A Common Error About the Christian Life.
By Wayland Hoyt
THAT the Christian life is all in the beginning. I am sure that the general thought, while it is not too much concerned about the beginning of Christianity in the soul—because it cannot be too much concerned about it—is not enough anxious about its subsequent development. It would have been just as wise for the ancient racer, after he had gone through the training process, and stripped himself for the contest, and entered the arena, and run on three steps, to have stopped there, and declared the race won and himself entitled to the prize. Why, the judge would answer, the race is but begun. Your preparation may have been assiduous and admirable, but it is in the law of the arena that the entire course must be accomplished, and the prize adjudged as you shall have carried yourself around the whole circle. The race itself is the only test of your preparation and beginning. But, somehow, we have too generally come to think that if we can only get a man to acknowledge his sinfulness, and walk for a time in darkness, and then pass out into a better state of feeling, to break forth in joy and songfulness, to see new light in the sun, and fresh greenness in the grass, to profess trust in Jesus Christ, that then the whole race is run, the victor's crown is on the brow. Now it may be that a man passing through such an experience has become a Christian, and it may be he has not. You cannot predicate Christianity altogether upon feeling. It is not all fervors, and raptures, and high excitements, and suffusions of sentiment. These may be the glorious door into the noble Christian life, and they may be the door into delusion. Christianity is deeper than feeling. Christianity is a changed nature. To be a Christian is to be a new creation in Christ Jesus. Christianity is the setting of the purposes toward God; it is resolute determination to arrange our action with, and not athwart the will of God; it is living as ever in our great Task-master's eye. And so the only test of the truth of the beginning is the whole race succeeding. "By their fruits ye shall know them," said the Saviour. The genuineness of the new life is to be judged of what you do each day in your business, in your family, amid your pleasures—not so much by what you thought you felt on some dim day years back. Christianity is more a life than a feeling. If the life bloom other than Christian, the strong presumption must be that the root out of which the life issues is other than Christian. It is the spring time, and I want flowers in my garden. I go to a seed store and ask for hyacinth bulbs. Unless my sense of smell be acute the man may sell me onions instead of hyacinth bulbs. They look very much alike. I take them home, and plant them, and water them, and watch them. If instead of the perfumed pyramid of flowers I get some weed or vegetable, then I am sure I have not planted hyacinths. So it is with Christianity. Unless the bloom be Christian it is certain that the bulb is not. The only test of saintship is endurance in saintship. The beginning is not everything in Christianity.—Wayland Hoyt.