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cendent glory which was, after all, the true underlying meaning of our dim solitary struggling effort of personality, and of the freedom, the reason, and the love, which we dimly recognized as elements necessary to its fulness. "Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God: and such we are. Beloved now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if He shall be manifested, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him even as He is."1 "Now the Lord is the Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit." Not that the Spirit, by constituting the personality of all, will make all alike. He will not overrule to uniformity, but develop the several possibilities of every one. They will differ, as much as and far more than, the difference,—in equal glory,—of the stars or the flowers. "There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead." 8

2

What then, once more, is our statement of human personality? It is no several or separate thing. Its essentia cannot be found in terms of distinctness. It does not, ideally or practically, signify a new, independent, centrality of being. On the contrary, it is altogether dependent and relative. It is not first self-realized in distinctness, that it may afterwards, for additional perfection of enjoyment, be brought into relations. In relation and dependence lies its very essentia. Wherever the least real germ of it exists, the true meaning of even that germinal and tentative life, as seen in what it is capable 1 John iii. 1, 2. 2 Cor. iii. 17, 18.

3 I Cor. xv. 41, 42.

of becoming, is this. It is the capacity of thrilling, in living response, to the movement of the Spirit; it is the aspiration, through conscious affinity (in such hope as is the pledge of its own possibility) after the very beauty of holiness; it is the possibility of self-realization, and effective self-expression, as love; it is the prerogative of consciously reflecting, as a living mirror, the very character of the Being of God. This, and nothing less, is the true reality of personality, that reality which we claim so easily, and so very imperfectly attain. It is only by realizing this that we ever can realize the fulness of what is, in fact, demanded and implied in the very consciousness of being a person. Personality is the possibility of mirroring God; the faculty of being a living reflection of the very attributes and character of the Most High.

Whilst, then, it may be true that philosophical thought is more or less explicitly teaching us that created personality is not, and cannot be, a really distinct or self-subsistent centre of being; that all existence must be, in its ultimate reality, not multiplicity but unity; that the particular can only reach its own proper self-realization in the way of relation, as part of the universal and the absolute: it is plain that at least to Christian theology the corresponding language is not strange, but inveterately familiar and congenial. Here at least Christian theology speaks, with simplicity and confidence, of truths which have always been clear and certain to herself. To her at least, if, on the one hand, the several self, as several, is true-in a sense and with a capacity neither conceived nor conceivable elsewhere; on the other hand, human personality, just so far as it claims to be self-centred or self-contained, is personality, so far, in contradiction against all that personality ought to mean. To Christian theology at least, the loneliness of a personality single and sundered, is a condition that of necessity belongs

not to life, but to death. If any one desires a Christian formula for the central conception of human personality, it may be gathered from the words of St Paul, "I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me." I, yet not I. Not I, and therefore I, the full, real, consummated "I," at last! Here is the real inmost principle of life and immortality brought to light by the gospel of Christ. And the words of St John are a significant comment; "We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we know Him that is true, and we are in Him that s true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life."2 And both phrases are but comments on those supreme words of the Incarnate to the Eternal, of the Christ to God; "I in them and Thou in Me, that they may be perfected into one" ... "that the love wherewith Thou lovedst Me may be in them, and I in them."8

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CHAPTER X

THE CHURCH AND SACRAMENTS

IF we turn from the side of theory to the familiar experience of the Christian life, it is sufficiently manifest that the religious character, so far as it is realized, is a character which is at every point, and for everything that it is, not self-sufficing, but dependent on Another. "It is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you"1 is a pregnant saying, representing the very principle of the inwardness of the individual Christian life.

This essential religious reality, wherever it is a reality at all, is recognized all the world over in two most universal and necessary ways. First in the habit,

whether more formulated or less, of meditation and prayer. The thoughts of a religious man, in their unconscious roaming, as well as in the efforts which they consciously pursue, turn upwards and Godwards. And such thoughts culminate in prayer;-the perfectly deliberate uplifting and effort of the self, as self, and all that it is or may be, in the way of yearning and request towards God. Such thought, and such prayer, (whether when measured by the clock they seem to occupy a longer or a shorter portion of his occupied time,) cannot be, to the religious man, a merely occasional exception, intervening in great contrast with the true inward tenor of his thought and life. On the contrary, it is they which

1 Matt. x. 20.

are the real staple, the underlying background, of all his consciousness. Outwardly he may be a busy priest, or a busy statesman, or lawyer, or tradesman, or labourer, or what you will. But underneath these things, the form of which is comparatively accidental, (though in each case, at first sight, it seems to constitute the life,) runs that steady stream of thoughtfulness and of prayerfulness to Godward; which, though it may not determine the direction of professional duty, yet determines absolutely, and dominates in the detail of every particular, the temper and the method in which duty is done. To try to imagine a religious man without meditation in any form (it may be almost infinitely informal) and without any effort of prayer,—is to try to imagine what is little else than a contradiction in terms.

Correlative with this, the secret of the inward consciousness, is that shaping of the outward conduct, that deliberate obedience of the moral life, to which we have already partly referred, because it is so inseparable from prayerfulness, that it was difficult to express the meaning of prayerfulness without language which at once, in a measure, had trenched upon the region of the outward life. Such obedience, whether in the shape of discipline strongly restraining forbidden impulses, or of duty, insisting upon what is neither natural nor easy, is obviously a rudimentary form of what in its fulness would be a life wholly conformed to, and lived by, a standard of excellence, such as certainly had not been, by nature or at first, to be found within itself. It is an element in the necessary process of learning to find, outside the personal impulses, the true focus and centre of inspiration of the personal life. It is part of that uphill work of becoming a law to oneself, in which the "law," (called "law" because conceived of, and indeed experienced, as standing outside and in contrast with the self,) in proportion as it

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