VITAL RELIGION by Dr. MacLaren

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 29, 1903

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 29, No. 17.

VITAL RELIGION.

By Dr. MacLaren

A DIRECTION post is good, but if a man is lame, he may lie all day at its foot, and be no nearer the city after all. But Jesus Christ’s life imparted to us makes the lame man leap as an hart. “This do and thou shalt live,” says Law, says Morality, says that which some call Religion. Live and thou shalt do this, says that Gospel which proclaims Christ for us that we may not die, and Christ in us that we may live.

In the Christ, dying once and living forever on the throne, and in the Christian spirit, is the pattern of all morality, the motive for reproducing and the source of power to reproduce it. If we know that Jesus died for us, we shall be drawn to copy the Lord who has set free the springs of love in our hearts; if we know that He lives in us, we shall be aware of a vitalizing, impelling, elevating, purifying energy, which entitles us to hope that it will one day triumph over all our evils, and make us fully participant of His glorified life.

Surely, if ever there was a time that needed a larger infusion into its Christian consciousness of these truths which I have tried to emphasize, it is this time. And that, not merely in the interest of a symmetrical development of the whole contents of the Christian revelation, but in the interest of a deepened spiritual experience, and of more efficient Christian service.

Life is the root of work, and so is more important than work. And it is open to doubt whether the abundant works of the churches at present are the outcome of life, or whether they are not, in some cases, galvanic movements that stimulate vitality and mask death.

Martha has it all her own way now. We hear a dozen exhortations to service, for one to sitting at Jesus’ feet in blessed receptivity. There can not be too much work, but there may be too little communion; and if so, the work may be vigorous and self-sacrificing, but it will have little success with men and little benediction from God. The power of the dynamo must be increased as the number of lamps it has to feed with electricity is multiplied. The more we abound in labor for Christ, the more prolonged and intimate should and must be our communion with Christ. We are in danger of building so many mills and factories on the river’s bank, each requiring to draw off some of the water to drive its machinery, that the stream will all be used up and its bed dry.

This busy age needs to obey the invitation: “Come ye yourselves apart.” He who is to prepare the way for Christ must be “in the desert” till the day of his showing unto Israel, and must often withdraw there to recreate and strengthen his soul, to renew his impulses, to purge himself from low motives and to feed on the truths he speaks. Then, and only then, will he be unmoved in will and word—an iron pillar, not a reed shaken by the wind. Then, and only then, will he be lifted clear above suspicion

of seeking ease or material well-being, silken garments and delicate fare. Then, and only then, will he be a prophet, and more than a prophet, and have the supreme honor of fading away in the light he loves.

The river that is to bring fertility to half a continent must rise high on the mountains of God, and be fed from the upper springs.

If it is true that Christ is the active life-principle in the believer, it follows that our chief task and true wisdom is to keep the channels clear by which that life may enter, and to increase the measure of it which we possess.

Receptivity is the all-important thing. Christian mysticism has been called “quietism,” and the name is accurate, in so far as it lays the greatest stress on what the early Friends used to call “waiting on the springing of the life,” but it is not accurate, inasmuch as that “waiting” is by no means passive inaction, but is the result of intensest energy. How much force is expended in standing still, when strong forces try to move a man! Concentrated effort of the whole nature goes to produce that “waiting” which brings the life of Christ into the still soul, as surely as the sun-beam fills the cup of the flower, opened wide and turned to its light.

The life must be first received, and then the holinesses, which are its results, will follow. But just as the communication of the life is no magical imparting without the effort of faith, so the life produces Christian character in its recipient by no magical process independent of his effort. The first word of Christian mysticism is, “It is God that worketh in you;” its second is, “Work out your own salvation.”

First receive, then use, the life. Then we can feel the intensest consciousness of our personal existence, and at the same time feel that it is truly and consciously blended with the all-quickening, all-producing, all-uniting life of Him who is “the Life,” and our experience will express itself in the blessed paradox, which to the simple heart is a felt truth: “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”—Dr. MacLaren.