169

IX.

THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS.

"And ye became followers of us, and of the Lord; having received the word in much affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost."—I. Thess. i. 6. "MAN can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness," writes the foremost man of genius and the sternest moralist of our times. I suppose that he means to describe something of the nature of the experience of these Thessalonian Christians, and probably he would acknowledge that the greatest human teacher of the lesson was the man who wrote these words. Paul's life as an apostle, preached this sermon as no moralist could preach it; and Paul's life was but a faint echo of a greater life, in which the idea was wrought out with divine completeness-the Man of Sorrows, and yet the most blessed Being in the universe, "God over all, blessed for evermore."

If a man cannot understand how far blessedness transcends and is independent of mere happiness, and how "many afflictions" may be perfectly consonant with much joy of the Holy Ghost, the joy that man shares with Christ, he may be a Christian by courtesy, but he knows little of Christian experience. Many a heathen has looked more deeply than

such an one into the mystery of godliness, and has fuller fellowship with the mind of the Lord. This is the great Christian idea of a fruitful human experience: "Much affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost."

The calling of a son of God confers no immunity from sorrow; but it opens beneath and through the sorrow, a spring of over-mastering, and to such a man as Paul, transporting joy. It is a great mistake to suppose that Paul's views of a Christian experience can be summarised in the terms, present pain, future joy. Paul while he lived, worn and burdened as he was, was the most blessed man living in the world who has left to us any record of his life; he was the man into the fellowship of whose spirit it would have been most worth your while and mine to enter; the man whose life-work was the noblest, the most faithful, the most glorious, which was done on the earth in his day; while it has left altogether the deepest mark on the higher culture and progress of our race.

The Caesars, where are they? The world has received the legacy which they handed down and has forgotten them; their names have passed into the custody of the scholars. They have left the strongest traces upon the world they ruled; their mark is stamped where it never can be effaced. The Roman empire is the matrix of European civilisation; but for the great majority of us moderns, as men, the Cæsars are little more than shades. But Paul is living among us as vivid and masterly as ever. His word at this moment is worth more to us, and can do

more for us, than all the rescripts of the masters of Imperial Rome. And why? For the same reason which makes his Master's word more profoundly a word of life to us. He pleased not himself; he ful filled a Divine commission; he followed Christ in the regeneration, "with much affliction and joy of the Holy Ghost." It is the man who can bring some regenerating power to bear on his age, who is shrined most lovingly in the homage and reverence of mankind.

It is the secret of the noblest power, the purest blessedness, and the most vivid hope-following Christ in the regeneration; that is, in the work of building up and restoring on earth what sin has destroyed. You may rush hither and thither in search of the true good of your being, and you may hew out many a goodly cistern to yourself. It is all vanity of vanities, till you have found and follow Him. Paul lives still so vividly in the midst of our modern world, because Christ, whom he followed and whose chosen organ he became, still lives, an abiding presence in our midst.

It was Christ in Paul who lived that life, and who left that record. The men, however mighty for the time they might be, who drew their inspirations from the ideas and ambitions of the hour, have vanished; or at best they have left but fossil skeletons of their lives for the curious to study; while these men, who followed Christ, in whom Christ was living, by whom Christ was speaking, are still amongst us, because Christ is amongst us; and they are to this day, though

after the flesh the world knows them no more, His chief organs of influence on mankind. Three hundred years ago Paul shook Christendom, as mightily as he shook heathenism and Judaism in his day; and perhaps the day has yet to dawn when the living influence of St. John will be fully felt in our world.

I. Followers of us, and of the Lord.

66

Brethren, be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ." "Brethren, be ye followers together of me; and mark them which walk so as ye have us for an ensample."

There is something startling, and, indeed, it seems almost awful, in such words as these. A man of like passions with ourselves, dares to propose himself as a mark for imitation to men and women who were seeking to be followers of incarnate God. But Paul does not shrink from it-" followers of us, and of the Lord"-and his life course amply sustains his words. But who dares to echo them nowwho would not shudder at the thought of setting himself forth as a model of Christian perfectness, an image of Christ, by which, being close at hand, to dim eyes the original might become the better known?

And yet the world is not without its Christ-like ones in any age; men and women who seem, not to be baptized only, but penetrated and possessed, by the spirit of the Lord Jesus. Their lives are as out of tune as was His, with the ideas, the habits, the aims, of the busy world around them; while in tune, as was His, with the life of the unseen throng

who "do the Father's commandments, and hearken to the voice of His word," here and on high. But there is nothing, on the whole, more wonderful in the world's spiritual history, perhaps, too, in the spiritual history of all worlds, than the measure in which it has been given to men and women like ourselves, with no special opportunities and advantages which are not also within our reach, to be and to live like the incarnate Son of God. The Lord does not shine on high in unapproachable isolation, like the sun in the firmament. As the first among peers, the elder brother among brethren, a bright particular star amid a cluster of constellations, He leads the marches of the great human host, with which He has cast in His lot and mixed up His life for ever. This likeness of living men to Christ is a sermon of hope to all of us, and it opens a great vision of what educated and perfected humanity shall be in Heaven.

But where are the points of likeness? Whence did Paul derive his right to say to the churches, Ye became followers of us, and of the Lord? Out of such Christian experience as he here records, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me;" and out of such passages of his history as the twelfth chapter of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians chronicles: "Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ's sake; for when I