Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Greatest Thing In the World and Other Addresses by Henry Drummond
page 84 of 118 (71%)
Obvious as it ought to seem, this may be to some an almost startling
revelation. The change we have been striving after is not to be
produced by any more striving. It is to be wrought upon us by the
moulding of hands beyond our own. As the branch ascends, and the bud
bursts, and the fruit reddens under the co-operation of influences
from the outside air, so man rises to the higher stature under
invisible pressures from without. The radical defect of all our former
methods of sanctification was the attempt to generate from within that
which can only be wrought upon us from without. According to the first
Law of Motion, every body continues in its state of rest, or of
uniform motion in a straight line, except in so far as it may be
compelled _by impressed forces_ to change that state. This is also a
first law of Christianity. Every man's character remains as it is, or
continues in the direction in which it is going, until it is compelled
_by impressed forces_ to change that state. Our failure has been the
failure to put ourselves in the way of the impressed forces. There is
a clay, and there is a Potter; we have tried to get the clay to mould
the clay.

Whence, then, these pressures, and where this Potter? The answer of
the formula is--"By reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord we
are changed." But this is not very clear. What is the "glory" of the
Lord, and how can mortal man reflect it, and how can that act as an
"impressed force" in moulding him to a nobler form? The word
"glory"--the word which has to bear the weight of holding those
"impressed forces"--is a stranger in current speech, and our first
duty is to seek out its equivalent in working English. It suggests at
first a radiance of some kind, something dazzling or glittering, some
halo such as the old masters loved to paint round the head of their
Ecce Homos. But that is paint, mere matter, the visible symbol of some
DigitalOcean Referral Badge