William Gray Elmslie

“ And we, if we would be great-minded like Him, must have the same high faith, the same heavenly consciousness. We must know that this world, with its wrongs and disappointments, is not all; that this life, with its pride and pomps, is but a passing show. We must remember ever the grander world beyond, the infinite life within, and even now, amid the glare and din of time, live in and for eternity. Then we should no longer fret for a thousand trifles that vex us, we should not trouble for all the wrongs that pain and grieve us. ”

“ Dorcas might have succumbed to sorrow, and amid the ruins of her shattered home she might have flung herself on the ground in despair. She might have been moping and repining, selfishly nursing her grief, embittered, envious, and grudging to others their joy. God pity those who are; it is often that the milk of human kindness has turned sour: the fault is of misfortune. She might have made herself a burden to all around, held the world a debtor, and herself a wronged creditor. She might have insisted on being miserable—as if a long face made a lighter heart. ”

“ Death cannot ultimately be an evil, since it is universal—the consummation, climax, crown of every human life. Ah, if we had the grander majesty of soul to look at it from God's altitude, we should call death, not a defeat, but a victory, a triumph. I think sometimes that if death did not end these lives of ours, how weary they would get. Think of it—to live on for ever in the sordidness, in the littleness, in the struggle, the pain, the sin of this life of ours. ”

“ If God be love, there is certainty. I enter a master-painter's studio, and I see upon his easel a spoiled picture. I can see the majesty of the design, the beauty of the ideal, but from some defect in the pigment or flaw in the canvas, it has gone wrong; it is blurred and dim and spoiled. But not so to himself; that man will not allow the disaster to prevent him creating in visible form the vision of beauty that once charmed his heart. The man would not be a man of will and determination if he allowed the disaster to hinder him in his purpose. God is unchangeable. God is God. ”

“ No; goodness alone, with no earthly reward, is heaven, and far more precious than all worldly gain." Why? Because goodness has in it the very breath of God, the throb of His Spirit, the echo of His heart. The good man has God in him, loving him, continually with him, he continually with God; and this world lies beneath him, and death beneath his feet. Ah, the best this world can give trembles before death and the grave, and breaks and is gone! but in goodness the human heart clasps God, and doubt is at an end. ”

“ Ah, there a man's heart-faiths make his life-conduct! It was so with the poet here, when those dark, demon doubts had filled his soul, when his mind was in a ferment, when his heart was pricked and bitter within him, when he heard good men—men that were good once—round him saying, "Does God know?" and when he felt himself in a God-forsaken world, where there was nothing but each man snatching the best he could get, where everything was given over to wickedness and evil. Ah, then, such a man does not stop at theoretical atheism and scepticism! ”

“ Oh, we need that angel of death to come in, and now and then stir the pool of our family life, that there may be healing in it, that there may be blessing in it! Death, holding the hand of God through it, to those that stand by and see the sweetness of human love, the triumph of faith celestial, has a grandeur in it, like Christ's death on the cross; it hides out of sight of the people the ghastly, the doubt-creating features and elements of its external impediment—death becomes God's minister. ”

“ Some of you know what it is for a real, true joy to get into your heart. Some of you, fathers and mothers, know what it is for a very true friend to get there. You hardly know how it happened, but one came right in to the inmost being of your life, and ere you knew it, you would be nothing without him—without him loving you. Love was all joy and happiness, and has stayed there ever since. It has made you different; you have learned to love the things he loves, and the love and knowledge have brought peace. ”

“ It is painted as an abyss, dreary and boundless, wrapped in impenetrable darkness, an inextricable confusion of fluid matter, destitute of character, structure, or value, without form and void. It is the raw material of the universe, passive and powerless in itself, but holding in it the promise and potency of all existence. For over it nestles, like a brood fowl, the informing, warming, life-giving Spirit of God, sending through its coldness and emptiness {309} the heat and parental yearnings of the Divine heart, that craves for creatures on which to pour out its love and goodness. ”

“ I cannot stop to enumerate the countless knocks and calls that come to all of us, in those strange aspirations that come with the secret, tender affections, the dreams of love and truth. For God's sake, never be ashamed of them, and be true to the dreams of your youth. Do not think that Christ is part of a creed only, or belongs only to church and Sunday. No, Christ is in everything holy, everything pure, everything loving, and everything that draws your heart. I would have you understand that Christ works to get into your heart, and not into your head. ”

“ What if the sun were no brighter and no vaster than the shrunken, dim, and tarnished image of his radiance framed in a child's toy mirror? Alas for us if God and the universe were not immeasurably grander than mankind's most majestic conceptions of them! Measuring ourselves thus, in truth and lowliness, over against God, who will not say, with the poet of our Psalm, "Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me"? ”

“ Ah! it is the same kind of blunder that causes us to make so much of mere forms of words in the Church, instead of looking to see if the Spirit of God animates the man and woman and the preacher who inhabit the professed house of God on earth. There may be no teaching of religion, no prophesying of Jesus, no foreshadowing of the evangelical truths of redemption in the Book of Esther; but what it does paint for you is a majestic picture of a human heart struggling against its own weakness, rising to a grandeur that had in it the glory of Christ's own self-sacrifice. ”

“ But have not you yourselves felt something about a home atmosphere in which such reasoning moved that is contemptible and despicable? Have not you recognised its infinite pettiness and littleness? Oh, what a narrow, contracted, selfish world that woman's heart is living in! It has been all a question about Esther—Esther's life, Esther's risks, Esther's obligations, as if that were the whole. ”

“ Ah, you want to prove what the Bible is by its own light, to show that it has a right to be spoken of as a revelation and as inspired! Do not go to all the trivial Mediæval theories and doctrines about it; go to the book itself, and go to the world. It can hold its own, without claiming anything outside to buttress it up. Set the heart-life in it against the heart-life of any other religion, and you will see that it has the blue of God's heaven in it—unsullied, splendid, perfect. ”

“ That is the first step of doubt. Then comes the second, the effect upon themselves: "Therefore pride is like a golden chain round their neck; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes stand out with fatness; they have more than heart could wish. They scoff, and in wickedness utter oppression, pour forth oppressive taunt; they speak loftily. They have set their mouth in the heaven, and their tongue stalketh through the earth." ”

“ Was it cruel of Christ to allow His friend Lazarus, His dear friends Mary and Martha, to go through that period of suspense, of anxiety, of sickness, of death, and of the grave, that they might do one of the great deeds in bringing in the world's Redeemer? Oh, men and women, if God be wise, and if God be great, then must it not be that somehow or other the structure of this world is the best for God's end, and our tears, and partings, and calamities but incidents in the grand campaign that shall end in the resplendent glory of heaven? ”

“ I do believe in the dreams of youth, that come in at that window which is open heavenward in every young soul, until the dust and dirt of earth cloud it over; the dreams of romance, that stupid old people try to crush and drive out, and that the world puts its heel upon; those dreams of friendship and honour, of truth and purity, {153} to be chosen rather than worldly gain; those dreams of love, generous and tender, that shall make two lives knit together into one of exceptional tenderness and goodness. There is the breath of heaven here ”

“ Surely it is supreme wisdom to take our life in its entirety from God, to sing through the whole gamut of life, the low wailing note of sorrow as well as the bright, dancing, radiant notes of joy, rejoicing in God so that the music of our life when it is done shall be filled with the fulness of that great Heart Divine that planned and fashioned it. ”

“ In the case of Christianity men act as they would be ashamed to act in other situations. You who are so given over to alarms, so hopeless of the faith, suppose you were in a ship that has sprung a leak, how should you act? Should we find you among the timid and the hysterical, who lose head and heart, refuse to help at the pumps, fling themselves in despair on the deck, and do their best to dishearten and impede the brave men who, keeping their misgivings to themselves, toil on with bravery to try and save the lives of all? ”

“ It is to this loving industry of John's mind that we owe the preface of our story, so laden with great thoughts. It bids us, before we scan the picture of our Lord's humility, gaze into His heart, and see how that night it was filled with contending emotions of exaltation and agony, of tenderest devotion and unrequited love, and then, in the light of His inner grandeur, grief, and forlornness, measure the marvel of this wondrous act of self-abasement. He who washed the feet of those sinful men was the Son of God and the world's Saviour. ”

“ Faith is salvation; Jesus Christ hangs there on the cross as Moses lifted up the brazen serpent. The moment a man believes on Him he is saved from sin. How? Through some magical virtue in the cross, in the Body hanging there, in the blood poured out, or in the man's mental act of faith? Never, never. That Christ hanging there is the living embodiment of faith in God: His life, His death, are the incarnate declaration that all sin is error, that all sin is an outrage, that men erred and went wrong when they disobeyed God. ”

“ Away from the hum and tumult of men, no one can look at those hosts of silent stars without a subdued and awed sense of the mystery of being, of the infinite possibilities that the universe discloses. The star-studded heaven at night makes a man irresistibly think of God. It makes a man think, too, of himself. The silence, the shining, the mystery and the solemnity of the starry heavens make a man's beating, living life, as it were, become heard. A man is intensely conscious of himself. That is exactly what passed through the heart of this writer. ”

“ Nature's most exquisite embodiment of calm is the sweet fresh air that is left by a great storm; and the perfection of the Psalm's restfulness is that it consists of unrest conquered and transmuted. For the poet's peace is the result of a great struggle, the reward of a supreme act of self-subjection. "Surely I have behaved and quieted myself;" or, preserving the imagery of the words, "Surely I have calmed and hushed my soul." His submissiveness had not been native, but acquired. His lowliness of heart was not a natural endowment, but a laborious accomplishment. ”