John 10:3-5 To him the porter opens; and the sheep hear his voice: and he calls his own sheep by name, and leads them out.… God supplies us at birth with a certain amount of animal vitality, and with certain faculties tending to various kinds and degrees of good in the universe, and by means of these we are to draw our life from the treasury of the creation and from God. Our success during our stay on the earth is to be measured by the amount and kind of life we derive from the fountains that flow from the Infinite fulness. Life may be increased. Even in the physical department we may have it "more abundantly" by obeying the plain conditions. We are not fated to a short allowance or a fixed amount, but are endowed with the power of growing, and are tempted by a large, unmeasured possibility. Through exercise, and the proper choice and economy in food, we not only keep well, but we enlarge the stream of vitality. And the law by which a man purifies and refreshes the currents of his blood, makes the eye clean, the tendons taut, the nerves calm, the chest capacious, the step elastic, and knots the muscles by discipline to such sturdiness that, though once they were tired with a slight burden, now they will lift nearly half a ton, is a law that can be traced up into the mental and moral regions, and be seen to govern the spirit as well as the frame. 1. Life may be increased. Many try to increase it by intensity. There is a story of an Eastern monarch who had been a noble ruler, but who received a message from an oracle that he was to live only twelve years more. He instantly resolved that he would turn these to the most account, and double his life in spite of destiny. He fitted up his palace gorgeously. He denied himself no form of pleasure. His magnificent gardens were brilliantly lighted from sunset to sunrise, so that darkness was never experienced within the circuit of his estate; so that, when. over he was awake, the stream of pleasure was ever flowing, and even the sound of revelry was never still. Thus he determined to outwit the oracle by living nearly twenty-four years in twelve. But at the end of six years he died. The oracle foreknew and made allowance for his cunning scheme. No doubt, on his death bed, the monarch saw the vigour and despotism of the laws of life, with which it is vain for finite art and will to wrestle. The story is true in the spirit, though it may be fable in its details. What is gained in intensity is lost in time. You cannot "have life more abundantly" by making the soul crouch down into the body, and diffusing it through the fleshy envelope, so that it loses the acquaintance with its own higher realm in the added zest of mortal pleasure. There is the most tragic waste of faculty. The end of such effort is disgust, weariness, and, in the inmost being, the sense of emptiness, folly and unrest. 2. There is another kind of life that we may call broad. Life is increased in this way by putting out more faculties into communication with nature and society. In fact, it is by the unfolding of faculties that all additions to life are received. Each one of our powers is a receptacle for some element of the Divine good, but it is not like a goblet, and it does not receive as water is poured into a vase; its method is rather that of a seed. When put into proper relations with its objects it germinates and absorbs from the currents and forces outside of it, and transmutes them into its own quality of substance. It is inspiring to think how some natures live broadly enough to take in elements of growth from the farthest quarters of the visible universe There are great naturalists living now that have received nutriment from the lowest discovered stratum of the earth and from the most distant patch of milky light in immensity. This is a method of receiving life "more abundantly," and in saying now that, according to the Christian wisdom, it is not the highest way, I am not going to criticize it but to commend it. I delight to think of men like Humboldt and Arago, Herschel and Agassiz, and to see in them that the riches of infinite truth are not wholly wasted on us; that God does not rain His wisdom through all our air and pack His treasures beneath our soil entirely for nothing, so far as the enlarging of the boundaries of human spirits is concerned. 3. Yet this life, though broad as we have thus interpreted it, may be superficial. The true abundance comes not from intensity, and not alone from the number of objects with which we are in communion, but from depth. A life is rich in the proportion that it is deep; and it is deep to the extent that the moral and spiritual sentiments are active and healthy. The spirit that has a sense of justice quick and large, and lives by it in relation to his fellows, and tries to organize more of it through himself in society, lives deeper than the man of intellect and infinitely, deeper than the man of pleasure. The affections are richer than the money making and the truth seeking capacities; and the richest affections are those which bind us consciously to the infinite. Of course, a thoroughly proportioned life will have both breadth and depth; but we must not fail to see that depth is the essential thing. That is connected with religion; that every mind may have. It is offered to you and me independently of our strength of mind or fulness of learning. Astronomy we may not have time to study, or ability to master; but God, who made all worlds, is as near to this one as to any, and as ready to fill our spirits as those that live in the most distant or brilliant star. And the religious life may be developed independently of all our learning. How much knowledge do you need to convince you that you ought to obey conscience? How wide acquaintance with literature to prove to you that you ought to bridle your selfishness, and trample a foul passion beneath your will? How great familiarity with libraries to assure you that a disposition of prayer and trust brings back a rich reward through inward harmony and a sense of peace? This is the deep life, and we may have it though we be hindered, though we have little time for the cultivation of mental powers, and the faculties that make life graceful. (T. Starr King.) Parallel Verses KJV: To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice: and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. |
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