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THE HIGHER LIFE.

I.

WHAT IS MAN ?

THE SCRIPTURE sets man before us as a being whom his Maker cares to redeem at quite infinite cost. This affords to us the one true measure of the quality of our nature, and assigns its place in the scale of the Creation: it is Heaven's own answer to the fundamental question of philosophy, What is man? The Bible, happily for us, is not a book of definitions. It offers little that can be regarded as a scientific elucidation of the dark problems of Being, human or Divine. Its concern is supremely with man "in relation;" as bound in duty to the Creation around him, to his fellow men and to God. The chief part of it is history, and it is the history of Redemption. From the first act of the Divine drama in the hour of man's transgression, to the vision of the purified and perfected Creation which is unveiled in the Apocalypse, it treats of the world as the theatre of Redemption, and of man as a being born to be redeemed,

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Whatever man may be in his interior structure and constitution, by whatever stages of development he may have attained to his present goodly stature and power, thus much is clear about him to the loving students of Scripture; he is a being whose redemption, whose salvation from the pit into which moral evil steadily settles and buries itself from the light, is held on high to be worth the agony and bloody sweat, the cross and passion, the precious death and burial, the glorious resurrection and ascension, of his Redeemer, Christ.

This is the central thought of this series of discourses on the higher life, and the travail through which it is born. Some of them are more speculative; some of them are directly practical in tone; but I seek to develope through the whole of them the ground of my belief, that the redemption which is by Christ Jesus is the one key to all that man is and to all that man endures. I hold that the existence of such a world as this, and such a creature as man has come to be through sin, would be a burning stain on the government of the righteous Ruler of the universe, but for the end to which it is working through Redemption; while in the light which the gospel of God's love and mercy casts upon the world, life, with all its pain, becomes a holy and blessed culture, binding man to God in a fellowship of interest and spirit, which is destined to furnish the highest developments of being through eternity.

I can see no light about man, about his capacities, his experiences, and the possibilities of his life, except

when I regard him as a being born to be redeemed. I can see no light about life, its broken promises, its poor fulfilments, its frustrated hopes, its ideal always far up in the height, except when I regard it as a redeeming process, which earth commences in pain. and travail, but which heaven will complete in glorious joy. This is why I believe the Bible. It is a light shining for me in a dark place; it lights up man, it lights up life, it lights up God. And the light seems to be of heaven. All things within and all things around, when I look at them in the light of the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, resolve themselves into an order, which, obscure as is much of its method, and sad as is much of its aspect, I joyfully recognise as Divine. It commends itself as "of God" to the purest and justest judgment which I can frame of Divine things; while it lays the basis of an intelligent hope for myself and for the world which justifies patience and sanctifies pain. Therefore, I believe.

Rob me of this faith, give me such a world to live in as some of our wise ones are doing their best to make for us, and the only question of supreme interest would be, which is the quickest and the easiest way out of it into the everlasting night?

There are certain views as to the nature of man, as to his place in the Creation, and the way in which it becomes him to look at his life, which are kept very prominently before the eye of the intellectual world in our day by able thinkers, who state them with great force, and with an earnestness of con

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