SERMON VII.

LAWS IN THE LIFE SPIRITUAL.

(PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY ON ST. PAUL'S DAY, JAN. 25TH, 1858.)

2 TIMOTHY iv. 7.

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.

THERE are three aspects of human life: the life practical, the life intellectual, and the life mystical. The life practical is the lowest form of life which is strictly human, the lowest, that is, which is raised above the mere susceptibilities of sense. It may coexist with the higher lives, or it may be in great degree isolated from them. The life intellectual is a further advance. It no longer illustrates what a man does, but what he is. Its seat is in the thinking mind, as the seat of the practical life is in the active powers and conscience. There is yet a still higher life in man: the life mystical or religious; those susceptibilities, emotional and intel

lectual, which men experience towards the infinite, towards the unseen source of power and goodness. This form of life may perhaps be located in the exercise of a special religious feeling and in the intuition.1

1

These three forms of life, inasmuch as they exist as a general phenomenon, may be noticed in characters of every age and of every religion. They are facts of human nature, irrespective of the objects towards which they may be directed, and the principles under which they may be conducted. be conducted. Accordingly their existence may be traced also in those persons who have embraced the Christian religion, and regulated their lives by its ideas and motives; indeed, it is in them that their highest and purest form may be studied. Though the life of every Christian must to some extent show the combination of all three lives, yet it is quite possible to select instances which shall form marked examples, more

1 Compare Morell's "Philosophy of Religion," ch. ii. The following Sermon, in some degree, assumes that the religious life is not merely moral life elevated in its motives, and transferred to new objects, but that it depends upon a special form of emotion, which co-operates with a special form of intuition. The difference between this view and that of Schleiermacher would be mainly that he would regard the discovery of the laws of this life to be impossible. While it must be conceded that the discovery of laws in these faculties is really impossible if sought by the method of psychological analysis, a new mode for their discovery is suggested in this Sermon in the application of induction to the experiences of religious men.

especially of some one of the three.

Thus most

persons who look at the characters of the Apostles of our Lord, as exhibited alike in history and in their written remains, would select St. James as the example of the Apostle who, in his exposition of Christianity, laid most emphasis on the life practical; St. Paul, on the life intellectual, and St. John, on the life mystical. And in a first view, and as a hasty generalisation, there is much truth in such a statement. Broad views of this kind have their value in suggesting or directing investigation. Yet if we look more narrowly into details, we shall find that no one of these three Apostles presented these three lives in isolation. It is impossible, on the present occasion, to digress to prove this assertion of St. James and St. John; but it will be very apparent in the case of St. Paul, if we turn our thoughts in the most cursory manner to his writings. If he presents to us in the Galatians and the Romans more approach to a dogmatic view of theology than is to be found in any other inspired work; yet in the Epistles of his imprisonment, those written to Ephesus, and Philippi, and Colosse, we have the secret, inexplicable workings of the spiritual mystical life alluded to, so far as language can express them. "He hath blessed us with all spiritual bless

1 Compare this view given with proper limitations in the Rev. A. P. Stanley's very instructive "Sermons on the Apostolical Age."

ings in heavenly places in Christ."

"Ye were

"Your

sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise." life is hid with Christ in God." "That He would grant you according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, that ye being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length, and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God." It is unnecessary to multiply passages, but we may ask, could any language, even of St. John, exceed such words as these, in expressing the depth of that spiritual inner religious life which St. Paul possessed, and of which he longed that others should partake? Nor is it necessary to detain you to prove, as might easily be done, that not only may the life mystical be found in the writings of this great Apostle as clearly as in those of St. John, but that also he strives to impress on his hearers the life of Christian action as flowing from Christian principle, with an earnestness not inferior even to the stern vigour of the Apostle James. The chapter on charity, in his first Epistle to Corinth, utters, as it were, the language of St. James with perhaps more than James's

1 Eph. ii. 6; Eph. i. 13; Col. iii. 3; Eph. iii. 16—19.

acuteness; and the language of St. John with more than John's pathos.

Indeed St. Paul may be adduced as an instance of an individual in whose life and teaching these three lives were very harmoniously balanced. Looking at his character as a whole, in no other Apostle can we find a model in which we can so suitably study the three in their combination in a Christian character. And perhaps it is this very circumstance which in part has largely contributed to make his influence so much more lasting and potent than that of his brother Apostles, and so operative religiously on other ages than his own. For it is observable that, be the cause what it may, the fact is real that the Apostle Paul may be measured against the first characters in history as regards the width and the permanence of his influence. It might seem a startling assertion, and yet it would bear investigation, if we were to assert to you that the single individual in all time whom we must select as having exercised the greatest influence on the world and left the impression of his character on succeeding ages, is the Apostle Paul. If you should be at first inclined to award that proud position to some mighty conqueror, you must check yourself by the thought that the conquest has swept past like the whirlwind, and seldom left in the foundations of an improved civilisation the permanent happiness which is the