| Strength and Beauty |
Chapter 12 |
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That is, they try to get the religion of their life into little sections by itself, as if all God wants of his children is a certain amount of formal worship in between the periods of business, struggle, care, and pleasure.
But this is an altogether mistaken thought of the meaning of Christian life. Religion is not something which is merely to have its own little place among the occupations of our days, something separate from and having no relation to the other things we are doing. Religion that can thus be put into a corner of its own, large or small, and kept there, in holy isolation, is not religion at all. It was said of Jesus in his life among the people that he could not be hid. This is always true of Christ wherever he is. He cannot be hid in any heart – he will soon reveal himself in the outer life.
The figures which are used in the Scriptures to illustrate divine grace all suggest its pervasive quality. It is compared to leaven, which, hid in the heart of the dough, works its way out through the lump until the whole mass is leavened. It is compared to a seed, which, though hid in the earth, and seeming to die, yet cannot be kept beneath the ground, but comes up in the form of a tree or a plant, and grows into strength and beauty. It is compared to light, which cannot be confined, but presses its way out into the world until all the space surrounding it is brightened. It is called life, and life cannot be kept in a corner. Indeed, grace is life – a fragment of the life of God let down from heaven and making a lodgment in a human heart, where it grows until it fills all the being.
All the illustrations of the kingdom of heaven in this world represent it as a branch of that kingdom, so to speak, set up in a man’s heart. “The kingdom of heaven is within you,” said the Master. It is not something that grows up by a man, alongside the man’s natural life, and apart from it, – it is a new principle that is brought into his life, whose function it is to infuse itself into all parts of his nature, permeating all his being, expelling whatever is not beautiful or worthy, and itself becoming the man’s real life. “Christ liveth in me,” said St. Paul, “and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith.”
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