APPENDIX

ON THE

SPIRITUAL LIFE:

AN ADDRESS TO THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY CHURCH SOCIETY, IN GREAT ST. MARY'S CHURCH, ADVENT SUNDAY, 1884.

A FEW months ago I was giving a course of Lectures in the Divinity Schools of this University on Pastoral Theology. I know not whether any who attended those Lectures are among my hearers this evening. If there are any such present, I would ask them to accept this evening's Meditation as intended to take up and continue the train of thought which I touched but had not time to develop in my last Lecture,-How best we may deepen our Spiritual Life.

I take it to be one of the purposes, if not the main purpose, of your Church Society-of your "Cambridge University Church Society," for such I believe is its full title-to assist those who are endeavouring, alongside of their intellectual training, to train also coordinately the spiritual part of their nature. For that we have a spiritual, as well as an intellectual and a bodily nature, I will take for granted. We all remember St. Paul's prayer for the Thessalonians :-" May your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ;" where the middle term, soul, in the light of other Scriptures, may be interpreted to include all that St. Paul would assign to the "natural man natural intelligence as well as natural affections1; and where the term spirit means that higher faculty whereby we are conscious of God and of the things of God.

I will also take for granted that we may properly speak of our

1

1 Thess. v. 23, R. V. Compare the use of the adjective νxikós in 1 Cor. ii. 14 (“the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him, and he cannot know them, because they are spiritually judged "), xiv. 14, and St. James iii. 15. And see also Thomas Jackson On the Creed, Book X, ch. xxxii. where he shows how the conscience sits in judgment on the reason.

spiritual life, of our intellectual life, of our bodily life; and that we are conscious of the growth, more or less, of these three distinct kinds of life. Nay, I will go further, and venture to assume that in your experience. as in my own, there have been times when we were painfully aware that our spiritual life was making much less growth

than our intellectual.

Is it even now so with any of us in this church? A brief selfexamination will help each to answer for himself:-"How about my reading of God's Word? Do I still use it devotionally, or have I come to take interest in the critical study of its pages only? How about my private prayers? Time set apart for communion with my heavenly Father ought to be the happiest hour or half-hour of the day, is it so to me? Or do I find myself stinting the moments given to it, that I may get to more intellectual work? Or, again, how about my troubles and trials? Do I instinctively turn to God when they arise? or are they of a kind I should hesitate to spread before the Lord?"

A few simple questionings such as these will suffice to make us aware whether our spiritual life has been gaining or losing strength of late. And whatever the answer be to us severally, all I know will rise from such self-examination with an earnest desire to do more to deepen and strengthen this innermost part of our nature.

How may it be done? This is the subject on which I invite you to meditate with me this evening. How may we best endeavour to deepen the spiritual life?—You observe I do not say, How will God deepen it? God will deepen it, if at all, in His own appointed ways, by His providential visitations, and, above all, by holy sacraments of grace given to us for this very purpose. But we must not expect God to do His part, or even to bless the appointed means of grace to us, unless we meanwhile are at any rate doing all we can do on our part. What, then, can we do for the deepening of our spiritual life? And on the threshold we must try to see yet more clearly what we mean by the phrase "the spiritual life."

First, it concerns us all equally. In our branch of Christ's holy Church we know nothing of that distinction which is familiar in another, the distinction between "the religious" and the rest who make no such profession. It may be that some among us have a much higher religious standard than others; but we in England know nothing of two distinct standards as a matter of profession. If some have leisure to give more time to the exercises of religion than others, we rejoice that the strength of intercessory prayer should be thus increased; but these same persons would be the last to assume that simply on this account their religious standard was higher than that of others who could only snatch fragments of a busy life for devotional observances. This first, therefore: the "spiritual life" is not confined to any cloistered or conventual type of religious life. It means something that all religious persons are equally aiming at.

And then, secondly: "life" in this phrase is clearly life in the sense of a vital principle, not life in the sense of length of days. We have all noticed and regretted the fault of our language, and of the Latin language no less, which uses but one word where the more exact Greek language has two words. On the morrow of a battle a young soldier is found stretched on the field; one places his hand on the heart, and says, "Life is extinct;" another adds, "Alas, how brief has been his life; "-using the word life in quite another sense. Thus our language runs much risk of confusing in our minds the two meanings of "life," the vita quâ vivimus and the vita quam vivimus. And it may be that this confusion has led us to adopt the phrase "the spiritual life" in our books of devotion, although (as I need hardly remind you) the phrase never occurs in Holy Scripture; while on almost every page of Scripture may be found a truer, nobler, grander phrase for which “the spiritual life" is (when we come to think of it) a mere substitute. If you ask me how it is that for the inspired phrase "the eternal life we have come to substitute the uninspired phrase "the spiritual life," I can only suggest that it is due to this equivocal meaning of our English word "life," which might lead to confusion if further definition were not added.

But, reminding you that by the phrase eternal life our Lord and His Apostles meant a new vital principle, a principle of divine life, implanted within us as a present gift of God, I trust we may without fear adopt the inspired phrase of Scripture, and express the question proposed to us thus:-"How best may we deepen the eternal life within us?"

And there will be this great advantage in so doing-our thoughts will be at once, and by the very sound of the words, directed to a score of passages in the New Testament bearing on the question, and helping us to answer it, which, had we kept the phrase "spiritual life," might not have occurred to us. And without the helping hand of God in Scripture, which of us would dare to venture forth on these deep waters? Let me select three of these passages.

(1.) And first. those words of our Lord in St. John v. 39, "Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think that ye have eternal life." If we may with our Authorised Version, and with all the Greek Fathers who refer to the passage, take the verb as imperative, we find our Lord commending to us study, the study of God's Word, as a means of deepening the eternal or spiritual life of the soul.

(2.) Now let us select another Scripture, also from the Gospel of St. John: St. John xvii. 3, "This is life eternal, that they should know Thee, the only true God, and Him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ."

I need hardly point out how entirely distinct this passage is from the first I quoted. There the knowledge referred to was such knowledge as might be acquired by study, by searching the Scriptures; here obviously the knowledge spoken of is of quite another kind,

personal or sympathetic knowledge, such knowledge as a child has of a father; and how is such personal or sympathetic knowledge obtained? Not by study, but by intercourse-by such loving, trustful intercourse as may subsist between friend and friend or between child and father. And so only can we attain to that personal knowledge of God in Christ which our Lord here commends to us as being eternal life to the soul, namely, by intercourse with God in prayer and in the secret returns of prayer,-in one word, by devotion.

(3.) Thirdly, let us recall one more passage, St. John vi. 27, "Labour not," or "Work not," "for the meat that perisheth, but for the meat which abideth unto eternal life, which the Son of man shall give unto you." Reserving for the moment the kind of work or labour which our Lord is pointing to, we have here at any rate some kind of work indicated, whereby we may obtain for ourselves the nourishing or strengthening of the eternal or spiritual life of the soul.

In all those three ways, therefore, by study, by work, and by devotion, we seem to have our Lord's authority for affirming that the eternal or spiritual life of the soul may be strengthened. You observe these three passages only touch one side of the questionwhat we can do to deepen this principle of Divine life within us. Other passages abound that speak of God's part, and what He has done to render possible the regeneration of the eternal life within

us.

But as we have already said, it is not with the mysteries of God's grace that we are concerned this evening, but rather with our own endeavours not to forfeit His blessed gift. We choose, therefore, the Scriptures that seem to teach us how we may confirm and strengthen our hold upon the gift.

(1.) And first by study-study of the Holy Scriptures ::- "Search the Scriptures" Christ says to every one of us; for not the Jew only, but much more the Christian allows by his very profession that in them he has eternal life. One who has given most helpful instructions for the deepening of the spiritual life-I mean the present Bishop of Truro-implores us to depend less on our little manuals of devotion, and to depend more on the devotional use of Holy Scripture. But another, who has given us an admirable book "on the devotional study of the Holy Scriptures "-I mean Dean Goulburn―begins by confessing that such study of the Bible is most difficult, far more difficult than the critical study of the sacred volume. And yet I suppose every one in this church has found the Bible in both its Testaments, speaking to his heart at times with a power that no other words ever seemed to possess. Think of that fifty-first Psalm, how we are there permitted to overhear the secret confession of a brother man-of a fellow-sinner-pouring out his soul to God in some agony of shame and repentance: "Have mercy upon me, O God, after Thy great goodness; according to the multitude of Thy mercies do away mine offences ! Wash me throughly from my

wickedness, and cleanse me from my sin!" There have been times in the lives of most of us when this Psalm has lifted us towards God in a way that nothing else could, for God was then speaking to us through those words, words which the Spirit with His plaints unutterable once enabled David to pour forth, not for himself alone, but for the sake of all in the after years who with like contrition of heart should turn to God for pardon.

Or let us look back and confess that from our childhood the lesson book that has taught us most about the unseen God and our relation to Him has been the story of Abraham going forth to foreign lands with sure trust that an unseen Father held him by the hand; or of Joseph, ever confident that the conscience within him was the voice of One who would strengthen him for every trial.

And if this is so with the Old Testament, how much more true is it of the New. Did the inmost thought of the heart of man ever find such true expression as in those words of Job feeling after God :— "Oh, that I knew where I might find Him?" And no answer came. But in the New Testament this deep yearning of man's heart, of the heart of everyone in this church at some time or other again finds expression: Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us!" And this time there is an answer :- -"Have I been so long time with you, and hast thou not known Me? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." And there was turned upon the seeker after God the full light of that countenance, of which the disciples could say in their after years: "We beheld His glory, the glory as of an only begotten Son of His Father."

But the question I want to put to myself is this: Cannot we also say the same? The light that shone from the face of Moses was a fading glory, but the light that shone from the face of Christ is felt from age to age to be still shining upon us from the inspired page of these Gospels. Oh, if we could only thus read them, every morning for a few minutes at any rate, on our knees in our secret chamber, feeling that as we opened this Book we were drawing a curtain, and there was shining upon us the full light of that same countenance, full of grace and truth! Going forth afterward to our family circle, to our daily task, how men would take knowledge of us that we had been with Jesus!

(2.) But these thoughts on the study of Holy Scripture, as the first means of deepening the Divine life within us, lead on to our second head:-

How we may also deepen it by devotion, meaning all the devotional exercises of our chamber, comprising not only study of God's Word, but prayer also; and prayer in all its several parts-confession. petition, thanksgiving, praise. For as in meditation on God's Word it is God who is speaking to us, so in prayer in all its parts it is we who are speaking to God. So that of the two together, we may say generally that in these our devotions we hold intercourse with God—