conceive nothing of the mysteries of godli- SPIRITUALITY. Spirituality! This is nothing else than a divineness of soul, a rising above things material, gold and lands and raiment, and living for the soul in its relations to time and eternity. GOD is called a SPIRIT because there are characteristics in all material things which separate them from perfection. The word Spirit is the ideal for the everlasting. It is an embodiment of love, and of thought, and of truth, and of life, and hence is felt to be immortal. The spiritual man is hence a soul not wedded to dust, but to truth, love, and life. To be spiritually-minded is life. Vintage Gleanings (From the American Pulpit). STEWARDS-not Masters. which is only of sense. If thou talk to a mere carnal man of Divine things, he perceiveth not the things of GOD, neither indeed can do so, because they are spiritually discerned. And, therefore, no wonder if those things seem unlikely, incredible, impossible to him which the believing Christian doth as plainly see as his eye doth any sensible thing. What a thick mist, yea, what a palpable and more than Egyptian darkness, doth the natural man live in! What a world is there that he doth not see at all, and how little doth he see in this, which is his proper element! There is no bodily thing but the brute creatures see it as well as he, and some of them better. As for his eye of reason, how dim is it in those things which are best fitted to it! What one thing is there in nature which he doth perfectly know? What herb, or flower, or worm that he treads upon is there whose real nature he knoweth? No, not so much as what is in his own bosom; what it is, where it is, or whence it is that gives being to himself. But for those things that concern the best world, he doth not so much as confusedly see them, neither knoweth whether they be. He sees no whit into the great and awful majesty of GOD. He discerns Him not in His creatures, filling the world with His infinite and glorious presence. He sees not His wise providence overruling all things, disposing all casual events, ordering all sinful actions of men to His own glory. He comprehends nothing of the beauty, majesty, power, and mercy of the SAVIOUR of the world, sitting in His human nature at His FATHER's right hand. He sees not the unspeakable happiness of the glorified souls of the saints. He sees not the whole heavenly commonwealth of angels (ascending and descending to the behoof of GOD's children) waiting upon him at all times invisibly, and the multitude of evil spirits passing and standing by him to I never loved those salamanders that are tempt him unto evil; but, like unto the never well but when they are in the fire of foolish bird, when he hath hid his head so contention. I will rather suffer a thousand that he sees nobody, he thinks himself alto-wrongs than offer one. I will rather suffer gether unseen, and then counts himself alone when his eye can meet with no companion. It is not without cause that we call a mere fool a natural, for however worldlings have still thought Christians fools, we know them the fools of the world. The deepest philosopher that ever was is but an ignorant man to the simplest Christian. For the weakest Christian may by plain information see somewhat into the greatest mysteries of nature, because he hath the eye of reason common with the best; but the greatest philosopher, by all the demonstration in the world, can Our children, relations, friends, honours, houses, lands, and endowments, the goods of nature and fortune, nay, even of grace itself, are only lent. It is our misfortune, and, it may be added, our sin, to fancy they are given. We start, therefore, and are angry when the loan is called in. We think ourselves masters when we are only stewards, and forget that to each of us it will one day be said, "Give an account of thy stewardship." Bishop Robert Horne (of Winchester). STRIFE-Love of. a hundred than inflict one. I will suffer many ere I will complain of one, and endeavour to right it by contending. I have ever found that to strive with my superior is furious, with my equal doubtful, with my inferior sordid and base, with any, full of unquietness. Bishop Joseph Hall (of Exeter). STRIVE-to Enter in at the Strait Gate. I am persuaded that what we have to aim at is not to accomplish any certain thing, to do a certain good; but, in whatever position we are placed, to make it minister to heavenly mindedness, to spiritual conformity. This is hearing the Shepherd's voice; so may an abbreviated, maimed, and persecuted life still fulfil itself in bearing, in witnessing, which may be enough for their existencethe rest above. Robert Alfred Vaughan. The highest life we all can reach, No barriers are found here; Both rich and poor may climb this hill, And reach this temple fair. To follow CHRIST with patient zeal Where'er His love may lead, To kiss the Hand that brings the rod Is to be great indeed; Where'er we are to hold the truth And witness to its power, Hopeful and patient through the night, And bright when dark clouds lower. W. Poole Balfern (The Pathos of Life). STRIVING. Who truly strives? they asked. Then one replied: The man who owns no other goal beside Archbishop Trench (Eastern Moralities). STUDY. Study is a sovereign remedy against the troubles of life. There is no vexation which an hour's reading cannot mitigate. Montesquieu. STYLE or Language of the Bible Ennobling. SUBMISSION-to the Will of GOD. SUFFERING-Divine, before Calvary. If we think of human suffering never touching our GOD till it touched CHRIST made Man, we do dishonour to His infinite goodness and mercy, and rob the Godhead of its best attributes. From the very earliest glimpses of the true GOD down through all history, we see the type and shadow of the Cross of Calvary not to be mistaken. How 66 else could it have been said of the FATHER, long before, that He was afflicted in the people's affliction, or that He bore with their backslidings as a man bears with his son, or that He was grieved with their stubborn heart in the wilderness, or that He sent His messengers to strive with them till He was weary? Surely here at every step we are met by the love which acts through sacrifice, and we see GOD the FATHER also carrying our iniquities in the burden of sorrow. Wherever we look, in fact, at GOD's dealings with fallen man, we are conscious, as it has been said with undeniable truth, we are conscious of a cross unseen standing on its undiscovered hill, far back in the ages, out of which came sounding always, just the same deep voice of suffering love and patience that was heard from the sacred hill of Calvary." And as it was with the feelings of the FATHER, so it is with the working of the SPIRIT. For how else can it be said with any truth that we grieve the HOLY SPIRIT of GOD by our sins, or that He is vexed and troubled, and striveth with us with groanings that cannot be uttered? How is this so very different from the struggle of Gethsemane or the burden of the SAVIOUR's life? And if this is all the same, if we see a GOD from everlasting to everlasting grieved by our sins and suffering for our evil ways, we the SON of GOD afresh if we are living a bad cannot find it hard to see how we crucify and sinful life. These SYMPATHY-from Humanity Necessarily Weak. earth by privation and suffering. harden the character but often leave the heart soft. If you wish to know what hollowness and heartlessness are, you must seek for them in the world of light, elegant, superficial fashion, where frivolity has turned the heart into a rock-bed of selfishness. Say what men will of the heartlessness of trade, it is nothing compared with the heartlessness of fashion. Say what they will of the atheism of science, it is nothing to the atheism of that round of pleasure in which many a heart lives, dead while it lives. Rev. Frederick W. Robertson (Sermons). SUPERNATURAL-The. The supernatural is more extraordinary and remarkable for the miraculous effects it has produced in the intellectual than in the natural kingdom. Miracles that can be explained lose their essence. Zimmermann. SUPREMACY-Moral. Moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments and not ruins behind it. J. R. Lowell. SWEETNESS. Impatience embitters hearts, but sweetness brings them back again. Madame de Maintenon. SYMPATHY-Divine. Or sorrow in our path appear? Assail our LORD with thoughts of sin, excused the offence. 66 Human sympathy, we must remember, may, and in many cases does, from its very fulness, become weakness. The sympathy of a mother for her child will too often prevent her from inflicting necessary punishment. The sympathy of the benevolent for the poor and suffering may, without caution, tend to the encouragement of vice. Sympathy is essentially a woman's virtue, but the quickness of feeling which overpowers judgment is also a woman's infirmity. There is, in fact, no virtue which more powerfully demands law and limitation before it can safely be yielded to. But the dignity of our blessed LORD's sympathy is as remarkable as its depth. He sympathised with the shame of the sinner whom He pardoned, but He never "Thy sins are forgiven thee; go and sin no more,' are words which have touched the human heart, and worked repentance and amendment of life in thousands, since the day they were first spoken, but no one could ever claim them as an encouragement to sin. The dignity of our LORD'S sympathy was, in fact, shown by His obedience to the law, which bade Him exhibit GOD's perfection. He never allowed one virtue to interfere with another. Mercy and peace might meet together, righteousness and peace might kiss each other, but the one never entrenched upon the province of the other; if it had, there would have been no perfection. And if we, like CHRIST, would truly and rightly sympathise; if we would in our degree bear the griefs and carry the sorrows of our fellow-creatures, without any weakness of judgment or absence of due proportion, we must view those sorrows as CHRIST viewed them, and soothe them in His Spirit. To relieve all anguish, to remove all pain, that is not to be our object. If it were, we might well in sorrow close our doors to the suffering, and, shutting out their misery from our view, give ourselves up to our own enjoyment. For sympathy is pain. It is not true sympathy unless it is pain. When we feel with and for another we must in a measure suffer, and, looking at the sad amount of wretchedness in this fallen world, we may perhaps at first sight be pardoned if we deem it better to be without sympathyneither to require it for ourselves nor to offer it to others. The loss on the one side may, we may well think, be counterbalanced by the gain on the other. Elizabeth Sewell (Amy Herbert). I TALENTS Great, Abused. None do the devil more service in his oppo sition to the Church of GOD than men of great parts who are enemies to godliness. A proud heart and a learned brain are Satan's warehouses and armories, the forge where he shapeth all his Cyclopical weapons against Divine truth. Edward Reynolds (Bishop of Norwich). TALENTS-to be Devoted to GOD. Man has a hand to write as well as a tongue to speak; and GOD has employed the pen of the ready writer as well as the tongue of the learned, to convey a word in season to him that is weary Rev. David Bogue, D.D. TEACH-Aptness to, the First Qualification for a Church Ruler. The first branch of the great work incumbent upon a Church ruler is to teach, a work this for which none is too great or too high. It is the work of charity, and charity is the work of Heaven, which is ever laying out its influence upon the needy. Yea, it is charity of the noblest kind, for he who teaches another the blessed truths of the Gospel gives an alms to the soul. He clothes the nakedness of the understanding, and relieves the wants of impoverished reason. He, indeed, who rules well leads the blind, but he who teaches gives him eyes. And let it be remembered that it is a glorious thing to have been the happy instrument, in the hands of GOD, to repair a decayed intellect, and so to free it in a measure from some of the inconveniences and impediments of original sin. Doctrine is that which must prepare men for discipline, and men never go on so cheerfully as when they see where they go. Now, in order to constant teaching, men must have a good stock. The minister of GOD must be a scribe well furnished with things new and old. And when JESUS CHRIST says he must be thus furnished, we must not suppose that He intended a preacher should have by him a hoard of old sermons (whoever made them) with a bundle of new opinions. For this certainly would be provision too dry for living Christians and spiritual persons. What JESUS CHRIST intended was, doubtless, a rich variety of matter and a copiousness of expression, that so he might be, as the Apostle Paul expresses it, "apt to teach." Dr. Robert South. TEACHER-CHRIST, the Truth, the Eternal. Blessed is the man whom Eternal Truth teacheth, not by obscure figures and trannication. The perceptions of our senses are sient sounds, but by direct and full communarrow and dull, and our reasoning on those He perceptions frequently misleads us. teach is disengaged at once from the labywhom the Eternal WORD condescendeth to rinth of human opinions. For of one WORD are all things, and all things without voice or language speak of Him alone. He is that Divine Principle which speaketh in our hearts, and without which there can be neither just apprehension nor rectitude of judgment. O CHRIST, Who art the Truth! make me one with Thee in everlasting love! In Thee alone is the sum of my desire! Let all teachers be silent, let the whole creation be dumb before Thee, and do Thou only speak unto my soul. The ministers can pronounce the words, but cannot impart the spirit; they may entertain the Thou art silent they do not inflame the heart. fancy with the charms of eloquence, but if They administer the letter, but Thou openest the sense; they utter the mystery, but Thou revealest its meaning; they point out the way of life, but Thou bestoweth strength to givest the increase. Therefore do Thou, O walk in it; they water the plant, but Thou LORD my GOD, Eternal Truth! speak to my soul, lest, being outwardly warmed but not inwardly quickened, I die, and be found unfruitful. Speak, LORD, for Thy servant heareth." Thou only hast the words of eternal life. Thomas à Kempis (Imitation of Christ). TEACHER-CHRIST the Great. 66 CHRIST came not to revolutionise, but to ennoble and to sanctify. He came to reveal that the Eternal was not the Future, but only the Unseen; that Eternity was no ocean whither men were being swept by the river of Time, but was around them now, and that their lives were only real in so far as they felt its presence. He came to teach that GOD was no dim abstraction, infinitely separated from them in the far-off heaven, but that He was the FATHER in whom they lived, and moved, and had their being; and that the service which He loved was not ritual and sacrifice, not pompous scrupulosity and censorious orthodoxy, but mercy and justice, humility and love. He came not to hush the natural music of men's lives, nor to fill it with storm and agitation, but to retune every silver chord in a "harp of a thousand strings," and to make it echo with the harmonies of heaven. Rev. Canon Farrar, D.D., F.R.S. (The Life of Christ). TEACHER CHRIST the First Great, Who word of instruction, a word of reproof, a word showed Sympathy for Childhood. JESUS was the first great Teacher of men Who showed a genuine sympathy for childhood; perhaps the only Teacher of antiquity Who cared for childhood as such. Plato treats of children and their games, but he treats them from the standpoint of a publicist. They are elements not to be left out in constructing society. Children, in Plato's eyes, are not to be neglected, because children will inevitably come to be men and women. But JESUS was the first Who loved childhood for the sake of childhood. In the earlier stages of civilisation it is the main endeavour of men to get away from childhood. It represents immaturity of body and mind, ignorance and folly. The ancients esteemed it their first duty to put away childish things. It was JESUS Who, seeking to bring about a new and higher development of character, perceived that there were elements in childhood to be preserved in the highest manhood; that a man must TEACHERS-Sunday-School: Their Moral indeed set back again toward the innocence and simplicity of childhood if he would be truly a man. Until JESUS CHRIST, the world had no place for childhood in its thoughts. When He said, “Of such is the kingdom of heaven," it was a revelation. Rev. P. Eggleston. TEACHER-The Spiritual: His Qualifications. Let him be some man of GOD, whose heart, warm with the consciousness of GOD's for giving love, delights to dwell on his REDEEMER'S goodness, and prompts him, with the genuine warmth of actual experience, to be telling of His salvation from day to day. Let him be one who will not tire of that theme, because it is the truth he lives on himself, and which he feels to be fruitful of peace and joy. Orthodoxy of opinion, though necessary, is not sufficient: there must be a breathing vitality about his religion, an animating energy about his piety, that shall make him, with GOD's blessing, the spiritual father of a numerous race. He must be a man of prayer. No human power can accomplish the work before him he must look, and steadfastly look, to those everlasting hills from whence cometh his help. With prayer must he gird himself for his work; in the spirit of prayer must he carry it on; in the incense of prayer must the offering of his day's exertion ascend before the throne. He must be a man mighty in the Scriptures: line must be upon line, precept upon precept: the Word of GOD must be in his mouth in all its varied fitness; a Dignity. Now, to The office of Sunday-school teachers is honourable before GOD and before man for the labours and sacrifices which it involves. Of all human duties, theirs who teach the Sunday-school, when faithfully performed, are farthest from a sinecure. They require patience, they require perseverance, they require self-denial, they involve contact with the most disagreeable persons, collision with the most unruly tempers, exposure to the most uncomfortable circumstances; and, worst of all, they are but too often-such is the waywardness of human nature-resisted or ungratefully received. persist against all these adverse influences in the service of any good cause would be accounted worthy of honour by all. How much more so in this, which of all others is freest from human observation, and least encouraged by the thought of human applause. Its duties are emphatically done in secret. The right hand scarcely knows the service of the left. It is performed in GoD's sight alone; and as the love of GoD and of souls can be the only adequate motive, so must His approbation be the sole reward. For be it remembered last, though far from least, as evidence of the great moral dignity of the Sunday-school teacher's office, it is, in its tenure, both voluntary and gratuitous. It is the offering of a free heart. It is the willing surrender of ease, of advantage, of enjoyment. It is the actual sacrifice of self self-indulgence, and often of self-improvement-to the benefit and comfort of others. |