God has a host who measure the strength and completeness of their union with Him by their holy living, rather than by their high emotions. As saintly as Paul, or Wesley, or Fletcher, or Carvosso, or any of the elect women of the past, whose written lives have been such an inspiration to us, while I pen these lines I sit amid thronging memories of a multitude of living ones scattered here and there through the churches, who do not defile their garments. The Lord has to-day, as yesterday, His Bride, the real spiritual church within the Church.
It is so true that the world wants something that will give it joy; and so is attracted by a joyful salvation. It is just as true that there are multitudes of non-Christian men and women treading this earth every day with weary step, sick and tired of personal wrongness, of wrongness in others; and what they want, consciously or unconsciously, is rightness, with its inward and outward harmony. So there comes to be to these thoughtful, aching, human hearts a wondrous magnetic power in a holy life to draw them toward the cross.
But the crowning beauty and glory of holiness is the happy union in one character of holy living and holy feeling. It is the "joy of the Lord" that gives the warmth and glow to the beautifully blameless lives, without which it would be but the soulless, incomplete beauty of the icicle. It must surely accompany obedient and loving walking with the Lord, as light and warmth accompany the rising sun. Though at times it may be the softened, subdued, saddened joy, if we may so express it, that marked so much of our Lord's life. And as youth ripens into age, with its many Gethsemane experiences, it will take on more of this character.
