Things present” comprehends all that can happen to us in the present state of things, and as long as we form part of it; while “things to come” denotes the great expected transformation, with its eternal consequences.

“Or things present, or things to come.” How quickly the incidents of daily life are gliding over us! and as they pass, to our weak gaze they steal from us so much that we hold dear—the elastic step, the clear vision, the strong nerve, the beloved friend, the hard-earned gold. Sometimes they manifestly enrich us. For the young there is a constant sense of acquisition. One good and perfect gift follows swiftly on the heels of another. But when we have crossed the summit of life’s hill there is an incessant consciousness of loss. Yet in God’s sight, and in the spiritual realm, these distinctions vanish and pass away as mists under the touch of the sun: and we find that all incidents come to bless us; all winds waft us to our haven; all tribes bring their tribute into the throne-room of our inner being. We are not the creatures of circumstances, but their masters, their kings, their lords. All these things are the servants and tutors appointed by our Father, to wait on and minister to us, His heirs.

1. “Things present.”—Our present lot is one of the “all things” which belong to us. We may not like it; we may greatly desire to be quit of it; we may be looking forward with intensest eagerness to a happier day, when our griefs or our difficulties shall no longer be with us. But these, remember, are from God to us, and God’s love is in them. Let us not be anxious merely to rid ourselves of them. Let us dig in them, and we shall find treasure.

We read some time ago, in an Australian paper, of a nugget worth a thousand pounds. In its picture a very ungainly block it looked. Most of us might have fallen in with it and heedlessly passed it by, or cast it aside as something in the way. The “digger” knew better, and he and his “mate” made a little fortune in a day.1 [Note: J. Walker of Carnwath, Essays, Sermons, and Memoir, 318.]

We can be only in the present, but not in the present without a past, nor in the present without a future. We need a present stretching from an eternal past to an eternal future. In Jehovah alone is such a past, present, and future found (Psalm 90:1-2). Jehovah hath created the heavens and the earth. We are here, and here as an integral part of them. “Bless the Lord, all his works, in all places of his dominion: bless the Lord, O my soul.” We are connected in that verse with all places of His dominion—everything, everywhere, my soul. Yet the foundations of our being, of our eternity, are in God—our possibility in His omnipotence—our futurition in the purpose of His will, as our actuality in our generic creation, and our individuality from Him who calls the generations from the beginning. So of men—so of our salvation, omnipotence, purpose, creation in Christ. There’s something there that I’ll no’ spin out; it could be spun out into a long thread.2 [Note: “Rabbi” Duncan, in Memoir of John Duncan, 498.]

2. “Things to come.”—The dim, vague future shall be for each of us like some sunlit ocean stretching shoreless to the horizon; every little ripple flashing with its own bright sunshine, and all bearing us onwards to the great Throne that stands on the sea of glass mingled with fire.

(1) All the future that hope anticipates or fear apprehends is ours, and we can safely leave it with Him. We are like a cathedral that has been building through ages; the scaffolding is round about it, obscuring its beauty and symmetry, but essential to the erection of the towering spires. But, when the whole thing is completed, the scaffolding will be torn down and burnt up, and the grand building will appear in perfection.

(2) The Hebrew youth who, eager and buoyant, full of joyous young life and aspiration, left his father’s home to seek his brethren in the distant pasture-lands, had no dream of “things to come” for him—no dream of his sale as a bondsman, of his exile, of Potiphar’s house, of the false accusation, of the fetters and the dungeon, of the hope deferred and the sudden release, of the unexpected exaltation, of the reunion to his family in circumstances baffling all human calculation, and fraught with a history so grand, with an influence stretching down through all time and abroad over all lands. Not in his wildest imaginings did that future of wonders ever open up before him. But as you see the roll of his destiny unwind, as event follows event in the marvellous career, you recognize how truly all that came to him was his, and for his sake—chastening, sifting, humbling, purifying, preparing him alike for an earthly or a heavenly future. So is it for us all, if we are truly of the seed of Jacob.

To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mirrored in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is turned to stone. This has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate and futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with their perfect creed of predestination, were turned to stone; the modern sociological scientists (with their excruciating Eugenics) are turned to stone. The only difference is that the Puritans make dignified, and the Eugenists somewhat amusing, statues.1 [Note: Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World.]

The man who believes in God and in His loving providence need not darken his days by fretful cares and dread of evil to come. Believing in God’s purpose of love with him, he knows that the future cannot bring anything contrary to that. If there are any trials and sorrows in that time to come, he knows that the Father’s grace is sufficient for him through them all. If there are temptations, he knows he will not be tempted above what he can bear. His times are in God’s hands. If his days are to be long, the more time to worship and to witness. If they are to be few, the greater need to redeem the time now. If they are to be lived through much tribulation with darkness and storm, with a long stretch through the valley of the shadow, the Shepherd of his soul is ever with him. He will ask to see the heart of good in every evil that touches his life, the joy that slumbers in every pain, and in the hour of the final passion will commit his soul to God.1 [Note: Hugh Black, Comfort, 179.]

“Why wilt thou be concerned beyond to-day,” asks Luther, “and take upon thyself the misfortunes of two days?” Put thus, with Luther’s sanctified common sense, it is foolish from any point of view, but it is more than foolish from the point of view of faith.2 [Note: Ibid. 191.]

II

Ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s

All things are yours, says St. Paul—with one exception. That exception is a very startling one. All things are ours—but ourselves! That is really what the Apostle means when he says, “All are yours, and ye are Christ’s.” And in this matter we are in precisely the same position as the Lord Jesus Christ. While all things are His, He is not His own any more than we are. “All things are yours, and ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” There is no one in this universe his own but God the Father. He is the only absolute Being; all the rest of us belong to some one else. Christ is God’s and we are Christ’s. Christ belongs to God by right of generation. “Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.” We belong to Christ by right of purchase. “Ye are not your own; for ye were bought with a price.”

1. It is because we are not our own, but Christ’s, that all things are ours. How should we, poor creatures of yesterday, have all things if it were not for our connection with Christ? Has not God given all things to Christ? As the Word has it, “The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand.” And how should we have all things, if they were not given us by Christ, whose we are?

2. We are truly our own only when we are Christ’s. The highest truth ever lies in the completest paradox. There are many things that we never truly possess till we give them up. It is only when we relinquish the world that we possess it. It is only when we let pleasure go that we obtain it. It is only when we give money away that we enjoy it. It is only when we lose our life that we find it. And it is only when we become Christ’s that we become our own.

Lord, Thou art mine, and I am Thine,

If mine I am; and Thine much more

Than I or ought or can be mine.

Yet to be Thine doth me restore,

So that again I now am mine,

And with advantage mine the more,

Since this being mine brings with it Thine,

And Thou with me dost Thee restore:

If I without Thee would be mine,

I neither should be mine nor Thine.

Lord, I am Thine, and Thou art mine;

So mine Thou art, that something more

I may presume Thee mine than Thine,

For Thou didst suffer to restore

Not Thee, but me, and to be mine:

And with advantage mine the more,

Since Thou in death wast none of Thine,

Yet then as mine didst me restore:

O, be mine still; still make me Thine;

Or rather make no Thine and mine.1 [Note: George Herbert.]

3. All things are ours to serve us, and we are Christ’s to serve Him. Service is the golden thread that runs through all creation, making it one. The ancient fable told that all things were bound by golden chains about the feet of God: and surely the real deep connection of which the fable spoke is to be found in the service which each lower order of creation renders to the one above, the service becoming rarer and more refined as the pyramid of existence tapers to a point.

Our Lord was also the servant of God, and we are His servants. We are, of course, His, in the sense of being owned by Him: He made us; He bought us; He claims us. But how many of us resemble Onesimus, the runaway slave of Philemon!—who probably bore the brand of his master, and had certainly been purchased by his gold, but who withheld from him his service, following the bent of his own wayward will, and herding with the most abandoned of the populace that rotted in the criminal quarters of ancient Home. We too have been bought by the Lord, at priceless cost; but we are far from serving Him with the same sort of loyal and whole-hearted ministry as that with which He, in His unwearied solicitude for us, serves the Father.

4. Whenever we get into this right attitude towards our Lord Jesus, we shall find that all things begin to minister to us in a constant round of holy service. Each event or circumstance in life becomes an angel, laden with blessed helpfulness, bringing to us the gifts of our beloved Master. That title, “Rabboni, Master,” the sweetest name by which the prostrate soul can address its Saviour, does not degrade or demean it; but enables it, like the babe Christ, to be the recipient of costly presents sent from afar—gold, frankincense, and myrrh. If we have been chafing at our lot, thinking that time and things are robbing us, we may be sure that we are not as we should be towards Christ; and the true cure will be to get as a slave to His feet. Then all things will be ours in this deep sense.

5. “And Christ is God’s.” If Christ is at the right hand of God, then the world is ours. The world is transformed from a prison into a home, and life from a dream into a reality. All that we know and love and strive for is given permanence and worth.

To see the glorious fountain and the end,

To see all creatures tend

To thy advancement, and so sweetly close

In thy repose: to see them shine

In serviceable worth; and even foes,

Among the rest, made thine:

To see all these at once unite in thee

Is to behold felicity.

To see the fountain is a blessed thing,

It is to see the King

Of Glory face to face: but yet the end,

The deep and wondrous end, is more;

In that the Fount we also comprehend,

The spring we there adore:

For in the end the fountain is best shewn,

As by effects the cause is known.

From one, to one, in one, to see all things,

Perceive the King of Kings

My God and portion; to see His treasures

Made all mine own, myself the end

Of His great labours! ’Tis the life of pleasures

To see myself His friend!

Who all things finds convey’d to Him alone,

Must needs adore the Holy One.1 [Note: Thomas Traherne.]

Yet Possessing all Things

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