to hold me in its everlasting arms. So let there rise straight from the heart of our crowded and toilsome lives mounts of vision which the spirit can ascend, and where the imagination can be free to hear "the glorious things spoken of thee, O city of God." 2. These high hopes look for realization to the city of God; it is the sphere of their fulfilment. City is the synonyme for Society in its richest and most varied forms; there the privileges, rights, liberties, and honours of citizenship are combined with the grandest opportunities of mutual service, the ministries of love and devotion, the fellowship of living minds. In the first aspect the city is the realm of law and order, where man, knowing and obeying the will of God, lives to realize the ideals of His eternity; in the second aspect the city is the arena where spirits know and serve each other, where the joy of each contributes to the common beatitude, and the beatitude of the whole to the perfection of each. Without the city the highest qualities of the man lie unexercised, held in the iron hands of the death that is the more awful for having never known life. The city of man is a hot-bed where virtues and vices are alike reared, though its fruitfulness is often like the abundance of the grave-yard, fed by the corruption that lies rank beneath. In it the scoundrel can ply his scoundrelism in secret, the villain can mask while he indulges his villainy; the pride that is only inflation, the pretence that has no bottom, the wealth that is a sham and a cheat, walk abroad, undiscovered and unashamed. But while the city of man can nourish the most vicious vices, it can also evoke and foster the highest and most self-forgetful virtues. The honesty THE CITY PERFECTS THE MAN. 367 that is at once just and honourable, the courage that is brave to do right and endure wrong, the goodness that delights not to be ministered unto but to minister, the charity that does not weary in well doing, that thinketh no evil, that beareth all things and hopeth all things,-indeed every virtue that can ennoble, every grace that can adorn man, may find room for growth and exercise in the city. Isolation engenders the selfishness which is spiritual death; life dutifully lived in society calls the better qualities of the man into activity and strength. The city of God, then, as the realm of love and obedience, ministry and fellowship, is the sphere for the development and realization of all the Divine ideals in man, individual and collective. It is a society of spirits on their way through obedience and service to perfection. All spirits are akin; we are human not by virtue of our bodies, but by virtue of our souls, and man stands related to man through all time and over all the world as brother to brother because all have been made in the same image and bear the same nature. And the city of God but means that the ideal of each man and of all his relationships is being realized. Variety is not thus destroyed, but rather created. In this city there will be father and mother, sister and brother spirits, spirits married in the wedlock of mutual affinities, and spirits whose paths shall lie as far apart as the poles of God's intellectual universe. But variety only deepens joy and enlarges duty. Uniformity is the death of happiness. Men must differ if they are to rejoice in each other, to serve and be served. If the life of John was love, heaven must be to him an enlarged home of the heart. That were no heaven to Paul where he was forbidden to speculate, to reason, and to teach. Abraham, as he gathers his children into his bosom, must have in a growing degree the father's joy. Every spirit that enters the city must be to the ancient citizens, the spirits of just men made perfect, a new object of love, a new call to new duty, a new source of pleasure. The elders of immortality must have strange things to tell its young men, and the young men may in their innocent ignorance have much to teach the elders. Human nature does not lose in interest by age, rather gains in it, becomes a storehouse of wisdom and wonders to the fresher mind. Imagine immortality realized under the conditions of time, a man as old as the race, yet retaining, as immortals must, unexhausted and exuberant, the energies and hopes of youth. He had met the fallen pair as— "They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, had looked with Noah from the ark; had talked with Abraham after God had met him; had seen Moses as he came down from the Mount, and rejoiced with the multitude which accompanied David when he entered Jerusalem; he had visited the empires of Egypt and Assyria, and watched the meeting of their mighty hosts; had listened to the discourses of Plato, and followed the conquests of Alexander; had beheld the rise of Rome, and had been in Judea when the Christ was crucified; and had step by step, alongside the march of events between then and now, walked as counsellor and companion with the great men and thinkers of the Christian centuries. Now, would not this man, an eager spirit all the time, open-eyed, A MAN AS OLD AS MANKIND. 369 hungry for knowledge, communicative, acquisitive, ever learning by experience how better to learn, to teach, to live,—be a mightier contribution to the knowledge of the world, a louder call to its wonder, than the vastest library it can boast? And in the city of God are there not innumerable spirits of even immenser experience, riper wisdom, more varied capabilities and knowledge? And why do these live except to communicate, to teach, to help to lift the ideal and achievements of the city, to raise its standard of obedience and beatitude? Immortality is not idleness; it must know progressive obedience to be happy, increasing activity that it may have growing beatitude. 3. The city, in order to fulfil the hopes of its citizens, must have throughout two qualities, it must be of God and eternal as God. These two are one. What is of God, spirit as He is, must partake of His eternity. Yet the two are distinct. To be of God is the source and spring of the city's perfection; to be eternal, the condition of its realization. The ideal is God's, the perfect mirror of His perfect mind, but it can be translated into reality only through obedience. And an obedience which answers to the idea in the Eternal Mind must be eternal. The relation of the city to God has its counterpart in man's relation to Him. The city is a city of sons, the will of the Sovereign expresses the love of the Father, the obedience of the citizen is the realized affection of the child. This affinity to God is the secret of our immortality; it is ours because we are akin to Him, of His kind. Give to a godlike spirit an immortality with God, and what height may it not win? What ministry of light, what B B service of love and beneficence may it not perform? As hope looks down into a future rich in such infinite possibilities, man is now awed and humbled, now uplifted and ennobled, and whether he be the one or the other, he alike feels as if his time were eternity, and work among men service of God. "Thus saith Jehovah, The heavens are My throne, and the earth is My footstool: what manner of house would ye build for Me? and what manner of place for My rest? For all these things did My hand make, and all these things came into being, saith Jehovah : but this is the man upon whom I look, even he who is afflicted and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at My word." 1 "He shall feed His flock like a shepherd: He shall gather the lambs with His arm, and carry them in His bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young." 2 "Ye are come unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable hosts of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the Mediator of a new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better than that of Abel." "3 "And thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved and has not perished, and may be our salvation if we are obedient to the word spoken ; and we shall pass safely over the river of Forgetfulness, and our soul will not be defiled. Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold fast to the heavenly way, and follow after justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward, and it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been reciting." 4 1 Isa. lxvi. 1-2. 2 xl. II. 3 Heb. xii. 22-24. ♦ Plato : Repub. Bk. x. 11, 621. (Jowett's translation.) |